There are times at work when I am facing critical decisions, ones in which there are no do-overs, and instead of deciding then, I’ll literally sleep on it. Whether negotiating a salary with a client, on the fence about sending a candidate out to a client or even what I’m going to have for lunch [in those cases I nap on it], I’ll decide not to decide [yet], get off of work, go to bed, sleep on it — and the next morning, the decision seems obvious.
I’ve always advised people on making logical decisions and not emotionally ones [depending on the decision of course], but I could never figure out what sleeping on it did to make the logical choices seem so obvious the next morning.
But, there’s an article that sort of puts it all together:
It wasn’t so long ago that the rueful joke in research circles was that everyone knew sleep had something to do with memory — except for the people who study sleep and the people who study memory. Then, in 1994, Israeli researchers reported that the average performance for a group of people on a memory test improved when the test was repeated after a break of many hours — during which some subjects slept and others did not. In 2000, a Harvard team demonstrated that this improvement occurred only during sleep.
Is that why when we get older we start to sleep less and coincidentally start suffering from memory loss?
