Insight and the sleep committee

摘要

We all spend about a third of our lives asleep, an essential but seemingly unproductive state. Experimental evidence now emerges to support anecdotal evidence that sleep can stimulate creative thinking. Does this experience seem familiar? The solution to an unfathomable problem, left unresolved in the evening, effortlessly pops into your mind the following morning. Although many people believe that sleep plays a role in these flashes of insight, this is a hypothesis that has not been rigorously tested. On page 352 of this issue, however, Wagner and collaborators provide evidence that sleep can have a beneficial effect on insight.