![]() The goal was to isolate N1 brain wave patterns without contaminating them from other, deeper sleep stages, said the team. Once jolted awake by the sound, they’d record their twilight dream ideas. Using a technique from Edison, the volunteers held onto an object-a ball or a glass container-that would fall when they entered deeper sleep. A portion of the remaining participants were then asked to briefly shut their eyes and relax for 20 minutes, during which their brain waves, muscle activity, and eye twitches were monitored so the scientists could reliably detect their sleep stage. People who gained early insight into the hidden shortcut were eliminated from subsequent analysis. To drill into the given two-rule solution, the participants first solved 10 problems using the instructions. While not artistic creativity, the task taps into a mind’s ability to break away from given instructions to find a novel route towards an answer-the essence of creativity. Identifying the pattern would jump-start a participant’s ability to solve the puzzle in record time. It’s quite simple: the eighth digit is always the second digit in any sequence. But unbeknownst to the volunteers, the team hid a shortcut to obtain the solution much faster. They presented participants with a string of eight numbers and provided two rules that could help them guess the next number as quickly as possible. In this study, the team started with a task and a lie. ![]() But, they continued, “We believe that N1 presents an ideal cocktail for creativity.” One-Minute Insight “Contrary to other sleep stages, the first stage of non-REM sleep has received little attention, and its cognitive role is largely unknown,” the authors wrote. This stage, dubbed “hypnagogic,” is what intrigued Oudiette. What stick around are experiences in semi-lucidity, a liminal haze where wakefulness blurs into sleep. Yet as anyone who’s ever kept a dream diary (myself included) knows, it’s terribly difficult to remember dreams from deep sleep. Sleep’s secret superpower has even galvanized AI to retain its learning, nudging deep learning to absorb and retain or discard information more like the human brain. Previous studies suggest that during periods of deep sleep, the unconscious brain can learn new words from a made-up vocabulary, or improve on motor tasks, say, playing music. Sleep may also globally dampen the brain’s synapses in an effort to maintain its plasticity-that is, its ability to learn-an idea dubbed SHY (synaptic homeostatic hypothesis), and clear out metabolic waste to protect against Alzheimer’s.īut to dream hackers, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of sleep is our potential ability to learn as the brain is resting. One theory suggests that our neural networks sort through previous learnings and physically strengthen connections-or weaken them-to etch important memories into neural circuits. It’s also a cycle, hopping between different sleep states roughly every 90 minutes.ĭespite our perception of sleep, the brain is hardly “shut down” during these cycles. Sleep is a multi-step process, gradually descending down the staircase towards unconsciousness. Adam Haar Horowitz at the MIT Media Lab, who was not involved in the work. “This study gives us simultaneous insight into consciousness and creativity,” said Dr. However, history’s greats, including Albert Einstein, Salvador Dalí, and Thomas Edison, have all purportedly employed a method to tap into that creative “sweet spot,” said Oudiette. Delphine Oudiette at Sorbonne Université in Paris, is one of the first to scientifically examine a specific period of sleep-when you’ve just dozed off-that can be tracked by a peculiar brain wave pattern called N1. In other words, there’s a brief window of creativity, right in the “twilight zone” of sleep as a mind gradually fades into total lack of consciousness. The trick only worked before drifting off into deeper stages of sleep. ![]() When over 100 volunteers were given the chance to nap, if just for a few minutes, their ability to creatively solve a taxing mathematical problem improved. That’s the advice we’ve all heard when challenged with a seemingly impossible dilemma.Ī new study suggests it’s not just folklore.
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