[sdiy] Sleep and creativity, was: SOIC audio ADCs & dsPIC33F ...

[cheater00 .]

Robin,

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Robin Whittle <rw at firstpr.com.au> wrote:
> Someone told me recently that couldn't think without a cup of tea.  That
> was my experience too.  My mornings and days in general are clearer and
> more productive since I stopped using caffeine in 2004.  I quite often
> have good ideas lying in bed in the morning, or in the first hour or so
> after getting up - putting things together in ways I had not thought of
> the day before.  There's something loose about the first hour or two.
> Newspaper headlines are at first seen to mean something more bizarre
> than they actually are.  Fresh combinations of ideas about electronics,
> molding epoxy composite dummy heads for binaural microphones, physics
> etc. float into my brain.  Not all of them survive later scrutiny.

That is my experience as well - however only if I'm sleep-deprived. If
I am well-slept, this kind of creativity lasts the whole day (even
into the late evening) and is usually better "quality". However,
sometimes it's good to be erroneous, because it liberates us from the
limits we impose upon ourselves by trusting our understanding of
things.

On a separate note, I noticed that if it gets very late into the
night, things sometimes sound different, and music just flows better
on the keyboard. So if I normally go to sleep around midnight, and
then stay up until 1 am a couple of days, and then on the next day
stay up until 3 am, I get that effect. Can this have to do with my
mind going into some specific sleep cycles while I'm still awake? This
effect is usually followed by longer periods of mental inactivity
coupled with physical activity. Sometimes it's playing simple music
(not really an analytic thing) for several hours into the night.
Yesterday it was that I went out to party, came back to the office to
pick up my bike at around 2-3 into the night, and then noticed that
the next train is in almost an hour, so I cycled back home (which
takes about 30-40 minutes). That was also a situation where I could
"zone out" for a longer period of time, so I can easily imagine my
mind slowly preparing for sleep. Similarly to how most people like to
"quiet down" before going to sleep (they try to be in a silent
environment).

One thing I noticed yesterday (early morning today) when walking up a
concrete staircase with my bike and cleat shoes (that have metal
plates in the sole) was how extremely loud the reverb was. I'll
postulate: maybe it's that the sound environment we are usually
surrounded with gets cancelled out by our auditory system before it's
analyzed? For a couple examples, my new office is located next to
train tracks, and at first the sound of trains whizzing by was
annoying, but now I don't notice it so much anymore. We have a
colleague who likes very loud arguments, and it was extremely
difficult to fathom, but now I'm slowly adjusting. Maybe right before
sleep or during sleep that "noise filter" shuts down, and we're
presented with the full and uncensored auditory image of what we're
listening to?

This is a question for a psycho-acoustics expert. I believe
"ecological acoustics" is a sub-field which might be interested in
this kind of questions.

Cheers,
D.