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Sleep consolidation/ "sleeping on it" is when you struggle w/ [learning a piano piece], sleep on it, and then you're suddenly much better at it the next day!
This has happened to me for piano, dance, math concepts, video games, & rock climbing, but it varies in effectiveness. Why? Is it:
My current guess is a mix of all four. But I'm unsure if you [practice piano] in the morning, you'll need to remind yourself about the experience before you fall asleep, also implying that you can only really consolidate 1 thing a day.
The decision relevance for me is I tend to procrastinate heavy maths paper, but it might be more efficient to spend 20 min for 3 days actually trying to understand it, sleep on it, then spend 1 hour in 1 day. This would be neat because it's easier for me to convince myself to really struggle w/ a hard topic for [20] minutes, knowing I'm getting an equivalent [40] minutes if I sleep on it.
If I'm playing anagrams or Scrabble after going to a church, and I get the letters "ODG" I'm going to be predisposed towards a different answer than if I've been playing with a German Shepard. I suspect sleep has very little to do with it, and simply coming at something with a fresh load of biases on a different day with different cues and environmental factors may be a larger part of it.
Although Marvin Minsky made a good point about the myth of introspection: we are only aware of a think sliver of our active mental processes at any given moment, when you ... (read more)