SfN: Creative dreams
There are lots of papers on sleep at this year's meeting, which is appropriate for a conference that always features a lot of socializing -- and a lot of caffeine to compensate for that socializing. Many of the papers expand on messages we've heard before about the cognitive penalty we pay for not sleeping properly. But one paper today contained a more unusual result: sleep sometimes helps us make more mistakes, but in a creative way.
Jessica Payne of Harvard University has been looking at what sleep make us better at. She asked people to read a list of words and then, 12 hours later, to write down as many words as they could remember. Half the subjects were tested at the beginning and end of the day, the others before and after a night's sleep.
Here's the surprise result: those who slept made more mistakes.
Payne's lists contained words that centred on a theme word, but that theme was not actually on the list. So one set might be house, glass, handle. The theme is 'window', but that was not on the list. Psychologists know that people tend to recall seeing the theme word, even if it wasn't there. Both groups did indeed do this, but those that slept made more of these mistakes.
What's interesting is that the sleep group included words that were linked to the theme in more creative ways. In one extreme case, the phrase "washing machine" was included. Payne says she can't work out how this connects to the list.
The implication of this may be that sleep helps us remember the gist of an event, but not the details. As events recede into the past, our memories naturally lose details of them but retain the gist of what happened. It may be that sleep plays a role in this process.