#ThinkfullyHabit: Awaken your alpha
Do you struggle to get out of bed in the morning? If so, it could be your advantage. Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman suggests that when we’re stuck on a difficult problem, one of the best things we can do is set our alarm clock to go off a few minutes early so that we can lie in bed while half asleep and our mind can go over the problem again, but in different ways.
“An insight is a restructuring of information. It’s seeing the same old thing in a completely new way. ”
WHY?
Early in the morning, just after we wake up, is a golden time for flashes of inspiration, new realisations and moments of breakthrough. When we’re a bit snoozy, we’re relaxed and our brain is a little bit less tightly gripped to the obvious ideas. It’s in this state that we are better able to meander through more unconventional ideas and different thoughts can come together, fall into place and result in us being more likely to have ah-ha moments.
Jung-Beeman has been able to identify precisely the brain waves that are at play when this happens – the alpha ones. When we’re waking up, we go from delta and theta brain waves (the slower, deeper sleep and dream related brain waves) to alpha brain waves, which are sometimes considered as the bridge point between the internal and external world.
Psychologist Joy Bhattacharya and colleagues also investigated the role of brain waves and they discovered that it’s possible to predict when someone is likely to have a flash of inspiration up to eight seconds before the inspiration arrives in their mind – and it’s the rhythm of brain waves that is critical, with enhanced alpha waves being one of the key predictors.
So, next time you’re tackling a tricky issue perhaps the only thing you need to predict is that you’ll hit the snooze button a couple of times the following morning and go from there.
REFERENCES:
Jonah Lehrer, 'The Eureka Hunt, Why do good ideas come to us when they do?' July 21, 2008, The New Yorker.
Bhavin R. Sheth, Simone Sandkühler, Joydeep Bhattacharya; Posterior Beta and Anterior Gamma Oscillations Predict Cognitive Insight. J Cogn Neurosci 2009; 21 (7): 1269–1279.