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Comment by motivic | Hacker News Reader

In case you feel sleep is a waste of time, it could actually be surprisingly productive to sleep. Once thing I noticed in grad school is that your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them. And often I would "dream" up a clever solution to a homework problem during my sleep.

J.P. Serre, one of the most brilliant mathematician still living today, purportedly "does all his best work in his sleep": https://tinyurl.com/y25q45ut

From what I learned in the wonderful Coursera course: "Learning How to Learn", these are manifestations of the unfocused or diffused mode of the mind, and play a critical role in learning and problem solving.

https://medium.com/learn-love-code/learnings-from-learning-h...

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While I understand why you'd write something like this, I think that this sort of thinking is the reason people get poor sleep nowadays anyway. This obsession with "efficiency" and "productivity". Even if it is more productive to get sleep, I believe that thinking about it in terms of hygiene or in terms of quality of life is much healthier.

Maybe you disagree but not every minute of life should be devoted to doing the most productive thing you can. Sleeping for sleep's sake or because it makes you feel good should be enough reason. I'd rather turn my attention away from all these life-hack, min-maxing ways of thinking and just listen to my body telling me what it wants.

Completely agree. I think GP put it this way because it’s easier to convince a “productivity ninja” that sleep is good for productivity than to convince them that productivity shouldn’t be their sole focus. If the goal is for them to get more sleep, this is how to reason with them.

It doesn't have to be about work productivity.

The most profound effect I noticed myself is learning passages of music on an instrument (note I'm an amateur, and not especially good!) After not too long trying to learn/practise one evening, I will be noticeably better the next day.

I found exactly the same thing and it weirded me out. How did I get better without practicing? Often I would hit a wall after practicing for hours and was not able to play a certain passage, but then the next day I magically could.

I've recently found that reading before going to sleep (while not staying up late reading) opens my mind the next day and I wake up knowing whether I have accepted or rejected a premise of a nonfiction book. It's like I read, don't think about it then, but then as I sleep I make up my mind or have more questions about the things that I read.

It's strange, and I wish I could learn more about this phenomenon.

The music thing is definitely a real phenomenon. It’s well researched and covered in some detail in “Why We Sleep” by Matt Walker (which is mentioned in tfa, and is a fantastic book.)

The fiction thing is interesting.

I won't dismiss that a lot of things can happen during sleep that will help you do better in the morning, but a lot of the time I think this kind of thing boils down to performance falling off as you get tired, to the point of eventually negating improvements you make. It doesn't help if you've figured out how to do something if you're tired to execute on it.

That's an interesting thought!

The Dark Souls series of video games are known to be hard, especially the bosses. Many people, myself included, have experienced being stuck on a boss and after 20 attempts they give up for the night. Next time you start the game up you beat the boss on the first attempt!

It's hard to know if this is because your subconscious mind kept working on the problem, or if new neural pathways were formed to handle the eye-hand coordination, or, as you suggest, you just came back to the problem refreshed.

Being refreshed, and not frustrated and tired, seems like the simplest explanation for this.

I do theatre as a hobby and do the same thing with learning lines. I run lines before bed and before lunchtime naps and I absorb the info far easier.

You have a valid point. But on the other hand, this is ycombinator news, and so entrepreneurs trying to get that last bit of productivity by doing an all nighter might think more long-term about this.

Hacker News is the complete opposite nowadays. People who tries to maximize productivity are frowned upon. The norm is to put your family, friends, travelling and stuff like that before anything else.

Productivity is just value you create for people who aren't you. Family, friends and travelling is value you create for yourself.

Having family and friends creates value for them too.

There's a visible shift in HN, but I certainly don't see HN so extreme on the end that you are stating as absolute.

It's a truly mind-boggling feeling when you escape the busy city life and somehow manage to be truly in sync with yourself.

I was hiking in Scotland and Iceland over the last two years and either times there was a breaking point when we were in the middle of nowhere. In Iceland some weather forced us to camp near a volcano off-site from the camping zones. In the morning, I got out of our tent and looked across a vast space of grass, rocks and ashes. A creek flowing nearby made the only perceivable noise aside from wind.

You take a look left and right. Breathe. A breeze goes over your face and you hear the deafening silence emanating from nature itself.

It was then when the usual life all felt like a massive distraction from life itself. It was a nice, calming and deep feeling that it's completely enough to just be... hard to convey.

And you don’t need to go far for this effect. I still to this day remember a beautiful calming moment I had when on a walk in the backyard near a house outside of Portland Maine.

Very true. and although i'm in the midwest you can still find forest preserves, hiking trails, lakes, rivers etc. Get out, find some big wide open space, no other people around. You get to zone in, decompress a little bit. personally i like fishing so i can stand around in silence for hours casting a little bait around trying to bag a fish.

I know how that feels, with camping as well. But I cannot shake the thought that most of our life is simply about survival.

And society is a better alternative than hunting/farming on your own.

Sure, but is it a better alternative than hunting/farming in groups? I'm not convinced.

Farming is not a good life. Hunter/gatherers famously had it much better.

Doesn't matter. The sustainable population of farmers is orders is magnitudes higher, to the point that they can push out any hunter-gatherers almost without noticing. I hope that modern life is at least closing on that quality of life, but I don't think it is yet, for most people.

the !kung bushmen spend about 15-20 hours a week "working", some as little as 12

What about the !Kung bush women?

Probably most of the labor of hunter gatherer societies was done by women. The men hunted some, but a bigger responsibility was raiding their neighboring tribes (often for women) and protecting themselves from being raided by their neighbors.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, many times women are treated as property and there is horrific violence against women.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/worl...

Also a lot of these societies are polygynous with men having multiple wives. So yeah, men work less - but that is because the women do the work for them under threat of violence.

The highest cause of death among young men in the HG tribes of Papua New Guinea is other young men. It's an incredibly violent culture there. The !Kung tell a much different story:

Patricia Draper - (1978) Learning Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung:

In writing an essay on aggression in !Kung life, one encounters some of the problems outlined above. Aggression, conflict, and violence—none of these are culturally elaborated preoccupations. Nor could one argue that a central cultural theme is concerned with an opposite set of values—the enforcement of peace and the uppression of aggression. From this point of view, values about interpersonal aggression do not qualify as an especially auspicious position from which to view the cultural terrain. Nevertheless, the !Kung are a people who devalue aggression; they have explicit values against assaulting, losing control, and seeking to intimidate another person by sheer force of personality. Furthermore, on a daily basis and over months of fieldwork one finds that overt physical acts by one person against another are extremely rare. In two years I personally observed three instances in which people lost control and exchanged blows: two twelve-year-old girls who wrestled and fought with fists; two women who scratched and kicked each other over a man (the husband of one of the women); and two men who violently shoved each other back and forth, shouted and separated to gather weapons, only to be dissuaded by other people from their respective camps. In a fourth case I saw two women who had fought the night before. Lorna Marshall, an anthropologist with much experience among the !Kung, makes a similar report:

During seventeen and a half months of fieldwork with the Nyae Nyae !Kung . . . , I personally saw only four flare-ups of discord and heard about three others which occurred in neighboring bands during that period. All were resolved before they became serious quarrels. [Marshall, 1976, pp. 311-12]

What most people know as farming is not the only nor most effective way to grow food in trade of time and resources.

Permaculture practices, "food forests", etc. are a better alternative and take most of their effort in the several year setup process. Once in balance, they are generally self sufficient and can produce significant amounts of edible food.

That's not to say everyone should become a "farmer", but for people in the HN community, it should warrant some study (it's all about systems design and design patterns).

I don't know about that.

We live longer though. Could we sustain that if we'd be hunters, or as farmers? (in the long-term)

I've thought about this and come to the conclusion that the ambitious man/town/society down the road is the problem. You can hunt and gather all you want, but societies build technology and excess manpower and one day they will come along and ruin your day.

You see this to a lesser degree within society itself or even within a single workplace, where those few who are eager to over-extend with unpaid overtime ruin it for the rest of us!

I understand your point of view, but honestly I have a hard time consolidating the notion of being stress-free with the notion of making as much of an impact as I can.

I want to be as productive as possible (when I'm not allotting necessary time for recreational activity, but my social activity is generally at a minimum) because of a driving fear over the future of earth and humanity. I have a deep urge to do as much good as I can in my life for society, because anything else just seems so selfish.

I was gifted with intelligence and determination, and to waste these skills overwhelmingly in personal pursuits when the world is in flames just seems so irresponsible. Anyone could do that. I want to make a difference, and that requires being as efficient and productive as I can.

What kinds of projects are you working on?

A lot of my energy still goes into the projects that feed me, but as I build after I build a nest egg there are many things I would like to increase my focus on.

For one I would like to break into the educational gaming sector. [0]

I've drafted and prototyped a few programs but haven't released anything substantial yet. Productivity and privacy tools mostly. Persona management utilities, a log utility I hope to eventually have distributed with most Linux distros, a (in my opinion) revolutionary social media platform which I'm still keeping quiet about for now.

I've recently finished drafting initial plans for a software suite which would allow you to maintain a private distributed data store and generate hashes which contain unique revocable keys in order to access and/or modify portions of this store. Websites/entities can be given these unique hashes in order to share information like reputation and private information under their own unique namespace, and other entities can be given access to (optionally fuzzed) fields from other namespaces. A Reputation API would provide entities a common way to provide cumulative updates to a person's reputation.

This could power services such as anonymized chat platforms based on reputation, distributed trustless online transactions, and hopefully a viable alternative to Cloudflare and Google reCAPTCHA. I want to work with websites like Reddit to reduce bot spam by implementing it. To move forward I'm just looking for a partner to aid me in technical writing (RFCs and such) and community management so I can start an open source collective around this idea because it's a lot of work.

I spend a lot of time leisure coding as well just for practice, picking up new technologies and stuff.

What about you, working on anything cool?

[0] My first experiment in this vein last year: https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1

One day I could not compile something. After fighting it several hours I decided to go sleep. A few minutes before waking up I dreamed that the solution was to set an environment variable. I even saw the specific variable and which value I had to set. I woke up and immediately tried it. It worked.

Just had one of these moments two days ago, the only other thing that comes close is when I go for long walks.

I have many epiphanies on the toilet. I'm not sure if it's extra blood flowing to the brain or what but the throne seems to add extra IQ.

I noticed extra inspiration on bathroom breaks as well, but as a control I tried just getting up and walking outside and back, and that seemed to have the same effect for me.

There's something going on during that context switch.

It feels like because all of the data about a problem is being unloaded into long term memory, when you return to the problem, you parse the entire data as once instead of adding to it in pieces.

It almost feels like a puzzle except the second time looking at it, you're looking at the whole thing you've solved versus just the piece you last added.

I totally agree. When faced with a problem outside the comfort zone, sometimes the brain focuses too much on a part that may turn out to be irrelevant. Having a break and returning later usually works wonderfully to again see the big picture.

Maybe just walk through a doorway?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-throu...

It would be an interesting experiment to think on a problem, then swap to a different office and see if that gives you a different perspective and insight.

I feel Luke ta a mixture of context switch and some idle time/downtime. I find walks great for letting my thoughts drift and work through things, same goes for train journeys. I think perhaps as you say, the switch unloads the information into your subconscious and then the downtime let’s it get to work.

I really liked Rich Hickeys talk on Hammock Driven Development which is basically this exact subject: load everything into your brain and then go snooze on a hammock while your mind gets to work.

Haha, interesting theory. For some it’s a cigarette break, for others (all of us?) it’s bathroom break, shower (showerthoughts, anyone?), nap, meditation. A break of any kind, if we may generalize.

Likely it's simply because that's one of the few occasions in modern life when we're not being bombarded with external stimuli. A few minutes of silence and your brain goes: "Right, now's a good time to present this thing I've been working on." Same thing with showers.

it also has "occupying" part of your brain with something simple it is used to so it allows you to think of things that would be hard otherwise.

If you simply sat in a chair and starred at a wall, you don't have the same effect as being in the shower, toilet, car, on a walk, etc.

Also for many, simply sitting in a room listening to music can do this as well. It's like your brain needs to distract itself from... itself.

For sure. It also help to go to park or nature or go for a swim!

When I used to bike commute to work, I had a similar effect. My commute to work is about 1 hour each way. On the way to work, ideas about work would pop into my brain. On the way home, ideas for home would pop up. Need to say that I don't really think about either work or home, they just pop up.

Sadly that does not occur so much now that I am driving to work. I wonder if cycling vs sitting is the differentiater here.

I was banging my head on a brick wall for an hour or so yesterday trying to figure out how a simple obvious thing wasn't working. The (also simple but slightly less obvious) setting that I'd forgotten to update came to me just as I was drifting off to sleep. This happens all the time.

That's the exact reason why we should have beds at work and not have regular working hours. People should just work and sleep whenever they want as long as they make meetings and project deadlines.

I for my part would never want to sleep at a bed in my office. I'd rather go home. I also live in Japan and a lot of places here have beds in the office but all it does is squeeze more time out of people and make them stay longer

For sure going home is good. I'm just saying instead of staying awake and do bad work, it is better to just let people sleep when they need to.

That works for me. In the last months of collecting data for my PhD thesis, I pretty much lived in the lab. This was basically biochemistry, so there was lots of "do this, wait some hours, do that, wait some hours, ...".

So I just napped when I could. At night, on the couch in the break room. During the day, on the cot off the women's restroom. And conveniently, there was a shower for staff who cared for research animals.

Now, living in a small apartment, my ~12 m^2 room includes desk, bed and storage.

I work from home coding, sometimes went onsite. If I'm stuck on a problem with some code which a walk or short break didn't solve, a sleep would usually solve it, hence the saying "sleep on it". I'd even sleep during the day for half an hour or a few hours just to get the answer. I've also been awake for 80hrs doing a windows server upgrade which failed horribly but I put that down to the system being hacked. Felt like a zombie, but strong tea and hard water calcium rich near London so possibly also contains unmetabolized cocaine in, played its part in being able to stay awake for that long.

So... remote work?

Imagine a future where we have engineered this effect to perfection, and even in your dreams you are expected to work. The effect would be an increase in the supply of labor, without an increase in the population. Wages would be depressed. There would be at least some people who have no reprieve, no moment to themselves, just so they can make it to the next paycheck and survive. 24 hour wage slaves. A human shaped cog in a capitalists machine.

What a remarkable hell we engineer for ourselves.

Or alternatively, we get all our work done in our sleep, and conscious time is devoted to leisure.

That's not how it works. There's always going to be someone willing to work in his sleep, plus 1 more hour of conscious time relative to the next guy.

In Spanish we call it "consultar con la almohada" (to consult with the pillow). I think it's not sleeping per se that gives you answers, but breaking the cycle of frustration. You wake up rested and think more clearly.

> I noticed in grad school that your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them

As other comments already mentioned, this works amazing for problem solving related jobs as well. As an engineer I use this actively on almost a weekly basis.

To make this work you just gotta really think about that problem and understand the actual parameters very well. Like almost every detail. And you really need to want it solved. Like make it really bother you. This usually comes by itself if you are engaged enough with the problem anyway. You can't solve something subconsciously when you just glanced at it and think "meh" about it. Then go to sleep and hope for the best if you didn't already solve it by using the above steps. Worst case is you wake up with the urge to understand the problem better and either get the solution or the next hints within the day ... or next session of sleep. The brain is really an amazing tool if utilized right.

Lucky you. In my case, I end up thinking about the problem in my sleep, come up with solutions that are a mix between reality and fantasy within the dream and usually end in a horrible loop of the above while I desperately try to break out of it. In short, spoils my whole night sleep ( at least how I feel about it next day ). Rarely have it actually produced a successful solution!

Wow, I thought that only happened to me. There was only one specific project I was on where I would have the not so practical fantasy solution like you described. Others were like the parent, a good sleep discovers solutions, I wonder what my subconscious was saying about all of this.

I secretly suspect this is everybody, and the people who claim to be coming up with real solutions in their sleep are back justifying what happened when they had enough time to sleep well and felt nice.

As I also experienced this, the trick is that you keep your mind focused around the problem, even when you go to sleep. I already mentioned you need to make trying to solve the problem your big thing of the day. Of course if you try to solve a problem and at the same day got almost robbed or were close to having an accident (or something really nice happened) your brain is most likely to process that instead at sleep or mix things up.

Claiming that all the engineers, scientists and researchers who claim to use a specific technique to solve problems are really just "back justifyting" seems a bit weird. For the record, I use this technique all the time AND, for the past 8 years, have been getting a solid 8 hours sleep most nights. Why would we do that?

My problem too. I actually can't fall asleep because my brain keeps throwing out random ideas at me, like a toddler tugging at my sleeve: "is this solution good enough? no? How about this? No? What about this? No? This?" and so on and so on throughout the night.

Have you tried meditation?

I did. This sleep problem happens only if I try to work on a problem before bedtime. Otherwise, I'm OK.

> usually end in a horrible loop

Describes perfectly some problems I've had when sleeping. They are not really any problems I think before sleeping and even in my sleep I'm not sure what the problem is but oh boy is my brain thinking hard about it. Usually I need to reset by walking around my apartment for a minute. Thankfully I've had less and less of these nights recently.

I completely agree. I fully discounted the value of sleep when I was in school but now professionally I use it in a very similar way.

When I need to learn how to use a new tool, I’ll read through the docs, some tutorial examples and try to find an actual complicated example (which is usually what I actually need to work with) of how it’s used. The first day, I kind of get it in theory but struggle to connect how the tool interacts with everything else. If I get a good night’s sleep I’m usually ready to get my hands dirty the next day with the complicated stuff because my understanding greatly increased overnight

This is also covered in Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep where he cites several controlled studies demonstrating the role of sleep in learning and outlines the neurobiology behind it:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

I used to see sleep as a waste of time. A few years ago I started to recognize its importance in overall well-being and adjusted my schedule and commute accordingly.

Reading Walker's book led me both to take sleep more seriously still and to take more pleasure in it.

On the other hand, while Walker may be right about everything he says (anecdotally I'm extremely aware of how important sleep is day-to-day), I found his book to be very poor evidence of what he's trying to persuade us of. His writing is that of one who has bought unquestioningly into a cult. The evo-psych digressions about "wise Mother Nature" are nothing short of ridiculous; the one that sticks in my memory is that he seriously considers the possibility that Nature gave teenagers an offset sleep cycle from adults so that they could start exploring the world on their own for a few hours each night. (One much simpler possible explanation is that it gave the tribe someone who was naturally on guard duty for more of the night, but of course this is testable by looking at non-tribal animals and I haven't tested it.)

I think that was a hardcore scientist trying to reach out to the wider audience.

As alecco says in this thread, it is indeed a hardcore scientist who studied sleep for twenty years trying to communicate to a wider audience. I'll cut him a lot of slack.

Also, not sure if you've seen Walker speak (do check out on YouTube), he's one of the most brilliant public speakers. Very few scientists can manage to hold your concentration like Prof. Walker does.

For those that don't wanna read the book, I enjoyed Peter Attia's interview with Walker. I haven't read the book though, so no idea if you'd be missing something.

One of the most interesting takeaways / proofs about the importance of sleep mentioned in the podcast, was that there's a huge increase in car accidents and heart attacks after the clocks shift in the spring (I haven't verified the claim).

https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/

I used to be really good at this. I would wake up with answers, first thought in the morning!

But as I have gotten older, the "working on it" dreams have become disruptive and my sleep less sound when processing some problem.

Joshua Waitzkin has an interesting perspective on this. He will take an idea, keep it in his hold, and then make sure he lets go of the focus a few hours before bedtime. IE. Do something with family instead.

Subconscious brain still works on it, but still able to sleep well. Not sure if this would be applicable.

Very interesting!

In high school, I would often "retell" the day in my mind, usually right before bed. More often than not, I would wake up with the solutions to problems I struggled with.

I have been trying to recreate this as an adult, except now I'm retelling the story of my day to my wife and vice versa.

Maybe the key is to do it earlier in the evening, and then disconnect for a few hours? I'll give it a shot.

Between lucid dreaming and solving problems overnight, sleeping was never better than in my high school years. I really do wish I could go back to that.

I'm still conflicted on the merit of lucid dreaming and problem-solving.

I find ZMA and Huperzine A can you get you lucid dreaming, but I don't know if it helps with problem-solving. IE. You'll still wake with the solution w/out dreaming.

This happens to me too for as long as I can remember. It's an endless thought-loop of abstract reasoning with a dream-like quality and coherence, never actually quite focusing in on the problem but disruptive to the goal of restful sleep.

I've had these exact type of dreams 4-5x/year for the past 15 years, since being in grad school. They're an interesting phenomenon. They're also fairly disturbing.

Same experience here. Sleeping with a notebook on my bedside table has helped somewhat--I can write down thoughts as I'm trying to fall asleep and not "worry" about forgetting them in the middle of the night.

But I do resort to sleeping pills after a few of those nights in a row.

I once had a problem we had thought / talked about for maybe a year, that gradually increased in urgency. We were almost down to the wire on coming up with a solution, we had 3 detailed plans written up, and they all had huge trade-offs, none of which were really acceptable to the majority of use-cases. I once spent an entire day thinking it through non-stop and just couldn't see past what we had already planned. Eventually decided to call it a night.

I woke up at 5am and knew exactly how to solve all of it. Took me 3 weeks to code what I knew the moment I woke up and it worked flawlessly from day 1 of testing. Now if I'm stuck I take off early and rest.

do you have an established routine for embarking on major efforts like that? how much value is there in writing out the plan, and at what resolution? I'm figuring out how to "sketch" large problems as I move towards being a more senior developer.

I have a pretty low bar for just starting a Google Doc, and it's part of my early thought process. It's important to very early on (even if you're not sure you're going to spend time on the problem - even if I just spend 30 minutes doing research on it), put the problem statement, exit criteria / success metrics, non-goals and stake holders on paper to clarify your own thinking about what you're even trying to do.

As different approaches present themselves I just write a quick summary with the pros / cons and gotchas that come to mind. At first I don't put in a ton of time - it's just notes organized like it might be a report one day. I'll probably throw a lot of what I've written away as my thinking on it improves, but I never throw away ideas. If it was plausible enough that I spent some time researching, it's worth recording for everyone else's benefit why you decided to abandon it.

Eventually when the problem comes to the surface more I can say, "I have a report started on this!", quickly revise it and share it with my team and stake holders, and we iterate from there. The design doc mentioned in my original post had actually been around for years, and I had shared it 6 months earlier and had a lot of detail and critical thinking applied to my early doc. It was just a progression from something I opened quickly when I had 1 idea.

You should take notes or records for early research somehow anyway, I just try and do it in a way that's quickly shareable as a design / plan. It might take months (or forever) until it's worth sharing, but it's just a place to record my ideas and new things I learn as the problem's on my mind.

I’ve experimented with nootropics and I came to the conclusion that the best way to improve your mental ability is:

Sleep

Exercise

Diet

And then everything else like nootropics

In that order. That is, they certainly work and help but they’re a micro-optimisation so there’s not much benefit if you’re not doing the macro ones first and sleep, in my opinion and anecdotal experience is at the very top of that list.

This is also my experience that sleep has the most impact. Not only does it impact my mental ability, it also impacts my mood, and therefore my productivity of wanting to work.

I don't know about the order or exercise and diet, but they are definitely on there.

Those are my exact conclusions too after doing a lot of research and experimenting. I may add that high intensity exercise seems to work best for the brain. I'd also add stress to this list - people underestimate how big it's impact can be nowadays.

You're absolutely right about stress, in my experience. I missed that one, but its so true.

I’ve learned to love the expression “let me sleep on it”

Thomas Edison used sleep too. It is written that he would would would sit holding two metal objects in a chair over metal pans. He would sit and contemplate a hard problem until he dozed off and dropped the items in to the pans, waking him up, after which he would rapidly write down what conclusions or ideas he came to in that few moments of sleep.

He is not alone in this regard among the elite thinkers, “healers”, and inventors throughout history

>In case you feel sleep is a waste of time, it could actually be surprisingly productive to sleep.

Probably the most productive thing one can do.

Idea: Full sleep is useless. I'll sleep 5 hours or less and gain more productive time / life lived.

Reality: Without full sleep (7-8.30 hours/day) you'll be less performant, less intelligent, less healthy, less productive, and on top of the less performance through your life, your life itself will be shorter.

One of my undergrad (and favorite) required classes was Graph Theory at UCSC taught by Gerhard Ringel. Asked how he solved problems - he pointed out that he slept on them.

It was a comment I heard from many Profs. but his was the first and it stuck.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Ringel

I think the different stages of sleep play a part here ... Salvadore Dali apparently liked to keep an object/pen in his hand that would drop and wake him up.

Still can't find enough real examples of polyphasic sleeping working, but love to know how well people of that retained content.

A litle bit insane, the article says: "Your number of immune cells begins to decline as well, as your body is deprived of its opportunity to make more". More daily work, less health!

Thomas Edison too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649850

Have you read Steve Pavlina's account of transition to and from polyphasic sleep?

Yep! It's been hard to ignore the other things people questioned about his attempt though ... I'm leaning toward trying biphasic, but still not sure yet.

So many times I'd be at home in my office, crunching 12 hours straight on a problem, only to finally give up and go to sleep. Without fail I'd jump out of bed an hour later, test my solution, and go back to sleep a happy man.

This doesn't happen for everyone. I've never had this happen. I've had a few dreams that seemed like amazing insights when I first woke up but then realized how they were dumb dream ideas.

That said solving problems while not focusing them has been repeatedly shown in research, including in dreams. I've had it happen many times while awake. The technique is to work intensely on a problem, then completely stop and move to something unrelated and simple. Often times a solution or missing information will pop into your head much later.

I find this works best if the last thing you do before falling asleep is studying or thinking about the problem as you are falling asleep. i remember reading thomas edison and salvador dali used a more intricate technique to problem solve during sleep https://www.inc.com/the-muse/albert-einstein-thomas-edison-y...

I refer to it as my hamster, it sits in the background spinning the wheel of whatever problem I'm stuck on. I find it works best if I actively think about the problem before sleep and then consciously put it out of my mind by doing something else. It might take a few days but there is usually an A-Ha! moment out of nowhere.

> your sub-conscious is passively working on the problems you encountered even if you are not actively thinking about them.

This is the same for creativity, this is why you come up with ideas in the shower or the train, assuming you're just idling and not scrolling through your smartphone.

Similarly pauses allow for other skills to grow (stop playing music for a week, a month, and you'll often feel more apt when you return). We're probably full of phasors and delays. And letting time for everything to mature/settle seems to matter.

When I have long bouts of binge coding (the last month) my dreams are just me constantly refactoring the same bits of code, usually related to the task at hand when I fell asleep.

This was my experience as well.

With so much work in graduate school to get done, the temptation is there to simply not sleep awhile. I'm sure you'd agree to get at least some sleep!

Few years ago I spent quite some time learning Haskell, failing to understand the concept of Monad. One day I just woke up, with the concept understood. It was like magic.

That's interesting. Have you ever woken up with the ability to explain monads?

This is so true. I had spent a long time analyzing a chess puzzle, gave up and slept. Boom, i "see" the answer. It was so stimulating that i woke up.

Happens to me all the time. I sit up in bed and think "oh that's how I can solve that" or "I should refactor this code this way", etc.

Agreed. Sleep has been a critical tool for foreign language learning for me. I'd also point out that exercise improves sleep quality.

>"does all his best work in his sleep"

So do I, but I haven't been able to convince my boss yet...

Any tips on how to enact problem solving during sleep?

I've just learned to recognize the kind of problems that sleeping me is good at.

Let's see if I can verbalize that...

I think it's often when I've discovered a lot of new things during the day, and I struggle to combine them.

Or when I get stuck on something, maybe having a hard time to decide between options. I go to sleep confident that I'll have fresh perspective and decisiveness the next day!

nice username!

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