Is it always like that or does it have to do just with the elapsed time and a certain idea gets more clear and you understand it more objectively? E.g. could you get a 'brilliant' idea in the morning and dismiss it later in the afternoon.

Maybe its just a civilizational thing (less a coincidence), that an individual gets more free time in the evening/night to ponder and come up with original thoughts, whereas during the day he's usually preoccupied with work, chores etc.

Interesting question! I agree with Karlo and Ales. I would just add to Karlo's point that you are more likely to have idle thoughts in the evening while you aren't engaging in purposeful activities.

The best way to understand if an idea is useful is by applying it, because it has to withstand real-world constraints. During the day, your ideas are more likely applied in your daily routines and thus subject to these constraints. Nighttime musing are more likely inert and thus insulated from them.

All the best,

Brandon

In my opinion, when in REM sleep the transmission patterns for consciousness may seem more calm, like that felt during meditation. This calmness actually helps the body to cognize much better than when the body is filled with thoughts. Thoughts in the day are rapid and therefore the transmission is rapid which leads to a lot of cross talk or destructive interferences within the flow of consciousness. The phenomenon is when the interference patterns stay connected to a non local thought, which keeps coming back over and over again which eventually becomes a nightmare. This is when the destructive consciousness patterns don't seem to calm down. In a peace full meditative state like sleep brilliant ideas emerge due to the constructive patterns within the flow of consciousness.

There's a story told of how, during WWII, Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Britain, was worrying about the conflict and the survival of the country. He went to bed, slept, woke up in the middle of the night with the answer! This would solve all the problems, end the war etc. He wrote it down on a pad of paper he kept next to his bed. The next morning he awoke, got up, and happened to glance at the pad. On it was written "The whole is pervaded by a strong smell of turpentine".

I do not know if this story is true or apocryphal, but if true, it would seem to indicate that the phenomenon you refer to is not so much to do with the ideas generated being more or less brilliant due to altered cognition etc. The idea here is a spectacularly poor one, and I suspect many are like that. It's more that the significance attributed to them, the emotional euphoria accompanying them is much greater. I would suggest that sleep makes cognition (generally) worse, but emotion is less regulated.

Of course, we must distinguish this from the other well-known phenomenon, remarked on by Poincare (how do I get an accent out of this editor?), when, stepping on a bus, the solution to a problem that had been puzzling him for days suddenly occurred to him, or the similar experience of Kekule who "dreamt" the structure of Benzene. Here the key thing is intensive work on a problem, followed by a release of effort (and a doze in front of a fire in Kekule's case). It may be that sleep potentiates some aspects of creativity.

That's all I've got for you!

Ian

I tend to agree with Ian. I also suspect ,Catherine, that you have never suffered from endogenous depression. The night does very strange things to our cognition. My wife went insane with psychotic depression and her nighttime thoughts were far more irrational than during the day - despite her being fully awake most of the night. Many of us, in a milder way find that we think negative thoughts at 4.00am that seem trivial by 9.00 am after some breakfast. This of course is the negative side, but I think it reflects the loss of rationality that Ian implies and that is also relevant to 'the smell of turpentine'. I have heard that story many times in various contexts but one version relates to the first use of anaesthetic chloroform - the chemists sniffed it and fell unconscious but before doing so wrote something banal on a piece of paper thinking they had discovered something amazing.

I personally use thinking about problems as a way to get to sleep - because I find that hard, although sleep fine once asleep. I spent thirty years thinking about the mechanisms of autoimmunity until I finally got that sorted in my mind. I would sometimes have useful new thoughts right at the start of my 'sheep counting' and write them down, and they would be useful. But the main point of this nighttime thinking was to bore myself to sleep and it works quite well.

However, I have become familiar with a phenomenon that I think may be relevant to your question. As I begin to slip towards sleep, in a hypnagogic state, I find a follow lines of logic from premises to conclusions but then realise that I no longer have any idea what the premises were that were in my thoughts five seconds before. It is as if the brains logical machinery loses a wingnut and all the wheels come loose and fall on the floor. And not infrequently after picking up the pieces I find that I have worked through a syllogism in which the conclusion bears no logical relation to the premises. So I think that in certain brain states close to sleep irrational ideas may occur through this mechanism.

This might apply both to hypnagogia, going to sleep, and hynapompia, waking up, and the depression experience suggests that it may well do, except that the hypnapompic thoughts are strongly skewed to negative and worry. I also get lucid dream images in hypnapompia that do not occur on going to sleep. So I suspect there are complex changes in the two states, with some overlap but big differences. In the lucid dream images faces will appear to me with the detail of high quality photographs, which I can peruse. They are people I have never met or seen pictures of - idealised composites. It seems that in this case the way the brain distinguishes reality from dream or remembered image has lost its wingnut. It can be great fun and is not associated with irrationality of logic.

I do not know the literature on this in detail but I think there is quite a bit Robert van Gulick was interested in these states if I remember rightly.

as with being "in the Zone" [peak performance in sports or doing surgery or exams] the sub/un-conscious mind works best when the Conscious mind/ego- identity is asleep or highly focused. As Agatha Christie has Hercule Perot say, "i am letting the little gray cells work for me." The brilliance of Left to Right Brain, REM connection of hemispheres can disappear when Left Brain consciousness/ego struggle comes back online. I agree with a few of the others and as a Clinical Psychologist and fan of Peak Performance I've seen how identifying with just your conscious mind and central nervous system muscle control gets in the way of subconscious wisdom and performance.

I presuppose Brandon’s explanation has to do with outer causes. Here are inner one I can propose owing to my work posted recently -- about a Reason getting ability to create theoretical psychology as a new discipline.

Well, there are the shortage of panoramic thinking (SPT) and the Cognitive Tolerant Inclusion (CTI) paired by our evolutionary prehistory. REM sleep is preferable to generate unusual, original ideas, but such the case is once more rarer and unusual when these appear intelligent. What you can remember about “asleep” discoveries? I can only: Pasteur, Mendeleyev and Kekule. So why such night insights beget hardly some thoughts?

CTI may be subjective (essential) and appraisal. Appraisal CTIs when you are sleeping may be only involuntary (it is the very old evolution mechanism doing instantly, without reflecting. At that SPT is “with us” ever, and subjective CTIs may be because of this of very occasional character. As for approval CTIs these in sleeping state (without nightmares, of course) may only be self-pleased. After awaking, you are use already more thin approval CTIs, and these give more weighted approval. Thus, only when “case favors to the prepared” by long preceding reflection as in the cases of those 3 scientists the case may be happy.