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Photo: pixabay researchers have discovered the secret to the success of Thomas Edison (Thomas Edison) and El Salvador Dali (Salvador Dal í), which is to stimulate creativity through dreams.

Write article | Ingrid Wickelgren

Translation | Grace

Revision | Huang Yujia

The structure of benzene, Google search and the science fiction Frankenstein: what do these representatives in science, technology and literature have in common? Many discoveries and inventions are inspired by dreams, and they are said to be part of them.

For decades, sleep scientists have been thinking about the link between dreaming and creative inspiration. They have long believed that these insights come from the REM phase of sleep. This phase begins an hour or more after entering the sleep cycle, accompanied by a wealth of dreams. But a new study finds that people focus on the earlier stage of sleep, which is between wakefulness and sleep, suggesting that this is the critical period for creative outbursts.

In a study published in Scientific Reports on May 15, a team of researchers found that people who took a nap scored higher on several measures of creativity than those who stayed awake while taking on the same creative tasks. Jonathan Schooler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said: "people have been speculating that this early sleep state is important for creativity, but as far as I know, this is the best study to prove its value." Sculler was not involved in the study.

More importantly, scientists have found that they can even have some control over the process of dreaming. For example, they can lead people's dreams to a particular theme, and the more people dream about it, the more creative they will be in the tasks associated with it. "We can almost say that dreaming about a topic can increase your creativity later on," said Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School and a member of the research team.

The experiment used a glove sleep detector called Dormio. Adam Hal Horowitz (Adam Haar Horowitz) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the co-lead researchers of the detector development team. Dormio can monitor muscle tension, skin conductivity and heart rate based on wrist and hand contacts to track sleep. In addition, it communicates with an app that sends voice cues for dreams and records dream reports.

Sleep tracking device-Dormio (photo: MIT) more than one famous thinker has used the first transitional phase of sleep, known as non-REM sleep phase 1 (N1), to gain innovative ideas. When the famous painter Salvador Dali conceived a painting, he dozed off on purpose and put a set of keys on a metal plate. When he dozes off, the muscles in his hand relax, the key falls off, hits the metal plate, wakes him up, and then he grabs the dream picture. It is said that Edison used a similar method, but he used metal balls instead of keys to inspire inventions.

In 2021, a research team at the Institute of brain Studies in Paris reported some preliminary and conclusive evidence that Dali and Edison's methods were effective. They asked testers to take a nap after reading math problems, all of which had hidden shortcuts. Among the vast majority of people who didn't come up with shortcuts in the first place, those who napped during N1 sleep were nearly three times more likely to find a better solution when dealing with new problems that needed to be solved with the same mathematical knowledge than those who didn't sleep.

Stickgold, Horowitz and colleagues want to prove that dreaming is the key to mediating an explosion of creativity in stage N1. Before the math study in 2021, the team had already begun a controlled trial of dreaming, guiding subjects to dream about certain things, such as a tree.

They recruited 50 people for the afternoon "nap study", presumably to attract those who like to take naps, although in fact only half of the participants were instructed to sleep during the study. When subjects wearing Dormio gradually fell asleep, apps connected to Dormio told them to "remember to think of a tree" or "remember to watch your thoughts." One to five minutes later, the app wakes them up and asks them to provide a dream report. The cycle was repeated for 45 minutes, with an average of five dream reports per person. Those who are told to stay awake can only let their thoughts wander when they receive similar instructions.

All but one of the nappers who received the "tree" cue reported dreaming about the tree or part of the tree, while only one of the more general nappers dreamt about the tree. One dreamer who was prompted by the trees described that "the trees have split into countless pieces" and that in the desert, "a shaman and I sat under a tree."

Source: pixabay participants then took three creativity tests: they wrote a creative story that included the word "tree", listed "all innovative alternatives" they could think of about the tree, and wrote the first verb they could think of for 31 nouns more or less related to the tree. The people who rated the creativity of these responses did not know who had taken a nap or who had received a "tree" cue, and the scores were then combined into a comprehensive creativity index.

In the end, people who took a nap and got a "tree" prompt got the highest overall creativity score. Horowitz says there is an objective and experimental link between the incubation of certain dreams and post-sleep creativity around the subject, confirming centuries of anecdotal reports about people in the creative field.

In addition, the more trees appear in a person's dream report, the higher his creativity score. "the more you dream about trees, the better your subsequent performance," said Catherine Esfahani, an MIT undergraduate who co-led the study with Horowitz. She added that people seem to be inspired by these tasks in their dreams. For example, a man who dreamt that his body was made of wood wrote a story about the Oak King. He wore a "crown of leaves", sometimes made of wood and sometimes made of light.

These data suggest that, as the researchers hypothesized, dreaming during N1 is a positive factor in creativity. Torres Nielsen (Tore Nielsen), a dream researcher at the University of Montreal in Canada, who was not involved in the study, said: "this is a groundbreaking study because there are no previous experiments to prove that what you dream while sleeping is actually associated with later creativity."

Nielsen and others say the study is small and needs to be repeated. In addition, Penny Lewis, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in Wales, who was also not involved in the study, said that afternoon nappers who were prompted did not score significantly higher in terms of personal creativity (relative to overall scores) than those who were not prompted.

"I think their data really convincingly show that as long as you spend some time on N1 sleep, which is very light sleep when you fall asleep, you can perform better on all three tasks," Lewis said. but the idea that taking cues leads to better results needs to be treated with caution, because the experimental data are not convincing enough. "

Photo Source: pixabay's objective, automated creativity test called "semantic distance" shows that a short nap helps stimulate creativity, but adding a "tree" cue doesn't help. In this test, the computer assessed the similarity of pairs of words generated in each creative task, and less similarity was associated with higher creativity. However, the test still suggests the mechanism by which sleep increases creativity in stage N1. "it shows that people can build further associations to find 'conceptual' bridges that they may not find," Sculler said. "

This study includes only a single hint involving trees, so other topics will need to be tested in the future and eventually used to solve practical problems. "it's exciting because, in principle, it's a technology that people can use to develop their own creativity," Sculler said. " There seems to be no shortage of subjects in the study. "there are a lot of different people knocking on the door of the lab and asking to participate in dream research," Horowitz said. "

Reference link:

Https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-how-to-use-dreams-for-creative-inspiration/

Https://news.mit.edu/2020/targeted-dream-incubation-dormio-mit-media-lab-0721

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue)

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