While you slumber, your brain puts the world in order

Bob Stickgold from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that people were better able to recall lists of related words after a night's sleep than after the same time spent awake during the day. They also found it easier to recollect themes that the words had in common - forgetting around 25 per cent more themes after a waking rest. "We're not just stabilising memories during sleep," says Stickgold. "We're extracting the meaning."
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1.1. In the beginning God created the conciousness and the void.
1.2. Now the consciousness was unformed and faceless, and no idea ever rippled its surface. And the spirit of God hovered over the void.
1.3. And God said: 'Let there be thought.' And there was thought.
1.4. And God saw the thought, that it was good; and God divided the thought from the nothingness.

The origins of American psychology are found in the historical resolution of two conflicting nineteenth-century interests: a concern with character and morality, on one hand, and an equally strong belief in pragmatism, technology, and a materialist explanation of behavior implied by the Darwiniian thesis. These two ideas were incompatible at the end of the 19th century. How could anyone defend and idealistic description of humans as loyal, altruistic, cooperative and spiritual and simultaneously accept the extreme individualism and pursuit of self-interest society demanded and biology rationalized?

An Argument for Mind, by Jerome Kagan, Yale Univ. Press, 2006. p.8

It usually takes about fifty years for a fruitful idea to penetrate a scientific discipline. The magnetic moment of hydrogen was discovered in 1941; half a century later hundreds of scientists were using fMRI scanners, which rely on this fact, to measure the brain.
ibid. p. 9.

A fundamental principle governing the brain is that neurons respond to change. Changes in illumination or motion automatically activate circuits and provoke attention to the site of change, for that is where information is likely to reside. A reward, therefore, does not have to be something the animal needs, such as food, water, a mate, or relief from pain. Essintially, many events called "rewards" are punctiation marks that, like a white streak in a blue sky, interrupt the stream of experience and, through activation of many brain structures, facilitate the establishment of assosiations. ibid. 21