Key Concepts
- As we snooze, our brain is busily processing the information we have learned during the day.
- Sleep makes memories stronger, and it even appears to weed out irrelevant details and background information so that only the important pieces remain.
- Our brain also works during slumber to find hidden relations among memories and to solve problems we were working on while awake.
More from this issue of Mind
August
2008 Issue- Head Lines Seeing is Hearing: New Type of Synesthesia Discovered
- We're Only Human Arranging for Serenity: How Physical Space and Emotion Intersect
- Head Lines Socializing with Youth Improves the Elderly's Health, Life Span
- Buy the Digital Edition
In 1865 Friedrich August Kekulé woke up from a strange dream: he imagined a snake forming a circle and biting its own tail. Like many organic chemists of the time, Kekulé had been working feverishly to describe the true chemical structure of benzene, a problem that continually eluded understanding. But Kekulé’s dream of a snake swallowing its tail, so the story goes, helped him to accurately realize that benzene’s structure formed a ring. This insight paved the way for a new understanding of organic chemistry and earned Kekulé a title of nobility in Germany.
Although most of us have not been ennobled, there is something undeniably familiar about Kekulé’s problem-solving method. Whether deciding to go to a particular college, accept a challenging job offer or propose to a future spouse, “sleeping on it” seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life’s puzzles. But how does slumber present us with answers?
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