The things left standing are the things you need to know.

Jad Abumrad, WNYC Radio Lab®
on Sleep. Listen to the podcast.

"The things left standing are the things you need to know." I am attributing this quote to Jad Abumrad because I recognized it as his voice while listening to radio. Friday's Radio Lab was on Sleep. One of the discussants, Dr. Gulio Tunoni of the Neuroscience Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggested that sleep is like a cleansing wave that flows over the entire brain, heightening those things that one needs to remember and diminishing those that one does not. An example of this was the process of learning a piece of music: keep at it for hours and nothing; sleep on it and you wake up Mozart (an exaggeration, but nonetheless an important comparison). I have experienced this with reading, writing and editing: sit there for hours and I am re-reading the same sentence for five minutes; sentences I write are convoluted and full of jargon for an academic-friendly appeal. So after about four hours I put it aside and sleep on it. The most important details of the many many pages I have read always, eventually, dependably remain on the surface. My writing is clear, my head is clear. All of the missteps, concerns and worries fade, are washed away and when I wake up in the morning, "the things left standing are the things you need to know."