Why inspiration at night

Where did your journey with astrology begin? What has astrology taught you about yourself, and how does the night sky inspire you? Shop collection.

No Comments. Post a Comment Cancel Reply. Not so. A recent study by Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks suggests that innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms drive daily fluctuations in many physiological processes like alertness, heart rate and body temperature.

Recent research indicates that these rhythms affect our intellectual functioning too. Numerous studies have demonstrated that our best performance on challenging, attention-demanding tasks - like studying in the midst of distraction - occurs at our peak time of day. When we operate at our optimal time of day, we filter out the distractions in our world and get down to business.

In a study I conducted, for example, participants were given three related cue words e. When misleading distractors were presented with the cue words e. Those tested at peak times were not affected by the distraction. In this and related studies, peak-time benefits are most robust when distraction would disrupt our thought processes and cause errors.

But distraction is not all bad, and Wieth and Zacks have demonstrated that we can use our increased susceptibility to distraction at off-peak times to our advantage. That makes it much easier for the neocortex to pull out common themes. The other phase of sleep—REM, which stands for rapid eye movement—is very different. That Greek chorus of neurons that sang so synchronously during non-REM sleep descends into a cacophonous din, as various parts of the neocortex become activated, seemingly at random.

Meanwhile, a chemical called acetylcholine—the same one that Loewi identified in his sleep-inspired work—floods the brain, disrupting the connection between the hippocampus and the neocortex, and placing both in an especially flexible state, where connections between neurons can be more easily formed, strengthened, or weakened.

These traits, Lewis suggests, allow the neocortex to unconsciously search for similarities between seemingly unrelated concepts like, say, the way the planets revolve around the sun and the way electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom.

When you wake up the next day, that slight strengthening might allow you to see what you were working on in a slightly different way. That might just allow you to crack the problem.

Crucially, they build on one another. Dan Gartenberg. There's nothing quite like a good night's sleep. What if technology could help us get more out of it? Dan Gartenberg is working on tech that stimulates deep sleep, the most regenerative stage which among other wonderful things might help us consolidate our memories and form our personalities.

Find out more about how playing sounds that mirror brain waves during this stage might lead to deeper sleep -- and its potential benefits on our health, memory and ability to learn. Russell Foster.