The Secret to Aspie Knowledge

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There is a saying that goes far back in time. It relates to the way that Aspies (those with Asperger's Syndrome) make accurate decisions. The process is fairly simple. Whenever you have an important decision to make in your life, it is important to "Sleep on It".

So if you have Asperger's Syndrome, give it a try. Give yourself a good night's sleep and then follow up on the answer that you came up with. And then a little later, when the answer has a chance to solidify, write back HERE and tell whether this logical approach is TRUE?

This is a well-known aphorism for everyone, not just autistic people. It's great advice! Just not particularly specific to neurodiversity.

??

I think in general we have more trouble sleeping on it then NT's

I'm not a very logical person, so I can't really say.

But when two or more equally safe and effective choices are available, just choose one.

It does not matter which one, as the point is to make the choice and act on it.

I have seen careers slowed down by dithering and second-guessing, even after the desired results were achieved.

Aspies are not given a playbook on how to succeed. But there is an important tool that you can learn. It is called
"Sleep on It". It can unwrap your superpowers if you let it. I will begin to explain it. One person on the internet puts it this way:

Is There Any Real Proof This Works?

Taking advantage of when your brain is prepared to give you the best ideas is something successful people have been doing for hundreds of years. Artists like Salvador Dali, writers like Mary Shelley, and great thinkers have understood that the early “nodding off” stage of sleep, when theta waves predominate in the brain, is the best time to let the creative juices flow.

Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison also relied on half-sleep moments to chew over big ideas. A nimble, creative mind is primed for solving problems, and that’s why mentally running through the day’s challenges early in the morning while you are still in this state (or even at night as you start to fall asleep) can yield amazing results. What worked for Einstein can work for you too, although maybe not in a theory-of-relativity kind of way.

Sleep is an important hidden tool for Aspies. Consider Albert Einstein.

Of all history’s great minds, arguably the master of combining genius with unusual habits was Albert Einstein – so what better person to study for clues to mind-enhancing behaviors to try ourselves? He taught us how to squeeze energy out of atoms, so maybe, just maybe, he might be able to teach us a thing or two about how to squeeze the most out of our tiny mortal brains.

10 HOURS OF SLEEP AND ONE-SECOND NAPS

It’s common knowledge that sleep is good for your brain – and Einstein took this advice more seriously than most. He reportedly slept for at least 10 hours per day – nearly one and a half times as much as the average American today (6.8 hours).

It’s common knowledge that sleep is good for your brain – and Einstein took this advice more seriously than most. He reportedly slept for at least 10 hours per day – nearly one and a half times as much as the average American today (6.8 hours).

Many of the most radical breakthroughs in human history, including the periodic table, the structure of DNA and Einstein’s theory of special relativity, have supposedly occurred while their discoverer was unconscious. The latter came to Einstein while he was dreaming about cows being electrocuted. But is this really true?

Back in 2004, scientists at the University of Lubeck, Germany, tested the idea with a simple experiment. First they trained volunteers to play a number game. Most gradually got the hang of it with practice, but by far the quickest way to improve was to uncover a hidden rule. When the students were tested again eight hours later, those who had been allowed to sleep were more than twice as likely to gain insight into the rules than those who had remained awake.

When we fall asleep, the brain enters a series of cycles. Every 90-120 minutes the brain fluctuates between light sleep, deep sleep and a phase associated with dreaming, known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM), which until recently was thought to play the leading role in learning and memory. But this isn’t the full story. “Non-REM sleep has been a bit of a mystery, but we spend about 60% of our night in this type of sleep,” says Stuart Fogel, a neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa.

Non-REM sleep is characterized by bursts of fast brain activity, so called ‘spindle events’ because of the spindle-shaped zigzag the waves trace on an EEG. A normal night’s sleep will involve thousands of these, each lasting no longer than a few seconds. “This is really the gateway to other stages of sleep – the more you sleep, the more of these events you’ll have,” he says.

Spindle events begin with a surge of electrical energy generated by the rapid firing of structures deep in the brain. The main culprit is the thalamus, an oval shaped region which acts as the brain’s main ‘switching centre’, sending incoming sensory signals in the right direction. While we’re sleeping, it acts like an internal earplug, scrambling external information to help you stay asleep. During a spindle event, the surge travels up to the brain’s surface and then back down again to complete a loop.

Intriguingly, those who have more spindle events tend to have greater ‘fluid intelligence’ – the ability to solve new problems, use logic in new situations, and identify patterns – the kind Einstein had in spades. "They don’t seem related to other types of intelligence, such as the ability to memorise facts and figures, so it’s really specific to these reasoning skills," says Fogel. This ties in nicely with Einstein’s disdain for formal education and advice to "never memorise anything which you can look up".

It’s not yet known why spindle events would be helpful, but Fogel thinks it may have something to do with the regions which are activated. “We’ve found that the same regions that generate spindles – the thalamus and the cortex [the brain’s surface] – well, these are the areas which support the ability to solve problems and apply logic in new situations,” he says.

Source: What you can learn from Einstein’s quirky habits

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Generally when I have a difficult problem to solve, I sleep on it. Magically the next morning I have the answer. There are hundreds of answers but my mind analyzes and comes up with the BEST answer. Why is this?

I have multiple brains. One exist in the daytime and the other in my sleep state. They are very different brains. My sleep brain is very fast moving at the speed of light. When there is a deep problem, it goes through an array of possibilities and then selects the best approach. When you are moving near the speed of light, it only takes a few minutes to assess millions of options. It all happens in REM and deep NREM sleep.

Many times the best solution is not the common solution. It can be an Off the Wall solution.

Case in point. I suffered a massive stroke around 3 years ago. I suffered extreme damage to the brain. I lost my ability to read. I would stare at the writing on the wall of the emergency room of the hospital. The letters broke apart into pieces right before my eyes and it was an entirely new alphabet system. One that I could not understand or read. If that wasn't bad enough, I also lost all my knowledge of words. It is really difficult to communicate when you forget your words. It produced what is known as Aphasia. And I had the worse form of it. (It is similar to the damage Bruce Willis recently experienced.)

I have made significant progress in recovering from that condition. But something happened right after the stroke. I went into an automatic sleep mode. I was awake for 12 hours per day and asleep for 12 hours per day. It was the way my brain began to cure itself. It happened automatically. It wasn't a type of drug treatment. It falls more in line with a brain cure, a self healing.

I think there are pros and cons to the approach, but overall it's well worth considering.

In my experience, my decisions tend to be better if I wait a while rather than acting on whatever occurs to me when I first encounter the need for a decision. And I've noticed that beneficial mental processing continues while I'm sleeping, so I wouldn't be surprised if decision-processing was happening then. It seems rather akin to the idea of solving a problem by dismissing it rather than attacking it full-on without resting until a solution is found, and to the idea of recalling something by dismissing it from the mind and allowing time for the required information to pop up by itself. All those things suggest that some processing happens unconsciously and without any effort, so if we can harness that, we might save ourselves quite a bit of effort.

Whenever I have a project or ambition that's in any way complicated and hard to think through, I tend to take as much time as I have available, because new information comes to light in the meantime and I notice better ways of achieving things by giving the matter plenty of time.

I think it often is an ASD trait to want to tackle problems full-on and sort them out in a single pass, perhaps because of a fear of interruption and the difficulty of resuming things later. So I guess it's hard to know which is the better option for any given dilemma. In my case I've probably often been too paranoid about the ill effects of adjourning and resuming, so these days I more favour taking a break, especially if I sense that there's more to a problem than is immediately apparent to me. It's possible to get rather tense when tackling a matter full-on, which doesn't help to make good quality decisions. Other times I feel I'm just not in the right "head space" to deal with the thing. Overall I find it hard to let go of problems, and I don't know whether it'll prove good or bad to do that in any particular case.

I guess the main thing is to try to remain aware of the choice, to experiment when it seems safe to do so, and by trial-and-error to learn to sense which method is appropriate for which type of dilemma. I think I have some kind of sense of that, but it would be hard to put into words. I don't think I've ever suffered much from dismissing a decision and resuming later, as long as I haven't gone past a hard deadline, and that doesn't happen very often at all.

Does not work for me due to unresolved and undiagnosed sleep issue (sleep is still not very restorative).
Likely wake up overwhelmed by varying internal sensations (I don't know, how do you say your blood flow and your internal organs is feeling weird and working harder? Or that everything feels heavy despite your head feels light and vice versa? Or that maybe your nerves are frayed by moving and thinking or feeling? Or if your hunger and bladder is making you tired and lazy than get up and actually wanting to eat and excrete? Or that your first and last thing you have to mind is breathing comfortably??) and it does not drive me to resolve it since there's no solution to that yet.


The closest thing I get was to un-overwhelm myself.
It doesn't matter how but it's more effective at the middle of the waking hours or near bedtime to me than anytime after waking up. Basically, walk on it than sleep on it.

Unless there's a way to fix that condition of mine, I got no choice but this.

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Whenever I do this, it's more than just one night of sleep.