×

You’re so smart when you sleep

Burt's Eye View

You know why you hardly ever land in hot water when you’re asleep? Because you’re smarter when you snooze.

Science says so.

My guess is that’s because it’s harder to be a smart mouth when we’re conked out. Just like smartphones, smart mouths make us stupid.

Science says that about smartphones, too.

According to research published this month in the journal Cell Reports, sleeping brains rev at racing speeds, consolidating memories from the day, pulling together strands of thought and stray scraps of information, and correlating them into cohesive flashes of understanding.

My theory is that our smart mouths utter so many stupid things when we’re awake that we’re constantly steeped in trouble. But when we’re asleep, our brains spend a lot less time trying to jam filters in place, back-pedalling and inventing creative excuses. That leaves more firepower free for thinking.

Cell Reports stays researchers hooked up a bunch of rats and studied how neurons fired in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with memory, while rats explored a new environment and while the rats slept. The firing patterns were the same except on turbo-boost in the slumbering rats. This helped them figure out the new place better when awake.

(Why is it when scientists want to study the human brain, they use rats? What does it say about us that a human brain is most closely mimicked by a rat’s?

Careful. You were about to make a smart mouth remark, weren’t you? About the person sitting beside you? See how stupid we are when it’s our mouths that are smart?)

So yes, when faced with a tough decision, you most certainly need to sleep on it.

I’ve found that my whole life is a tough decision, which is why I crawl under my desk so often for naps. You remember the blanket forts you built as a kid? They work pretty well for adults, too. The hard part is getting your bosses to grasp that you make fewer mistakes asleep under the desk that awake at your keyboard, where they seem to think you should be.

Here’s another theory for why we’re smarter asleep than awake: We’re a lot less likely to be staring at a smartphone when sound asleep, although that’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

According to a study published in August by Florida State University, simply hearing a cellphone vibrate distracts the mind and kills productivity.

How many times have you been a restaurant, heard a phone chirp, and everyone in the place checked their screens? Or maybe you didn’t notice. Because you were yanking out your own smartphone.

On the plus side, smartphones have limited our smart mouths. We text instead of talk.

That reminds me, when I was scrolling through my phone when I was supposed to be paying bills the other day, I saw a post that read: “I’m having some friends over tonight to stare at their phones. Wanna come?” I laughed until the lights went out. I guess I should have paid my bills.

If you don’t think smartphones make us stupid, stand on the sidewalk by a utility pole and watch how many people walking smack into the towering thing. They didn’t see it because their noses were in their phones.

I’ve never seen a rat do that.

— Cole will be checking his smartphone for email at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.

NEWSLETTER

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *
     

COMMENTS

[vivafbcomment]

Starting at $4.85/week.

Subscribe Today