Importance of sleeping

You might be surprised to learn that just plain being awake creates toxic products in your brain. How does the brain get rid of these poisons? Turns out that when you sleep, your brain cells shrink. This causes an increase in the space between your brain cells. It's like unblocking a stream. Fluid can flow past these cells and wash the toxins out.

So, sleep which can sometimes seem like such a waste of time is actually your brain's way of keeping itself clean and healthy.

Taking a test without getting enough sleep means you're operating with a brain that got little metabolic toxins floating around in it, poisons, and make it so you can't think very clearly.

But sleep does more than just allow your brain to wash away toxins. It's actually an important part of the memory and learning process. It seems that during sleep, your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you're thinking about and learning. It erases the less important parts of memories and simultaneously strengthens areas that you need or want to remember.

Sleep has also been shown to make a remarkable difference in your ability to figure out difficult problems and to understand what you're trying to learn. It's as if the complete deactivation of the conscious you in the prefrontal cortex at the forefront of your brain helps other areas of your brain start talking more easily to one another allowing them to put together the neural solution to your learning task while you're sleeping.

Dreaming about what you're studying

If you're going over what you're learning right before you take a nap or going to sleep for the evening, you have an increased chance of dreaming about it. If you go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material it seems to improve your chances of dreaming about it, still further.

Dreaming about what you're studying can substantially enhance your ability to understand.

It somehow consolidate your memories into easier to grasp chunks, and now, time for a little sleep.

I think the brain probably does some of this spontaneously and particularly during sleep. Because if you think about what happens during sleep. You've got a washing away of all of the conscious, top down, cognitive control over your thoughts. And it probably permits different neural networks to assemble themselves in ways that may make sense spontaneously, but are free from the guided process of our top down mind. And so I think that's one of the reason why people will awake from sleep, dreams, or other relaxed states, when they're not thinking about problems. And all the sudden have come up with a solution. All components were there that required a release at least temporarily of the constraints, that would be applied to the problem to recognize a new solution.