On sleep, memory and creativity

“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast”
I came across this beautiful quote whilst dabbling in a new Coursera course about “Learning how to Learn” and discovered a new curiosity about the importance of sleep to aid brain functioning and optimal creativity.
With unmatched eloquence, Shakespeare is making an analogy between knitted clothes and sleep — That sleep has multiple functions; not just in offering us physical and mental rest but also permitting a more active pattern-forming or “knitting” of experience where some of the most original synthesis and sense-making of unrelated events can form and converge organically.
The coursera on Learning how to Learn, led by U.S Engineer, Barbara Oakley, cites sleep as critical for memory and creative development, and it strikes me, how much, in contemporary life we underestimate the potential of time fully rested, as what we need to serve our best creative thinking.
As Fast Company says: “Research has repeatedly found that sleep improves people’s ability to come up with creative solutions to problems. Psychologists from UC San Diego found that REM sleep improves the creative process more than any other state–asleep or awake. And often the solutions to problems come to us when we are sleeping because of a phenomenon cognitive scientists call “pattern recognition.”
And, Maria Popova of the wonderful blog Brain Pickings, summarises her personal lessons of 7 years of writing including a lesson on her recommedation to “build pockets of stillness into your day” and “most importantly….sleep” In fact Popova says “Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work”
Popopva highlights in today’s society we seem to wear our lack of sleep as a badge of honour when it is, more, a “profound failure of self-respect and of priorities”
Perhaps an outdated badge of honour, then, and maybe a hang-over from the industrial revolution when the body as a work-machine and mechanical productivity surfaced en-masse?
Sleep is now the subject of more pressing discussions about memory and health. But one thing feels certain — if creativity is one of society’s most prized assets, isn’t it time we valued our sleeping time as much as those we spend conciously processing. Might we start to see protecting and valuing our rest time, and learning how to talk about ourselves as humans with cyclical rythmns for rest and creative processing, recognising we are not machines that thrive on as little maintenance as is humanely possible?
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