The night crew

A random walk through the radio dial might have solved a mystery that has befuddled me for decades.

I first encountered this mystery when I was a flight student. I noticed that most of my improvement seemed to come between flights instead of kicking in during the duration of a flight.

Learning flight maneuvers is a demanding task. They involve the simultaneous application of brain work and physical coordination. If you want to unravel the world of how people learn stuff, this is a good place to start.

Anyway, when I became a flight instructor I noticed the same mysterious force at work with my students. During any given lesson I could run a student through the same maneuver a bunch of times, but they typically didn’t show much improvement during this process. The improvement would show up, like magic, during the next lesson.

With this factor in mind, I redesigned the syllabus to keep flight lessons reasonably short. It was apparent that a long and dragged-out lesson wasn’t going to yield much incremental advantage.

To the contrary, from what I saw, lessons that dragged on too long merely taxed the attention span of the students. This drawback didn’t seem to have any counterbalancing advantages when it came to seeing progress during the next lesson.

In summary, then, the students would typically improve in what I’ll call a stair-step fashion. The flat part (it wasn’t really flat, but we’ll just call it that for the sake of contrast) was the actual lesson, and the upwards progress accrued during the time between lessons.

Flying isn’t the only environment where I’ve seen this factor at work. In the deskbound side of life, I’ve broken a number of logjams in financial and economic calculations by just putting down the project for a few days.

The solution would seem to percolate up when I wasn’t even thinking about the problem.

Or was I?

Ah, that is, indeed, the question.

And that’s where the radio comes in. I was scanning the radio dial hoping to find some Merle Haggard. I wound up with NPR (National Public Radio).

I only caught a snippet of the NPR show and since I was driving I wasn’t able to take notes. But I’m going to share what I heard. If I can find out more about it I’ll let you know.

What I heard was an interview with an expert on how our brains operate when we sleep.

The gist was that during our wakeful hours the brain acquires information and during our sleeping hours the brain organizes that information.

In other words (mine, not the expert’s), our brains don’t just shut down when we’re sleeping; they’re just kicking things to the night crew. A sleeping brain isn’t an idle brain. It’s doing critical work. We’re thinking even when we don’t think we’re thinking. But our thinking type of thinking and our non-thinking type of thinking have different jobs. We don’t get to see the whole thing. We’re just aware of part of it.

Anyway, passing the day’s information over to the night crew for further administration seems like an elegant arrangement to me, since I regard raw information as pretty much useless, or even misleading, until it’s organized, prioritized, and analyzed.

Looking back at the flying example, we can consider a sequence of lessons to be a cycle that’s based on two sub-cycles; one is short (the information conveyed during a lesson) and one is long (the digesting of each lesson’s information). There are, of course, other factors involved, but the trick to optimizing things is to get the cycles to interact with each other constructively.

Flying is just one very dynamic example, but I think the same factors apply to anything that we’re studying or teaching.

As for the sleep angle specifically, as a topic of discussion it seems to be part of a trend. I’ve noticed an increasing number of articles about the merits of sleep, or, more to the point, the drawbacks of a lack of it.

Anyway, now that my drive is done, my dinner has been eaten, and I still can’t find my Merle Haggard tape, I’m going to open up a book on Chinese grammar.

That stuff always puts me to sleep. Hey, I guess that’s a good thing.