Sleep Increases Our Ability to Solve Problems Creatively

Sleep on it.

This advice has stood countless people in good stead
(including me) for many a year. And I'd be willing to bet
that there isn't a soul on this green Earth who doesn't
believe in the fundamental soundness of this little gem of
folk wisdom. After all, some things are just plain TRUE, and
we don't need scientific proof to know they're true.

But leave it to the lab-coated pointy-heads (who have to
find ways of spending all their government grant money
somehow) to seize upon these truths, dissect them, and turn
them upside down and inside out in the name of science. Such
was exactly the case in some recent German research testing
the veracity of the old "sleep on it" bit of folk wisdom.
Here's how it worked:

For the study, two groups of volunteers were taught a series
of rules for solving mathematical problems involving the
ordering of numbers. One of these groups was then allowed to
sleep, while the other was forced to remain awake. Sure
enough, the "sleep group" proved twice as adept at applying
these rules to solving the study's problems as did their
wakeful counterparts.     

As usual, the tried and true wisdom of the ages has stood
the test of science.

However, the research failed to pinpoint WHY sleep increases
our ability to solve problems creatively - only that it
indeed DOES. According to the journal Nature (where the
findings were published), one of the study's authors
suggests that sleep restructures and reorganizes your mind's
most recently acquired memories, allowing new insights to
take hold based on the re-prioritization of these thoughts. 

At the very least, these findings should reinforce to us all
the importance of sound, restful sleep. Not just to your
body's overall health, but to your mental functioning and
problem solving ability as well. But then, anybody who's
ever gone to bed perplexed about something and arisen clear-
headed already knew that… 

Isn't that more or less everyone?  

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What the (guinea) pigs are telling us…

In medicine, there are many parallels between humans and
pigs.

For starters, we're both the smartest members of our
respective orders. Also, our hearts and circulatory systems
are remarkably similar (enough so that human-to-pig heart
valve transplants have become relatively common). And it's
because of this last fact that pigs have proven most useful
as "guinea pigs." In fact, I'd say we owe our porcine
cousins a debt of gratitude, since a huge amount of medical
research has been conducted using pigs as human stand-ins
for all kinds of heart and circulatory studies. I, for one,
am grateful, because…

A recent pig study proves a point I've been making for
years: That a certain amount of body fat is essential for
optimum immunity and resistance to major diseases,
specifically cancer and diabetes. According to an article
published in the American Journal of Physiology, new pig-
based research shows that fat cells (as long as they aren't
completely saturated with excess lipids) produce a series of
hormone-like proteins called cytokines in response to
invading toxins. These cytokines act almost identically to
the immune system T-cells normally responsible for fighting
off disease. Fat cells also seemed to play a role in aiding
insulin to properly regulate blood sugar, and also aid the
body's response to cancerous cells.

Naturally, the study found that when pigs accumulated too
much fat, these benefits diminished, leaving the animals
vulnerable to infection and disease. If this study's
findings hold true to humans, scientists may soon discover
ways to fine-tune the metabolic "triggers" that spur these
fat cells into producing cytokines, perhaps helping our
bodies beat cancer, diabetes and other diseases from the
inside out.

What's this mean for you? It means that unless your body fat
percentage is high enough to be dangerous or to make you
overweight, you're not benefiting at all from trying to get
it as low as possible. In other words, we're naturally
supposed to have a little fat on our frames - and you're
better off having a couple extra pounds of it (just a few,
not a slew) than to be too lean…

Oh, and next time you see a pig, you may want to take a bow
for telling us so.