Sleep Can Bring Life Changing Ideas

From solving problems to flashes of inspiration, scientists are beginning to unravel the creative powerhouse that is the mind at night.

By Kate Wighton / The Times UK

History is peppered with tales of phenomenal ideas taking shape in sleeping minds; Paul McCartney said that he awoke with the tune of Yesterday in his head, and Robert Louis Stevenson said that the idea for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydecame to him in a dream.

But what exactly is going on in our minds while we sleep? Does slumber really prompt creative genius? And can the most uncreative of people receive flashes of inspiration once their head hits the pillow?

Scientists believe that the mind at night weaves together bits of information in innovative ways. Throughout the day your brain rarely gets a chance to stop and think. In a state of constant alertness, it responds to a stream of challenges, from writing a report for a work deadline to remembering where you left your car keys and figuring out what to buy for dinner.

Even when we are relaxing in front of the television, the brain is still beavering away, processing the information about the plot lines, or co-ordinating your arm movements every time you sip your wine. Believe or not, even watching Strictly Come Dancing requires brain power.

Sleep is the only time when your brain gets to relax and mull over the thoughts of the day. This is when new ideas and ways of thinking start to emerge.

“Think of your brain like a web,” says Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University.

“During the day the web is very tight, so you can only put information in a certain number of places. During sleep the web expands, and with the luxury of time, those bits of information can be put into lots of different places and make new associations.”

He adds that this process may help to foster the formation of new ideas. Experts, however, are divided on whether this occurs when you dream, or during deeper, non-dreaming sleep. This bringing together of seemingly unrelated bits of information is crucial to helping the brain think itself out of problems, says Matthew Walker, a sleep researcher at University of California, Berkeley.

“Sleep seems to stimulate your mind to make non-obvious connections. It puts all the information from the day into a big biological theatre and forces the mind to speak to people at the back of the theatre, who you may not think you have any connection with. This is the basis of creativity - connecting ideas, events and memories that wouldn't normally fit together.”

In fact, this creative process has been visualised by scientists. By placing volunteers into brain scanners and sending them to sleep, scientists have seen that the areas associated with emotion go into overdrive, especially while dreaming, while the areas that are responsible for logic are switched off. This not only explains why dreams are incredibly random - you can be talking to a colleague one minute and the next minute sitting in a your old school classroom dressed in your pyjamas - but this rewiring also explains how the brain can pull together disparate information. As to how much sleep we need, experts believe this varies from person to person. But a sure sign of sleep deprivation is feeling sleepy during the day, aside from the mid-afternoon slump.

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131 Actionable Ideas from Ten Books I Wish I Had Read Ages Ago

The author highly recommends you to read these books and form your own takes. But if you only have 45–90 seconds time blocks, here is a list of times to go through the actionable ideas from each book.


1. Find Your Element by Ken Robinson (60 seconds read)
2. Start With Why by Simon Sinek (45 seconds read)
3. Purple Cow by Seth Godin (30 seconds read)
4. Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (30 seconds read)
5. Getting Things Done by David Allen (45 seconds read)
6. The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (60 seconds read)
7. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (90 seconds read)
8. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (60 seconds read)
9. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (45 seconds read)
10. Zero to One by Peter Thiel (60 seconds read)

Purple Cow
by Seth Godin

• Take risks at being remarkable, and don’t worry about criticism.
• Target the people who are both willing to try new things and very vocal at spreading the word to others.
• Invent the product with marketing.
• Target and measure your marketing effectively.
• Don’t emulate the leader, because you’ll never learn the process of turning risks into success.
• The traditional form of advertising is no longer effective because in today’s overwhelmingly advertised world capturing the consumer’s attention is almost impossible.
• In today’s crowded marketplace, there is no room for “ordinary.”
• Being ridiculed can be a good thing, as it spreads word about you and your product.

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104 Actionable Ideas From Eight Books to Build An Epic Mindset

The author of this post highly recommends you to read these books and form your own takes. But if you only have 45–90 seconds time blocks, here is a list of times to go through the actionable ideas from each book.

1. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (75 seconds read)
2. The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown (90 seconds read)
3. Quiet by Susan Cain (45 seconds read)
4. Mindset by Carol Dweck (60 seconds read)
5. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg (75 seconds read)
6. The Defining Decade by Meg Jay (90 seconds read)
7. The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal (90 seconds read)
8. The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane (45 seconds read)

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Big ideas from small towns

In this feature, published in The Hindu dt. 19th Jul 2015 under the column "Sunday Anchor", the writer profiles 10 tech ventures from small cities and towns across the country.

On Sundays, Rohith Bhat takes his daughter for a ride on a red Hero scooter through the temple town of Udupi. On other days, he is busy running a company that makes some of the best-selling Apple iOS apps from a traditional town known for its Krishna temple and a distinctive vegetarian cuisine.

“You don’t need to be in Bengaluru or Delhi to develop world-class products,” said Mr. Bhat, 43, the founder of Robosoft Technologies, the company behind popular apps such as Camera Plus. The app, used to enhance phone camera functions, has until now been downloaded 27 million times. “We could be in Udupi, and the rest of the world can discover and consume our products,” said Mr. Bhat, who hired local talent in the town to build the app’s technology.

Nearly 1,900 kilometres north of Udupi, in Jaipur, Nishant Patni’s start-up CultureAlley has till date helped 30 lakh users, mostly Indians, learn English through their mother tongue. Vadodara, the third largest city in neighbouring Gujarat, is home to Indusface, a small company in the business of protecting large customers such as Bharat Petroleum and the National Stock Exchange of India from cyberattacks and hacking.

Even as many new-generation start-ups sprout up in India’s metros, especially Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad, the likes of Robosoft, CultureAlley and Indusface, among the hundreds of start-ups that exist today in the small towns and cities, are showing how ideas can be incubated and developed anywhere. These companies not only build products and services for a global audience, but their employees experience a far better quality of life compared to their metro counterparts. This is because cost of living is low, retention of talent is high, and there are hardly any traffic bottlenecks. “They are making their home in small towns because there is less competition for talent and it is much cheaper to operate,” says Sasha Mirchandani, managing director at Kae Capital, a venture capital firm that has backed CultureAlley. “Also, many people just want to work from their hometowns.”

At a later stage, though, when these companies grow and mature, they might find the small city environment challenging. That’s when they need access to more senior managers and also talent in large numbers. “They will have to move to metros like Bengaluru when they have to scale up their business and hire talent in large numbers,” said Rajan Anandan, Google India managing director and a top angel investor.

Thiruvananthapuram: Senzit -- crime detection

Bhopal: Appointy -- business of scheduling appointments

Hubbali: LabInApp -- interactive virtual laboratory tool

Tiruchirappalli: Dextrasys -- patent filing, prosecution and litigation

Udupi: Robosoft -- mobile applications and games

Coimbatore: Ampere -- electric vehicle manufacture

Jaipur: CultureAlley -- learn conversational English

Kochi: Sayabot Systems -- building robots for many purposes

Belagavi: SenseGiz -- create products that talk to each other

Vadodara: Indusface -- protect organisations from hackers

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28 Idea Killers

Every one of us knows reasons why creativity and innovation are stopped in our organizations. It happens everyday, everywhere in the world. And every time a good idea is stopped, it’s one too many. That’s why Gijs van Wulfen, the author of the book presents in chapter five of his new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’, which you can download

Seven Little-known Ways to Sell Your Ideas

If an idea is good, it will be bought, right? Wrong. The world is not as Kant desired it and humans are not perfectly rational.

The reality of decision-making is that it isn’t based solely on the facts. Sure, decision-makers will ask for all the data they can get their hands on, will weigh the pros and cons, and they will look at the trade-offs, but when it comes down to call-time, other non-rational reasons come into play. And that makes persuading people more an art than a science.

No other member of the business class is possibly more aware of this than the CIO. That’s thanks to the nature of IT and IT projects. IT projects bring significant—and often frequent—changes to large swathes of the enterprise, making change management among the most important skills for IT leaders.

Also, in many organizations, especially those in which IT is seen as an enabler, the CIO needs to dip into the budgets of other departments to build a CRM, for example—but has to convince business owners to spend their money in a way that IT wants. And even in companies where IT departments do have sizable budgets of their own, it needs to be spent—and justified to the top brass—on projects that are hard to sell like security, consolidation, or IT staff training.

CIOs also have possibly the most number of audiences to convince, compared to their peer group—often with the least authority. “There are at least five categories of people that IT leaders have to convince,” says Anuragi Raman, associate director, BPEX deployment leader and head-IT at Motilal Oswal Securities.

They could, for instance, be a business peer who proposes a less-than-visionary way of getting business intelligence, but whose budget a CIO needs to spend. (It might be their money and their project, but it’s your IT architecture.) Or a chief executive who doesn’t want to release funds to fight off a security threat he doesn’t think is serious. Or it could be the hundreds of staffers who refuse to use a new ERP; a vendor who won’t budge; a business partner, like a dealer, who won’t align his systems to yours.

To coax the crowd, CIOs have picked up tricks you won’t find in business manuals. Sometimes their advice can seem completely counter-intuitive. Take this for example: To sell your ideas you need to avoid a decision and the decision-maker. Or you mustn’t be passionate about your ideas. Or how it’s okay to be politically incorrect, because if you want to watch your ideas spin into shape, like a jar on a potter’s wheel, you need to get your hands in the clay.

Here are seven little-known win-over ideas you won’t find in management books, lessons that aren’t celebrated in public forums, but rather exchanged in hushed whispers from one CIO to another.

Don’t Present
Skip the Decision Maker
Fear Isn’t the Key. Envy Is
Remember, Politics is Part of the Game
Tame Your Passion
Don’t Seek a Decision
Don’t Give Everyone the Same Story

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Google’s Zeitgeist Events

Google’s Zeitgeist events are a series of intimate gatherings of top global thinkers and leaders. ZeitgeistMinds is a collection of inspiring videos from these events.

Dive in to explore the ideas that affect our social, economic, political and cultural surroundings. Hear perspectives from industry pioneers and statespeople, renowned writers and bloggers, scientists and artists, activists and musicians. Learn from progressive minds, and discuss topics that influence the world around us.

Listen. Join in. Be part of the Zeitgeist.

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10 crazy IT security tricks that actually work

IT security threats are constantly evolving. It's time for IT security pros to get ingenious.

This blog post offers 10 security ideas that have been -- and in many cases still are -- shunned as too offbeat to work but that function quite effectively in helping secure the company's IT assets. The companies employing these methods don't care about arguing or placating the naysayers. They see the results and know these methods work, and they work well.

1: Renaming admins
2: Getting rid of admins
3: Honeypots
4: Using nondefault ports
5: Installing to custom directories
6: Tarpits
7: Network traffic flow analysis
8: Screensavers
9: Disabling Internet browsing on servers
10: Security-minded development

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