If I’m playing anagrams or Scrabble after going to a church, and I get the letters “ODG” I’m going to be predisposed towards a different answer than if I’ve been playing with a German Shepard. I suspect sleep has very little to do with it, and simply coming at something with a fresh load of biases on a different day with different cues and environmental factors may be a larger part of it.
Although Marvin Minsky made a good point about the myth of introspection: we are only aware of a think sliver of our active mental processes at any given moment, when you intensely focus on a maths problem or practicing the piano for a protracted period of time, some parts of the brain working on that may not abandon it just because your awareness or your attention drifts somewhere else. This wouldn’t just be during sleep, but while you’re having a conversation with your friend about the game last night, or cooking dinner, or exercising. You’re just not aware of it, it’s not in the limelight of your mind, but it still plugs away at it.
In my personal experience, most Eureka moments are directly attributable to some irrelevant thing that I recently saw that shifted my framing of the problem much like my anagram example.
If I’m playing anagrams or Scrabble after going to a church, and I get the letters “ODG” I’m going to be predisposed towards a different answer than if I’ve been playing with a German Shepard. I suspect sleep has very little to do with it, and simply coming at something with a fresh load of biases on a different day with different cues and environmental factors may be a larger part of it.
Although Marvin Minsky made a good point about the myth of introspection: we are only aware of a think sliver of our active mental processes at any given moment, when you intensely focus on a maths problem or practicing the piano for a protracted period of time, some parts of the brain working on that may not abandon it just because your awareness or your attention drifts somewhere else. This wouldn’t just be during sleep, but while you’re having a conversation with your friend about the game last night, or cooking dinner, or exercising. You’re just not aware of it, it’s not in the limelight of your mind, but it still plugs away at it.
In my personal experience, most Eureka moments are directly attributable to some irrelevant thing that I recently saw that shifted my framing of the problem much like my anagram example.