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Unpacking Your Mind 27

honor to talk of late nights and excessive hours working, as if they
merited congratulation rather than sympathetic disapproval!
It is not simply the number of hours’ sleep that matters.
During the day, your mind is constantly taking in new experiences.
Our brain needs deep sleep, sometimes called REM sleep (rapid eye
movement), when we are also often dreaming. It is at these times
that your brain is processing the experiences of the day.
Studies in animals have shown that the neurotransmitter
acetylcholine is being produced in REM sleep, a chemical essential
for healthy neural networks and therefore for memory.
Consequently, deep sleep has been shown to aid the process of
forming memories. When your brain is asleep, its speed slows right
down for most of the time, producing what are called theta and
delta waves. Recently it has been suggested that, during REM sleep,
your brain also transmits at an extremely fast rate, about 40 cycles
per second, and these have been called gamma waves.
It is no accident that you say you will “sleep on it.” A num-
ber of researchers have noticed that if you review something before
you go to sleep and again when you wake up, you tend to remem-
ber more of it. I know this works for me. When I have a particu-
larly complex presentation to make, I find this technique helps me
to master my subject much more effectively.
Jayne-Anne Gadhia consciously uses the power of sleep:

I go to bed worrying about something and when I wake up I have an
answer. I now deliberately pop a question into my mind before I go to sleep
and ask myself the answer in the morning as I take my shower!

In fact, when we are asleep, we go through a number of cycles, each
taking about one and a half hours, each moving from a lighter sleep
into a deeper sleep and back again. Going through a number of
these complete cycles is critical for our mental health.
Darkness is important for encouraging the pineal gland to
produce the neurotransmitter melatonin, an essential chemical for
ensuring that our body clock functions effectively. A dramatic
example of how our brains are affected by upset time rhythms is
experienced whenever we fly across major time zones. (It turns out