Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how to hack your sleep to help solve your problems,

why the holes and violins are shaped the way they are,

and why static shock is worse in the winter.

Let's set us some curiosity.

Have you ever gone to sleep with a problem and woken up knowing this illusion?

There's a reason for the phrase, just sleep on it. It seems to work.

Creatives and even scientists have sworn by this method and there are credible stories

about overnight inventions.

And now there's some good science to back it up, along with the methodology you could even try

yourself at home.

For a new study published in psychological science, Northwestern University psychology researchers gave puzzles to

57 people, and they paired each one with a different sound.

The sound would loop for two minutes while the participant tried to solve each puzzle, and the puzzles just kept on coming

until they failed to solve six of them. Then they were quizzed on which sound matched with which

puzzle, and then they were given a sleep monitoring device and sent home.

That night the sleep monitoring device analyzed their sleep stages.

When they drifted into slow wave sleep, the device played the sounds paired with some of the puzzles they couldn't solve.

The goal was to activate their memories of those puzzles during their sleep.

And get this, when the participants got back to the lab first thing in the morning,

...