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THOMAS EDISON is said to have held a steel ball in each hand as he prepared for a nap. When he nodded off, they would drop, waking him and allowing him to capture the ideas he had in the moment just before sleep – a period he believed to be one of the most creative. But are there really certain times when our brains perform better? And, more broadly, do we excel at different sorts of thinking at different stages in our lives? If so, it is worth asking how we can make the most of these mental peaks and push our brains’ abilities to the max.
While Edison’s method may have been unorthodox, it turns out he was onto something, as Delphine Oudinette at the Paris Brain Institute and her colleagues discovered in 2021. They gave 103 slightly sleep-deprived people a seemingly complex maths problem that could be solved with a simple creative insight. Participants who had been woken just after falling asleep were almost three times as likely to make the creative leap and solve the problem than those who remained awake throughout the experiment.
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This knowledge may help if you are looking for inspiration. But if it is memory you are trying to optimise, then deep sleep is when your brain does its heavy lifting – laying down new long-term memories from your day’s experiences. To make the most of this, you need enough sleep, which for adults varies between 7 and 9 hours each night. If you are among the many people who fall short, getting more sleep is a simple way to boost memory and learning. It will also improve attention, decision-making and mood – and even reduce your risk of cognitive decline over the long term.
Assuming you got enough sleep the night before, what happens to your brain power over the course of the day? In general, cognitive performance declines the longer you are awake, with a molecule called adenosine building up and generating “sleep pressure”. As a result, your performance tends to follow a predictable path: it is highest in the morning, peaking at around noon, then it starts dipping and, aside from a slight peak in the afternoon, it is downhill all the way to bedtime. This pattern is somewhat shifted by our individual “chronotypes”. Natural “larks”, who tend to wake early, follow it most closely; “owls”, who go to sleep late and wake later, reach their cognitive peak later in the day.
Along with this daily rhythm, there are peaks and troughs over the course of a lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, the brain’s performance doesn’t simply decline from early adulthood onwards. A series of experiments in tens of thousands of people found that while problem-solving ability is highest in our 20s, other important mental skills mature later. For example, working memory peaks at around 30 and emotion perception is highest from your 40s to 60s, while comprehension and information-processing abilities reach a zenith at around 50 and remain high for decades thereafter.
Whatever the time of day or period of life, there is still a way to get more from your brain: flow. Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first described it as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”. In other words, this is pure focus. One recent study suggests that the brain network activity linked with the flow state is organised in an energetically efficient way. “This might explain why flow feels effortless,” says Richard Huskey at the University of California, Davis.
Flow is more likely to occur if you are undertaking a task with clear goals, immediate feedback and a balance between challenge and your skill level. Although people’s tendency to experience it seems to be partially heritable, there may be ways to cultivate it. One of these is mindfulness – paying attention to your thoughts and bodily sensations. Given the other potential benefits of mindfulness, it may be worth a try.
This article is part of a special series on the brain, in which we explore:
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