Sleeping Makes You Smarter

Feeling stupid? Take a nap. At least you won’t say anything stupid for a while. There are other, more persuasive reasons to catch up on sleep, and many of them are laid out clearly in this lengthy article in the Scientific American. The magazine reports that research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our
brain is busily processing the day’s information, organizing that information so that it will be more useful when we wake up. When a
picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, Sciam reports, sleep can
save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background
drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover
relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the
unnecessary details fade—perhaps even helping us find the meaning in
what we have learned.
What a lot more? Read more in the Scientific American.