Studies indicate that sleep can genuinely assist you in making better decisions.
Recent studies in the field of sleep indicate that sleep can indeed assist in making accurate and well-considered decisions.
This is reported by UNN, referencing Science Alert.
A 2024 study shows that sleep can help us make more rational and informed decisions, preventing us from falling for misleading first impressions. To illustrate this, researchers from Duke University in the USA had participants engage in a "garage sale" game.
During the experiment, participants rummaged through virtual boxes filled with unwanted items. Most items in the boxes were of little value, but a few special items were more valuable.
After searching through several boxes, participants were asked to choose a box they liked and receive a cash reward equivalent to the value of the items inside.
When participants had to make a choice about a box immediately, they tended to evaluate the boxes not by all their contents but rather by the first few items. In other words, these participants were overly influenced by the initial information they encountered and did not take later information into account in their decision-making.
Participants then slept and made a new decision the following day. It turned out that they made a more rational choice, and the position of valuable items in the box seemingly did not affect their decision.
Solving Problems with a Sleepy Brain
When we get stuck on a difficult problem, it may feel like we've hit a dead end.
A 2019 study showed that when hints in the form of sounds related to an unresolved problem were given to a sleeping brain, it seemed to help participants solve the problem the next day.
In this experiment, participants were given a set of puzzles to solve. During the puzzle-solving process, a unique sound was played in the background. At the end of the testing session, researchers collected all the puzzles that participants had not been able to solve. While participants slept, researchers played sounds associated with some of the unsolved puzzles.
The next morning, participants returned to the lab and attempted to solve the puzzles that had stumped them the previous evening. The success rate was higher for the puzzles that were hinted at during the night, suggesting that the sound cues prompted the sleepy brain to work on finding a solution.
How to Take Care of Your Eye Health: Expert TipsOct 27, 2024, 03:59 • 21821 views
One way sleep can help us solve problems is by enhancing our understanding of the connections between objects and events. A study published in 2023 tested this idea.
Researchers had participants explore associations between four different items (one animal, one place, one object, and one food) related to an event described to them by the researchers. Some associations were clear pairs, such as item A being directly related to item B. Others were only indirectly connected to another part of the event, for instance, item D was never directly linked to items A or C.
The research team found that after a night of sleep, participants were better able to identify indirect associations (they discovered a subtle connection between items A and D), compared to those who did not sleep.
This suggests that sleep provided participants with an understanding of the underlying structure of events.
As a reminder,
Researchers found that the C69 piano chord during sleep can significantly reduce the frequency of nightmares. The experiment showed a decrease in the frequency of bad dreams from 2.94 to 0.19 per week.