Starting with my undergrad but fully committing to it by grad school, I (and several of my friends who went through similar programs in math/cs) have a strategy that uses this. If, for example, I had a new problem set in a math course, I would bash my head against it in the evening for an hour or two. I'd make an honest attempt but move on from problems quickly if I got stuck. I'd rarely get much done. Then, I'd do my best to get a good night's sleep (at least 7.5 hours quality sleep). In the morning I'd try the problems again first thing after coffee, and frequently found that I could do a significant portion of the problems, or at least make headway. This might be biased by the fact that I'm really much more of a morning person to begin with, but I know several people who use this strategy.
This pretty much describes my method of working as well. Often at the end of the day, when I’m not feeling like I have enough energy to solve anything new, I’ll spend some time just looking over some new problems I’ll have to solve in the next few days. I don’t try to solve them. I’m just “loading them into my head”. The next morning I usually find some potential solutions waiting for me. Thanks, brain! I’ll repeat that process a few times until I have them solved. Unfortunately, while this works great in real life, it doesn’t work for interviews.
While programming Java full-time, I found myself waking in the middle of the night with some big chunk of my brain grinding away on coding issues. Not good.
I don't think it needs to be as "structural" as you're describing here. Simply "work on something else if you're stuck, come back to it after a day, two days, or longer" has long been one of my secrets to get stuff done.
I once worked somewhere that allowed you to work only on one ticket/task, before you were allowed to move on to another. Completely dumb policy for so many reasons.
This reminds me of what I learned about myself during my years spent at the university. I observed that in the morning my brain is better at understanding new concepts. Mornings were the best time for me to practice and improve problem solving, but I tend to remember less details of what I come across. However, at about 2pm my brain appears to switch to memorizing mode, where I struggle with problem solving compared to the morning, but I will remember a lot more of what I read. I structured my learning activity leveraging this observation. Even to this day (am 46) I can feel the same tendency, e.g., if a problem seems somewhat difficult, I just wait until the next morning, if I can, only to find it easy to come up with some solution that seemed out of reach the previous evening. Also, I try to do most of my reading at night (well, life with a family doesn't leave a whole lot of options for timing anyway).
This resembles the oldest self-optimisation-trick I've ever been exposed to: Soak in a topic short before going to bed, avoid distractions before actually falling alseep, and "watch" your brain learn overnight. I think I was aroun 10 when I was told this trick. And to this date, its about the only tangible memory optimisation technique I've ever put to use. Nothing ever came close to its effectiveness.
Cool to see that this worked well for someone. Super hard to force the key insight in a problem to magically appear given more time sunk into it. Big weakness of mine honestly, and requires a lot of self-awareness to pull myself out of a problem-solving rut. I like the idea of hacking sleep - do you find yourself priming your mind with the problem before nodding off? Curious how a bedtime wind-down routine factors into how effective this is.
I do the same with the NYT crossword puzzles. The puzzle for a day is released at 10 pm NY time (except the Sunday and Monday puzzles are released 4 hours earlier) the day before, which is 7 pm in my time zone.
I start the puzzle at the end of my day. If I get stuck and cannot finish it before I fall asleep, probably 95% of the time when I take a look again sometime the next day I immediately see answers to several of the things I was stuck on and finishing the puzzle goes smoothly.
I had a college professor suggest this and I 100% agree. I think of it as loading the problem in your brain. Then sleep on it and you will make a lot more progress in the morning than if you had just spent the same total time in one sitting.
I don’t think it can be compared to caffeine in its efficacy at all with the mushrooms being far more useful, but do note that both caffeine and psilocybin rely on anecdotes for cognitive performance, despite one being able to be studied as a non controlled substance
This works. It also works fine for programming tasks. If you feel your struggling or making a slow progress on your current task, switch to a different task.
When you come back to the first one your subconscious has usually processed it quite a bit.
I think just about everyone has a similar anecdote.
I was stuck on particularly tricky part of a musical piece I was learning - hours and hours of practice and I just couldn't get it down. Went to bed, woke up and was able to nail it within the hour.
I have a similar hack but my breakthroughs typically happen on my morning run (after your mentioned good night of sleep). No ear buds, etc. Just a casual pace and giving my mind time and space to work.
Hippocampal replay was the main subject of my dissertation. It has been studied primarily in rodents, but there have been a lot more human studies in the meantime.
My PhD proposal was to suggest that cognitive fatigue is an adaptive construct. Rather than reflect a depletion of glucose and that people can't function anymore, cognitive fatigue is a suggestion for the agent to go 'offline' and replay.
"...analyses reveal that the HF in hummingbirds is significantly larger, relative to telencephalic volume, than any bird examined to date..."
--
IMO the ability of the Hippocampal spatial 'compuiting' - is what consumes the glucose in what is their 'GeoPU' - and so to be able to think in a 3D volumetric space - not vector space - allows for such precise control where the positional coordinates of a food source have a heavy weaight in 3D and Temporal Memory - which is the same as how it can navigate in a 3D point space with its hovering...
It Computes to Live and it Lives to Compute.
GPU folks should be studying hummingbirds.
Especially for AI patchfinding with sensor awareness - as some hummingbirds migrate ~2,000 miles from Chile to Canada.
Now note how frequently this critter needs aerial refuling, and it needs to know the best and most efficient path to hop all the food-check-points over 2,000 miles
>By foraging frequently and fuelling hovering flight directly with ingested monosaccharides hummingbirds avoid the energetic tax associated with the cost of synthesis of fats from these sugars prior to their oxidation. Remarkably, hovering hummingbirds are able to utilize fructose and glucose equally, a physiological feat which no mammals are thought to match, and one that suggests novel physiological capacities for the oxidation of fructose by active muscle tissues in hummingbirds. The data presented here indicate hummingbirds enhance net energy intake though specialization of diet, behaviour, and, uniquely, metabolic physiology.
-- now imagine the ripples that are running through the hippocampus thats maintaining this level of efficient precision of a Body that has near instant acceleration and precisice altitude control in a 3d volume.
Hummingbirds are the most amazing critters.
We should be studying humming birds glucose control through the HF, not rats.
Admiral Raymond Spruance of the World War 2 US Navy was known as very calm in a crisis; he was very serious about getting enough sleep so that he was well-rested during any battles. When other officers would stay awake for 36 to 48 hours at a stretch, he would read a novel and get sleep because he knew he had enormous responsibilities that needed him at his best.
He also walked 8+ miles a day, even when at sea he would make sure he walked around the ship, usually with some other officers to discuss any pertinent issues of the day. Walking is great for turning over problems in your mind, or even just daydreaming to give your subconscious mind "space to work".
I’ve been lucky enjoy to have been able to live around my unconscious. I made a conscious decision to allow my unconscious to guide me through life.
The original idea to do this came from Le Corbusier[1] who once described his process of working as being a phase of collecting details on a project, a phase of doing something else (allowing his unconscious to work on the project) and finally he would sit down and complete the project.
The disadvantage is that I never know when inspiration hits and when exactly I will get something done. It’s important to be organised and have everything written down is my approach.
Also I give myself time and room to explore possible solutions from seemingly unrelated areas - a kind of zen navigation[2] for project work.
Your process sounds like something a writer might say. Are you a writer?
I am saying based on how writers/poets etc are depicted. Waiting for ideas to arrive, sometimes they keep they keep waiting for it, sometimes it hits them on a random event.
Something I've been wondering about - but have been unable to find any solid research on - is if it would be "optimal" to sleep immediately after any learning/training session, whether it be mental or physical, instead of just resting while still awake.
If sleep is the best state for the body to be in to consolidate memories, reduce fatigue, etc., then it would seem logical to try and be in the sleep state as much as possible.
Obviously the difficult part is actually being able to fall asleep on command without using some kind of pharmaceutical, but I do think falling asleep quickly is something that can be learned:
Would love to see some research on it, but this reminds me of the structure of a traditional yoga asana practice and I've wondered the same thing about rest after a learning/training session. Typically at the end of a practice session of yoga asana (and sometimes in between postures) you'll take savasana and just rest in open awareness. A teacher of mine would always say this is the most important part of class, to let everything integrate in.
When I started training Muay Thai I found that I often would "lose" a lot of what we had worked on in class, and then started taking savasana right when I got home. In that not-quite-sleep state my brain would replay what we worked on.
Sometimes if I'm really bashing into a wall with some coding problem I'll just take savasana for 10-15 minutes and get back to it. I feel like it helps.
Funnily enough I wonder if a burst of adrenaline after learning is effective. Kind of tricking your brain into thinking it just survived a dangerous situation and must retain whatever lead up to it.
I suggested cognitive fatigue was an adaptive construct that biases people to go offline and replay their memories, and that this was decision-theory optimal from a learning / reward perspective.
When I feel fatigue coming on, I just lie on a sofa with some soundscape playing on my noise cancellation headphones.
I close my eyes and allow my mind to drift. Similar to the phase before falling asleep. Most of the time, this mind drifting is enough but sometimes I fall asleep - both states help.
The whole setup of the modern school day is dumb. It's too early for many growing minds. And it doesn't balance what's taught with a chance to reflect on it. And the school year should be the whole year with more breaks rather than a summer time off.
It would be pretty cool to have some sort of siesta for students in the day. Maybe one of those private schools would do it.
The Book The Sleep Solution or Why We Sleep touches on this. It also claims that REM sleep is a core part of this experience. The analogy that I found most useful is that REM sleep writes data from the cache to hard disk. In the process it cleanses that data reducing the emotional overload attached with it.
Say you just experienced grief. Dreaming about it is an essential in the process of getting over it.
REM sleep is inhibited when you use sleeping pills or alcohol.
Interesting, as I would divide my dreams up 25/25/25/25 between mundane daily experiences, the same or very similar dream, totally new situations and finally the surreal ones where you magically end up in random places and random situations.
Always figured it's a blend of taking past and recent experiences and re-ordering them, with a hint of hypothetical scenarios for the future.
The "flicker" sounds like a good A/B test for the hypothetical while the replays are good for memorisation.
I can often tell when I'm dreaming when it comes to the more hypothetical ones due to dodgy physics or whatever (try nipping my face and can't feel anything) so I'm probably buggering that process up a bit. Maybe an INTJ trait. I remember doing that as a kid and being able to fly, but nowadays often I can't get beyond 10 metres above ground. Been rate limited.
I've often though about sleep in RPG terms. Sleeping gives me 1 experience point to put into any skill, and I get to choose which skill gets the experience point by what I work on during the day.
I haven't always succeeded, but I try to at least work-on or study something I care about before bed.
In undergrad, I would tackle problem sets or a programming course problem as soon as I could. I would wrestle and fight, sometimes I made progress, usually not.
Night of sleep and going to $dayjob to pay for school, ideas would just manifest themselves in my head. Happened dozens and dozens of times.
I once had the following experience as a kid: i learnt a skill (in that case, juggling), completely in my sleep.
I clearly remember trying it in my dream, failing, in what was pretty much a "dry-run" or a simulation, where maybe several hours of actual practice were emulated within a few minutes of dreaming.
When I woke up, I try, and it worked, I had captured the actual coordination/reflexes necessary for it to work.
I also solved several problems/issues on a few occasions but this experience was the most stunning because it resulted in getting an actual physical skill that since hasn't gone away.
In college especially before a test my brain was on study mode and would not turn off. Most often I couldn't sleep because I was trying to solve a problem. There was no problem it was just nonsense and no solution. I was going through the motions of it but it was pointless. I wish my brain actually would have worked on actual problems while I slept.
edit: I also recall when I was a naive late teen early 20s "song writer" (wannabe) I would often wake up with lyrics. They were also nonsense. Literally. I had a notepad and wrote what I thought was great but it was just gibberish.
Sleeping to solidify memories and concepts is like when you were a kid and you just slept off the entire 8 hours car journey. Not only you get the sleep, not only you get the result, but you also didn't even notice it happen
Barbara Oakley's "Learning How to Learn" course describes this processing as "diffusion". It's amazing how much just doing something else for a while when I get stuck on something can help, be it a drum beat I'm having trouble replicating or a query I'm having trouble writing.
Since this is processing of past events and future possibles during sleep, would it be fair to hypothesize that animals that sleep actively (appear to dream) are conscious when awake?
this phenomenon is easily experienced while fighting an Elden Ring boss... very often players will spend 2-3 hours fighting a boss, learning the patterns and trying their best... and sometimes its just impossible. but then you sleep and boot up the game the next day and you get it first or second try. Its a really well known thing in the DarkSouls community and it is common advice.
[+] [-] uv-depression|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dimal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] euroderf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] arp242|1 year ago|reply
I once worked somewhere that allowed you to work only on one ticket/task, before you were allowed to move on to another. Completely dumb policy for so many reasons.
[+] [-] chrisweekly|1 year ago|reply
Excellent advice.
[+] [-] pzs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lynx23|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sidnb13|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|1 year ago|reply
I start the puzzle at the end of my day. If I get stuck and cannot finish it before I fall asleep, probably 95% of the time when I take a look again sometime the next day I immediately see answers to several of the things I was stuck on and finishing the puzzle goes smoothly.
[+] [-] aarreedd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|1 year ago|reply
I don’t think it can be compared to caffeine in its efficacy at all with the mushrooms being far more useful, but do note that both caffeine and psilocybin rely on anecdotes for cognitive performance, despite one being able to be studied as a non controlled substance
[+] [-] riiii|1 year ago|reply
When you come back to the first one your subconscious has usually processed it quite a bit.
[+] [-] choilive|1 year ago|reply
I was stuck on particularly tricky part of a musical piece I was learning - hours and hours of practice and I just couldn't get it down. Went to bed, woke up and was able to nail it within the hour.
Sleep is underrated.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Melatonic|1 year ago|reply
That being said the pre req being that it's a problem I've already known about (and likely slept on)
[+] [-] yarg|1 year ago|reply
Generally around 2 or 3 in the morning, just when I need it the most.
[+] [-] Summerbud|1 year ago|reply
In the end, a good sleep is what make it different!
[+] [-] 11235813213455|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timshell|1 year ago|reply
My PhD proposal was to suggest that cognitive fatigue is an adaptive construct. Rather than reflect a depletion of glucose and that people can't function anymore, cognitive fatigue is a suggestion for the agent to go 'offline' and replay.
Two of my collaborators wrote an extremely influential paper writing down a Q-learning equation for replay: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0232-z
[+] [-] bmitc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maxbond|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|1 year ago|reply
Have you studied the hippocampus memory of hummingbirds much?
Their glucose is consumed to preserve their extraordinary 3d spatial memory for all their food sources.
---
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22357941/
"...analyses reveal that the HF in hummingbirds is significantly larger, relative to telencephalic volume, than any bird examined to date..."
-- IMO the ability of the Hippocampal spatial 'compuiting' - is what consumes the glucose in what is their 'GeoPU' - and so to be able to think in a 3D volumetric space - not vector space - allows for such precise control where the positional coordinates of a food source have a heavy weaight in 3D and Temporal Memory - which is the same as how it can navigate in a 3D point space with its hovering...
It Computes to Live and it Lives to Compute.
GPU folks should be studying hummingbirds.
Especially for AI patchfinding with sensor awareness - as some hummingbirds migrate ~2,000 miles from Chile to Canada.
https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/nature-blog-network/ruby-th...
Now note how frequently this critter needs aerial refuling, and it needs to know the best and most efficient path to hop all the food-check-points over 2,000 miles
https://i.imgur.com/3MvzmX9.png
Hummingbirds can fuel expensive hovering flight completely with either exogenous glucose or fructose
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111...
>By foraging frequently and fuelling hovering flight directly with ingested monosaccharides hummingbirds avoid the energetic tax associated with the cost of synthesis of fats from these sugars prior to their oxidation. Remarkably, hovering hummingbirds are able to utilize fructose and glucose equally, a physiological feat which no mammals are thought to match, and one that suggests novel physiological capacities for the oxidation of fructose by active muscle tissues in hummingbirds. The data presented here indicate hummingbirds enhance net energy intake though specialization of diet, behaviour, and, uniquely, metabolic physiology.
-- now imagine the ripples that are running through the hippocampus thats maintaining this level of efficient precision of a Body that has near instant acceleration and precisice altitude control in a 3d volume.
Hummingbirds are the most amazing critters.
We should be studying humming birds glucose control through the HF, not rats.
[+] [-] bloopernova|1 year ago|reply
He also walked 8+ miles a day, even when at sea he would make sure he walked around the ship, usually with some other officers to discuss any pertinent issues of the day. Walking is great for turning over problems in your mind, or even just daydreaming to give your subconscious mind "space to work".
[+] [-] Towaway69|1 year ago|reply
The original idea to do this came from Le Corbusier[1] who once described his process of working as being a phase of collecting details on a project, a phase of doing something else (allowing his unconscious to work on the project) and finally he would sit down and complete the project.
The disadvantage is that I never know when inspiration hits and when exactly I will get something done. It’s important to be organised and have everything written down is my approach.
Also I give myself time and room to explore possible solutions from seemingly unrelated areas - a kind of zen navigation[2] for project work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/667285-he-had-a-tremendous-...
[+] [-] smusamashah|1 year ago|reply
I am saying based on how writers/poets etc are depicted. Waiting for ideas to arrive, sometimes they keep they keep waiting for it, sometimes it hits them on a random event.
[+] [-] syndicatedjelly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] financetechbro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] salomonk_mur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blastro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|1 year ago|reply
If sleep is the best state for the body to be in to consolidate memories, reduce fatigue, etc., then it would seem logical to try and be in the sleep state as much as possible.
Obviously the difficult part is actually being able to fall asleep on command without using some kind of pharmaceutical, but I do think falling asleep quickly is something that can be learned:
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/want-to-fall-asleep-faste...
[+] [-] mtalantikite|1 year ago|reply
When I started training Muay Thai I found that I often would "lose" a lot of what we had worked on in class, and then started taking savasana right when I got home. In that not-quite-sleep state my brain would replay what we worked on.
Sometimes if I'm really bashing into a wall with some coding problem I'll just take savasana for 10-15 minutes and get back to it. I feel like it helps.
[+] [-] nope1000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timshell|1 year ago|reply
I suggested cognitive fatigue was an adaptive construct that biases people to go offline and replay their memories, and that this was decision-theory optimal from a learning / reward perspective.
https://mayank-agrawal.com/papers/AgrawalMattarCohenDaw21.pd...
[+] [-] Towaway69|1 year ago|reply
I close my eyes and allow my mind to drift. Similar to the phase before falling asleep. Most of the time, this mind drifting is enough but sometimes I fall asleep - both states help.
[+] [-] whycome|1 year ago|reply
It would be pretty cool to have some sort of siesta for students in the day. Maybe one of those private schools would do it.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|1 year ago|reply
I can go to sleep confident that in the morning I'll probably figure out what I just can't get a handle on right now.
[+] [-] yamrzou|1 year ago|reply
The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Committee_of_Sleep
[+] [-] RHSman2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _thisdot|1 year ago|reply
Say you just experienced grief. Dreaming about it is an essential in the process of getting over it.
REM sleep is inhibited when you use sleeping pills or alcohol.
[+] [-] ricardo81|1 year ago|reply
Always figured it's a blend of taking past and recent experiences and re-ordering them, with a hint of hypothetical scenarios for the future.
The "flicker" sounds like a good A/B test for the hypothetical while the replays are good for memorisation.
I can often tell when I'm dreaming when it comes to the more hypothetical ones due to dodgy physics or whatever (try nipping my face and can't feel anything) so I'm probably buggering that process up a bit. Maybe an INTJ trait. I remember doing that as a kid and being able to fly, but nowadays often I can't get beyond 10 metres above ground. Been rate limited.
[+] [-] Buttons840|1 year ago|reply
I haven't always succeeded, but I try to at least work-on or study something I care about before bed.
[+] [-] dgfitz|1 year ago|reply
Night of sleep and going to $dayjob to pay for school, ideas would just manifest themselves in my head. Happened dozens and dozens of times.
[+] [-] lucasRW|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|1 year ago|reply
edit: I also recall when I was a naive late teen early 20s "song writer" (wannabe) I would often wake up with lyrics. They were also nonsense. Literally. I had a notepad and wrote what I thought was great but it was just gibberish.
[+] [-] Almondsetat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|1 year ago|reply
(Course is https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)
[+] [-] Layvier|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wrycoder|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pxc|1 year ago|reply
--
1: https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc
[+] [-] sweeter|1 year ago|reply