The German chemist Friedrich Kekule claimed to have intuited the chemical structure of the benzene ring after falling asleep in his chair and dreaming of an ouroboros (a serpent biting its own tail). He's certainly not the only person to have discovered a flash insight after waking from a good sleep. In science alone, many breakthroughs were apparently borne of a decent snooze, including Mendeleyev's creation of the Periodic Table and Loewi's experiments on the transmission of nervous signals through chemical messengers.
Most of us have tried sleeping on a difficult problem before and using an elegant experiment, Denise Cai from the University of California in San Diego has shown that this old technique really does have merit to it. She found that our brains are better at integrating disparate pieces of information after a short bout of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - a deep, dream-rich slumber that involves ...
