Why can you sit 2 hours trying to solve a programming/math problem, give up, go to bed & then when you wake up, solve the problem in 10 minutes?
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There is a great book on this subject and I think it is called Why We Sleep. One of the most fascinating things revealed was an experiment measuring brain activity. I may get details wrong but the concept is correct. The experiment was on awake monkeys. Scientists wanted to see how their brains responded to certain stimuli. As the story goes, someone forgot to shut off the recorder device one night and came back the next morning to a pile a data that exceeded data collected during waking hours. It opened a whole new area of study for scientists.
Are brains are not inactive when we sleep, they are more active. Our brains process a days worth of input and the next morning usually results in more clarity regarding the previous days problems.
I rely on the above phenomena for all tough problems. I will spend a day testing solutions for something, go to bed thinking about it as I fall asleep and wake up confident that I will have a new perspective that solves the issue at hand. Sometimes it takes 2 nights but I usually find an answer. This of course is worthless for emergency decisions that need an immediate answer but luckily, that scenario does not happen often.
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