My Learning Cat Naps: A Student's Phenomenon

[Math Is Hard]

When I am trying to absorb a lot of new concepts that I am studying and trying to reason out(without luck), I find that I read them several times and then I go into a mental fatigue. Often, I will lay down and I pass into this mental state where I am not quite asleep and not quite awake. All sensory experiences are tuned out and I do nothing but work in a semi-dreamlike state on processing the concepts. This usually lasts for a couple of hours and when I "awake" I usually have any misunderstanding resolved, or at least a new way to go back and look at the material with a different approach.
I wonder if this phenomenon is something like a meditation state. I've never been able to meditate succesfully by trying to make it happen, but I wonder if my brain is able to do this for me. Is this something that other students experience?

 

[somasimple]

Hi,

Nap is known since a long time to do so. You decrease the noisy information coming from the real world and it helps concentrating on the problem.

All great thinkers have used nap.

http://www.mensjournal.com/healthFitness/0601/napping_power.html

 

[Math Is Hard]

Thanks for the very interesting article, somasimple. I was especially interested in this part:

Here's how the power nap works: Sleep comes in five stages that recur cyclically throughout a typical night, and a power nap seeks to include just the first two of them. The initial stage features the sinking into sleep as electrical brain activity, eye and jaw-muscle movement, and respiration slow. The second is a light but restful sleep in which the body gets ready -- lowering temperature, relaxing muscles further -- for the entry into the deep and dreamless "slow-wave sleep," or SWS, that occurs in stages three and four. Stage five, of course, is REM, when the eyes twitch and dreaming becomes intense.

It's that second stage that I spend a lot of time in when I nap, and I am not sure if I ever go the rest of the way into SWS and REM. Of course, it could be that I am just not remembering the last stages.

 

[Math Is Hard]

p.s. I thought this was truly amazing!

When billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett broke the record for around-the-world solo jet flight last March, he slept just 60 minutes in 67 hours of flight time -- 60 minutes broken into two- and three-minute naps. "I slept when I needed it and awoke refreshed," he says. Fossett, who holds world records in ballooning, sailing, and flying, adds that none of his feats could have been done without these micro-variety "power naps."