Is it true that our brains can “background process” problems while we sleep (or constantly)? There’s a Pampers advert I saw on TV that suggests babies do this to solve problems they encounter while awake (and of course they sleep better with a Pampers disposable…) and it sounds a bit hokey to me.
I have heard this also, but the only evidence I have is anectdotal. My dad, while a graduate civil engineering student, would wake up in the night with “answers” to difficult problems he had been working on. Seems it was true for him, anyway.
I’ve heard versions of this anecdote throughout my life, so I don’t think it’s apocryphal. Kind of a cool story if it’s true.
Until those with knowledge chime in, this’ll have to do.
WAG
Sure. Our branis are always active as long as we are alive. How else to account for dreams? And surely waking up early enough to get to work isn’t an automatic reflex.
Of course, I don’t have to get up for work any more and you do. Hah!
Odd coincidence department -
I’m rereading The Innovents Abroad and just today I read the part where Twain writes that the supreme joy is to discover something. To be the first that sees a new land or gets a new idea. And one of his examples of the pleasure of a new idea was when “Howe realized that we had been putting the eye on the wrong end of the needle.”
Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while sick in bed and wrote the first draft in 3 days fearful of forgetting it. Although he later changed the story I read years ago that he said his first draft was delivered to him whole and had only to be written down.
I know that if I have a hard essay to write or some other difficult problem I will usually address it but not start right away, and by the time I sit down and finally tackle it days or weeks later the answers seem to already be there and flow more quickly than the first attempt, even when I don’t even conscioulsy think about them. Like my problem with run-on sentances for example 
This theory would be fascinating if true.
Just recently I made a startling realization about a topic that I hadn’t even thought about for a few weeks – it occurred to me out of nowhere, as if I had already reasoned it and was recalling it. It was quite odd. Perhaps this theory could explain that.
But I am still more than a little dubious. That our minds are active in some way during sleep is not in question. The question is whether they actively produce coherent reasoning. Now, it would seem inevitable that certain associations – namely words, but also sights, sounds, emotions, or other ideas – would be produced from memory in this somnolent reasoning process, since all of our waking reasoning works that way; yet we have no evidence of such a thing. Which means either that we forget it all, or that we do not necessarily produce such associations while we reason. Cecil wouldn’t agree with the latter, according to this article, in which he says, “Can you think without language? Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to.”
This is of course a complicated subject, and I am no expert. But I can at least say with certainty that, as the randomness and obscurity of our dreams and the illogical behavior of sleepwalkers, which both suggest that we do not reason coherently in our sleep, constitute virtually all common knowledge that could be evidence toward the subject, there is little reason to believe this theory, until there appears some serious research that can support it.
Certainly memory works that way. Think about all those times that you are trying to remember the name of a person or a movie or something, and you can’t remember when you want to. Then, days later, you happen to think about it again and the answer is instantly there. How do you think it got there? Basically your brain was going through the filing cabinet for a while after you stopped consciously thinking about it, and left the folder on the desk for next time. I don’t know for sure, but most likely problem-solving and creative processes work in much the same way.
Sticking to the OP’s title question…
It would depend on what you mean by “problem”. If you mean your maths homework or writing block or in general, a specific result-obtaining activity, then I would say no. During sleep, selected memories do get processed and you dream, but I don’t think our brains are always working on a problem, like I defined above. Right now, we can’t tell.
I have always thought that recollection occurred only upon specific provocation by some association. To assert that the brain can spontaneously and without the provocation of another thought recall something seems to me like a rather bold statement. Further, your explanation that the brain “goes through the filing cabinet and leaves the folder on the desk for next time” – which relies upon that idea – sounds like quite an elaborate process, and I am hesitant to accept it without any evidence.
Now dreams present a quandary here, as they do resemble such a process: it could be asserted that they consist of random and spontaneously recalled bits of information coming from our memories. Nonetheless, it is not at all evident that this same process is ubiquitous and proceeds while we are awake, and it is even less evident that such a thing happens with our rational faculties.
I can program my brain to wake me up at a certain time the next morning (“I will wake up at 8:45 tomorrow morning, I will wake up at 8:45 tomorrow morning…”) by repeating the information, which makes my brain think that it’s important so it gets a higher priority in the Non-conscious Processing Department.
Likewise, the sewing machine dude spent ages and ages concentrating on the problem, trying out various deisgns and sourcing background material. This repetition gave his non-conscious all the information it needed to find the answer. IIRC the DNA dude dreamt the double helix after trying for ages to unlock the answer.
You know when you have a word on the tip of your tongue? That’s a communication breakdown between your non-conscious and your conscious. As soon as your conscious thinks about something else, your non-conscious can push the word through, indicating that it can hold answers until the time is right to deliver them.
Mr. Adoptamom is a residential master carpenter. He often modifies the house plans to suit the homeowners “I wish we’d thought of this before we had the plans drawn” dreams.
Many times, he’s come home wondering how he could fit this, modify that, trim this, etc in the most efficient and eye pleasing manner to accomodate their wishes. Oddly enough, he often wakes up the next morning with the solution, either figured out in a dream or he wakes up “knowing” what he didn’t know the day before.
Of course YMMV.
Coleridge allegedly composed “Kubla Khan” while asleep, and only managed to write down the fragment we have before he was interrupted by ‘a person from Porlock’. Granted, he was on the nod from all the laudanum he was taking, instead of being properly asleep. I have a book here somewhere whose author found most of the images he used in his commonplace book over the previous few weeks.
Sometimes it’s not so successful. There’s an old story about someone who woke up in the middle of the night with a piece of great wisdom, and wrote down the following verse:
Hogamus higamus,
Men are polygamous;
Higamus hogamus,
Women monogamous.
rjk’s post reminded me of an anecdote of my own: I have at least twice had dreams in which I heard music that I have never heard before. I could hear it vividly several hours after awakening, but I have since forgotten all of it except for a few parts. I was pretty sure it was something my brain had created in my sleep, not something I was remembering – which was both puzzling and illuminating, because as an amateur composer I am used to having to exert at least some mental effort in order to create such coherent music in my mind (though I am certainly able to), but in my dreams there was no feeling of exertion; it simply came from nowhere. This seems to support the notion that we reason in our sleep without being aware of it.
But as I said already, the notion of reasoning without being aware of it seems like a paradox, as it should. How it happens (if it does) must surely be a complicated issue.
When I’m planning a writing project, I’ll often give myself time to stew on the issue for a while. I’ll think about it for a bit, toy with ideas, and then go off and do something else. I might be doing other things for a while, in fact, before my thoughts wander back around to the issue of my writing. Often, my thoughts make definite progress that time. I’ll be able to coherently state my main concept, for example, or I’ll have the high-level outline planned. I’ll go back to doing this on and off when I’m writing, taking time out to go and get myself some water or flip through the channels when I’m stuck for a line (opening lines to a section in particular).
This works often enough that I consider it a valid part of my process, not just slack goof-off time. I do know that beating my head against a wall is not productive, and that the best way to improve flow is to stop trying for a while.