structure of benzene, google, Frankenstein: What do these symbols of science, technology and literature have in common? They are one of many discoveries and inventions that are said to be inspired by the act of dreaming.
Sleep scientists have pondered the link between dreams and creative inspiration for decades. They have long assumed that these insights derive from the rapid eye movement phase of sleep, which is dream-rich and begins more than an hour before the sleep cycle. But new evidence is spotlighting a much earlier stage of sleep — the twilight zone that separates sleep and wakefulness — as fertile ground for creative explosions.
In a study published on May 15, scientific reportThe researchers showed that people who took short naps to encourage sleep onset scored higher on several measures of creativity than those who did the same creative tasks after waking up. “There’s a lot of speculation about the importance of this early state of sleep for creativity, but to my knowledge, this proves its worth,” said Jonathan Schooler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It’s the best research,” he said. He was not involved in research.
In addition, scientists have discovered that the dreaming process can even be controlled to some extent. They did it by directing people’s dreams to specific topics. The more people dream about the subject, the more creative they will be for tasks related to that subject. “This suggests that dreaming about a topic increases subsequent creativity about that topic,” said study team member Robert Stickgold, a dream researcher and cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. almost close to,” he says.
The experiment utilized a glove-like sleep detector called Dormio, developed by a team that included Adam Haar Horowitz, a postdoctoral fellow and co-principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dormio tracks sleep onset by contacting your wrist and hand to monitor muscle tone, skin conductance and heart rate. It communicates with an app that issues voice prompts to dreams and records dream reports.
Several well-known thinkers have taken advantage of the first transition to sleep, called non-rapid eye movement sleep stage 1 (N1), to generate creative insights. The painter Salvador Dali used to doze on purpose while he placed his keys on a metal plate when thinking of ideas for his paintings. As he nodded, the muscles in his hand relaxed. He dropped his key and it hit the plate and woke him up, but he kept having the image of the dream. Thomas Edison is said to have used a similar technique with metal spheres instead of keys to gain insight to incorporate into his inventions.
In 2021, researchers at the Paris Brain Institute reported some of the first solid evidence that Dali and Edison were aware of something. They showed people math problems with hidden shortcuts and then let them take a short nap. Among the majority of people who didn’t find an immediate shortcut, those who napped in the N1 sleep stage were more likely to find better solutions when tackling new problems that needed to be dealt with in real life. It was nearly three times higher than those who did not take a nap. Same math knowledge.
Stickgold, Haar Horowitz, and their colleagues wanted to test the concept that dreaming is a key mediator for generating insight outbursts during N1. Before the 2021 math study was published, researchers began a controlled study of dreams that persuaded people to dream about specific things, such as trees.
They recruited 50 participants for an afternoon “nap study.” The name probably appealed to people who like to nap, but the researchers actually asked only half of the participants to sleep in the study. While wearing the Dormio, the actual nappers were rendered unconscious, during which time her Dormio-linked app said “remember the trees” or “watch your thoughts”. Don’t forget to do it,” he instructed. After 1-5 minutes, the app woke them up and requested a dream report. This cycle was repeated for him for 45 minutes, generating an average of 5 dream reports per person. Those told to stay awake were forced to wander with similar instructions. (Researchers have created a simplified web-based version of this dream hatching protocol that you can try at home.)
Of those taking tree-directed naps, all but one reported dreaming of a tree or part of a tree, whereas those taking more general directed naps There was only one person. One tree dreamer described being in a desert where “a tree splits into endless splinters” and “a shaman sits with me under a tree.”
Participants then underwent three creativity tests. I wrote a creative story that included the word “tree”. They listed “every creative alternative use” they could think of for the tree. They then wrote down the first verb that came to mind for each of the 31 nouns more or less related to trees. Creativity in response was assessed by people who did not know who took a nap or who received the prompt “tree”. These ratings were combined into an overall creativity index.
Those who took a nap and received the tree cue had the highest overall creativity scores. “There is an objective and experimental connection between the hatching of a particular dream and post-sleep creativity on that subject,” says Haar-Horowitz. “This confirms centuries of anecdotal reports from people involved in creative fields.”
Additionally, the more references to trees, the higher the person’s creativity score. “The more you dream about trees, the better you perform afterwards,” says Kathleen Esfahany, an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the research collaboration with Haar Horowitz. People seemed to use dreams to get ideas for those tasks, Esfahany added. For example, a person who had a dream in which his body was made of wood, wrote a story about an “oak king” wearing a “crown of leaves” whose body was sometimes “made of wood” and sometimes “light”. It’s made of.” “
Taken together, these data suggest that dreaming during the N1 period is an active ingredient of creativity, as the researchers hypothesized. “This is pioneering work,” says dream researcher Torre Nielsen of the University of Montreal, who was not involved in the study. “Nobody has experimentally shown that we dream of anything.” [sleep onset] It actually has to do with the creativity that follows. “
Nielsen et al. say the study is small and needs to be replicated. In addition, Penny Lewis, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in Wales, who was not involved in the study, noted that the individual creativity task score (as opposed to the composite score) was associated with prompted naps. Those who took naps were not significantly higher than those who took unsolicited naps. . “We think their data convincingly shows that spending time in stage 1 sleep, the very light sleep that occurs at sleep onset, leads to improved performance in all three of these tasks.” says Lewis. But “because the statistics aren’t that strong, the idea that prompts are leading to these effects should be treated with caution.”
An objective, automated measure of creativity called “semantic distance” showed that short naps helped encourage ingenuity, but the addition of tree prompts offered no further benefit. There was no. In this measure, the computer assessed the similarity of the word pairs generated in each creativity task, with lower similarities indicating higher creativity. Still, this measure suggests a mechanism that enhances creativity during N1. “It suggests that people can relate to, and thereby discover, more distant things. [conceptual] It’s a bridge you might not find otherwise,” says Schooler.
This research included only one prompt on the tree, so it should be tested on other topics and eventually used in real problems. “This is interesting because, in principle, this is technology that people can use to nurture their own creativity,” Schooler says.
It seems that there are quite a few people who want to try it. “So many different kinds of people have knocked on our door and asked us to have a dream,” Haar Horowitz says.
