The mechanism behind the phenomenon of 'a solution comes to mind after a night's sleep' has been partially elucidated; the brain compresses and organizes the events of the day into less than one second while sleeping

Many people have had the experience of being stuck in a situation where they couldn't find a solution for their studies or work and then coming up with a solution after a night's sleep. The phenomenon of coming up with an idea after a night's sleep is said to be related to the brain's memory sorting function during sleep, but a new research team from Yale University has elucidated part of the mechanism behind this function.

Nested compressed co-representations of multiple sequential experiences during sleep | Nature Neuroscience
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01703-6

Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experiences — even when 'offline' | YaleNews
https://news.yale.edu/2024/08/14/sleep-it-how-brain-processes-many-experiences-even-when-offline

How Does the Sleeping Brain Supports a Day's Worth of Memories? | Technology Networks
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/articles/how-does-the-sleeping-brain-supports-a-days-worth-of-memories-389786

Previous research has revealed that the brain performs a process of 're-depicting experiences and integrating them into memories' during sleep. However, previous studies have only analyzed the mechanism of consolidating 'a small number of experiences' into memories, and the mechanism of parallel processing of a large number of experiences has not been fully understood.

So a research team led by Yale University's George Dragoi recorded the activity of rat hippocampal neurons for 19.5 hours to analyze the memory consolidation mechanism in mice.

The analysis revealed that the brain compresses the experiences of the day into episodes of playback lasting less than one second and processes them. Furthermore, it was revealed that the parallelization of two or more different experiences enables efficient parallel processing. Dragoi explains that experience compression during sleep is like 'extracting parts of multiple experiences throughout the day and playing them back in succession at ultra-high speed, just like when you're dreaming.'

In addition, the study found that the first and last experiences in a series were most strongly represented in the brain during sleep, which may be related to the phenomenon observed in humans where people tend to remember only the first and last parts of a series of events.

Dragoi shared a link to read the full paper in the following post:

Most knowledge of sequence p/replay comes from single experiences. Now we reveal principles of generative coding enabling HPC to parallelize & bind time-compressed representations of 15 discontinuous experiences in single events in sleep @NatureNeuro : https://t.co/QnR5Tq3sc8 1/6 pic.twitter.com/IP7LxvVmU2

— George Dragoi (@GeorgeDragoi2) July 19, 2024

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