Recent sleep research shows that sleep can actually help you make good, informed decisions.
UNN writes about this with reference to Science Alert.
A study from 2024 shows that sleep can help us make more rational, informed decisions and avoid being deceived by first impressions. To demonstrate this, researchers from Duke University in the United States had participants take part in a garage sale game.
During the experiment, participants rummaged through virtual boxes of unwanted items. Most of the items in the box were not worth much, but a few special items were more valuable.
After searching through several boxes, participants were asked to choose their favorite box and receive a cash reward equal to the value of the items in the box.
When participants had to make an immediate choice in favor of a box, they tended to evaluate the boxes not by their entire contents, but by the first few items. In other words, these participants were overly influenced by the first information they encountered and did not consider later information in their decision.
The participants then slept and made a second decision the next day. As it turned out, they made a more rational choice, and the position of the valuables in the box did not seem to influence their decision.
Solving the sleeping brain problem
When we get stuck on a complex problem, it may seem like we've reached a dead end.
A 2019 study found that when the sleeping brain was given cues in the form of sounds related to an unsolved problem, it seemed to help participants solve that problem the next day.
In this experiment, participants were given a set of puzzles to solve. While solving the puzzle, a unique sound was played in the background. At the end of the testing session, the researchers collected all the puzzles that the participants were unable to solve. While the participants were sleeping, the researchers played the sounds associated with some of the unsolved puzzles.
The next morning, the participants returned to the lab and tried to solve the puzzles that they had not solved the night before. The solution rate was higher for the puzzles that were prompted at night, suggesting that the sound cues forced the sleeping brain to work on finding a solution.
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One of the ways that sleep can help us solve problems is by opening up an understanding of the relationships between objects and events. A study published in 2023 tested this idea.
The researchers had participants learn associations between four different items (one animal, one place, one object, and one food) related to an event that the researchers described to them. Some of the associations were obvious pairs, for example, item A was directly related to item B. Others were only indirectly related to another part of the event, e.g., item D was never directly related to items A or C.
The research team found that after a night's sleep, participants were better able to detect indirect associations (they found a subtle connection between points A and D) compared to those who were awake.
This suggests that the dream gave the participants an understanding of the basic structure of the events.
Recall
Researchers have found that playing the C69 piano chord during sleep can significantly reduce the number of nightmares. The experiment showed a decrease in the frequency of bad dreams from 2.94 to 0.19 per week.