HEALTH Study: Our brains keep working while we sleep

The study is considered hard evidence to support the common-sense idea.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Everybody feels refreshed after a good night's sleep. But can you wake up smarter? More artistic perhaps?
German scientists say they have demonstrated for the first time that our sleeping brains continue working on problems that baffle us during the day, and the right answer may come more easily after 8 hours of rest.
The German study is considered to be the first hard evidence supporting the common sense notion that creativity and problem solving appear to be directly linked to adequate sleep, scientists say. Other researchers who did not contribute to the experiment say it provides a valuable reminder for overtired workers and students that sleep is often the best medicine.
Sleep deprivation
Previous studies have shown that 70 million Americans are sleep-deprived, contributing to increased accidents, worsening health and lower test scores. But the new German experiment takes the subject a step further to show how sleep can help to turn yesterday's problem into today's solution.
"A single study never settles an issue once and for all, but I would say this study does advance the field significantly," said Dr. Carl E. Hunt, director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research at the National Institutes of Health.
"It's going to have potentially important results for children for school performance and for adults for work performance," Hunt said.
Scientists at the University of Luebeck in Germany found that volunteers taking a simple math test were three times more likely than sleep-deprived participants to figure out a hidden rule for converting the numbers into the right answer if they had eight hours of sleep. The results appear in today's issue of the journal Nature.