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When you're stuck on a tough problem, it's not uncommon to take a walk or give your brain a break, only to gain that sudden flash of inspiration or insight you were looking for.

"You have a problem to solve; you cannot really find the right solution. Then you take a nap or do something restful, and it clears up," says George Dragoi, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. "Something happens there, and suddenly the solution comes to you."

Dragoi and co-author Baburam Bhattarai, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in his lab, have now identified patterns of brain activity associated with this "offline" learning process in a recent study published in Nature Communications.

When humans try to solve a problem or learn a new skill, we do more than just encode new information in the brain. We also draw on past experiences and knowledge, connecting old neurons along new pathways to adapt them to new purposes.

Learning to drive a family car, for example, may be an intensive process over three or four weeks in young adulthood. Later in life, learning to drive a new vehicle—like a large, rented moving truck—requires a much shorter period of learning and adjustment.

"You assimilate the new stuff with the old information," Dragoi says, "and you kind of learn it again.

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