‘O teach me how I should forget to think.’ –Shakespeare
Targeted Memory Reactivation During Sleep Improves Next-Day Problem Solving
Many people have claimed that sleep has helped them solve a difficult problem, but empirical support for this assertion remains tentative. […]
In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented.
The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement). […]
These results demonstrate that cuing puzzle information during sleep can facilitate solving, thus supporting sleep’s role in problem incubation.
