Recent scientific findings suggest that sleep onset (known as N1) may be an ideal brain state for creative ideation, a relationship that has been the subject of speculation among scientists.
When we go to bed, we fall into light sleep, which is Phase N1: it is the shortest and covers the most superficial sleep. Especially during the day, it is the most common time for a nap or short nap.
New research has established that this sleep or short nap phase is the most appropriate for creativity: at this time, the creative mind is particularly fertile.
The experiment involved 50 volunteers, mostly students and teachers, who could take a nap while their vitals were monitored through Dormio. When the N1 phase was detected, a computer repeated the message: “think about the trees.”
Once the test was over, all the participants said that they had dreamed about trees, even those that were considered routine and not at all creative.
They were then asked to imagine alternative uses for the trees and the proposed initiatives were original, surprising and abundant: some saw them as possible toothpicks for a giant or as raw material for original musical instruments.
They were also subjected to creativity metrics used in psychology, just as a computer measured the semantic distance between words related to trees.
The result of all these exercises is clarifying: those who were induced to dream about trees achieved a score 78% higher in the creativity metrics than those who remained awake observing their thoughts; 63% higher compared to those who thought awake in trees; and a higher 48% of those who took a nap without creativity incubation.
The authors of this work, whose results are published in Scientific Reports, consider that it has more applications in addition to promoting creativity: it would also serve to treat patients with recurrent nightmares.
Research indicates that people who remember their dreams more times score better on tasks that measure creativity than those who remember them less.
Study links frequency of dream recall to personality traits such as creativity and openness to experience
The works of Salvador Dalí are known in which he represents his dream universe. Francisco de Goya also collected in the engravings that make up Los Caprichos allusions to the world of dreams, the most representative being “The dream of reason produces monsters”, in which the author is observed surrounded by owls, owls or bats, while he is asleep. with his head resting on his arms on a table on which pencils and drawing paper appear. A scene that was possibly part of the author's dreams or nightmares during a daydream and that he later captured in the etching.
To try to answer the relationship between dreaming and creativity in people, a team of researchers, led by Perrine Ruby, from the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences in Lyon, has published the article “The high frequency of dream recall is associated with a greater creativity and network connectivity in default mode” in Nature and Science of Sleep. This research suggests that “the frequency of dream recall is positively correlated with personality traits such as creativity and openness to experience.”
The study differentiates between those “high recallers” (HR), who remember a lot of dreams, and “low recallers” (LR), who remember fewer of them during sleep and wakefulness. According to Luis M. Martínez, “the authors have found differences in both the connectivity and the activity upon awakening of different components of the default neural network (DNN), a set of brain regions functionally coupled to each other that would be responsible for a large part of of the activity carried out while the mind is supposed to be at rest or not involved in any specific task.
Recent scientific findings suggest that sleep onset (known as N1) may be an ideal brain state for creative ideation, a relationship that has been the subject of speculation among scientists.
When we go to bed, we fall into light sleep, which is Phase N1: it is the shortest and covers the most superficial sleep. Especially during the day, it is the most common time for a nap or short nap.
New research has established that this sleep or short nap phase is the most appropriate for creativity: at this time, the creative mind is particularly fertile.
The experiment involved 50 volunteers, mostly students and teachers, who could take a nap while their vitals were monitored through Dormio. When the N1 phase was detected, a computer repeated the message: “think about the trees.”
Once the test was over, all the participants said that they had dreamed about trees, even those that were considered routine and not at all creative.
They were then asked to imagine alternative uses for the trees and the proposed initiatives were original, surprising and abundant: some saw them as possible toothpicks for a giant or as raw material for original musical instruments.
They were also subjected to creativity metrics used in psychology, just as a computer measured the semantic distance between words related to trees.
The result of all these exercises is clarifying: those who were induced to dream about trees achieved a score 78% higher in the creativity metrics than those who remained awake observing their thoughts; 63% higher compared to those who thought awake in trees; and a higher 48% of those who took a nap without creativity incubation.
The authors of this work, whose results are published in Scientific Reports, consider that it has more applications in addition to promoting creativity: it would also serve to treat patients with recurrent nightmares.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31361-w (05/15/2023)
Research indicates that people who remember their dreams more times score better on tasks that measure creativity than those who remember them less.
Study links frequency of dream recall to personality traits such as creativity and openness to experience
The works of Salvador Dalí are known in which he represents his dream universe. Francisco de Goya also collected in the engravings that make up Los Caprichos allusions to the world of dreams, the most representative being “The dream of reason produces monsters”, in which the author is observed surrounded by owls, owls or bats, while he is asleep. with his head resting on his arms on a table on which pencils and drawing paper appear. A scene that was possibly part of the author's dreams or nightmares during a daydream and that he later captured in the etching.
To try to answer the relationship between dreaming and creativity in people, a team of researchers, led by Perrine Ruby, from the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences in Lyon, has published the article “The high frequency of dream recall is associated with a greater creativity and network connectivity in default mode” in Nature and Science of Sleep. This research suggests that “the frequency of dream recall is positively correlated with personality traits such as creativity and openness to experience.”
The study differentiates between those “high recallers” (HR), who remember a lot of dreams, and “low recallers” (LR), who remember fewer of them during sleep and wakefulness. According to Luis M. Martínez, “the authors have found differences in both the connectivity and the activity upon awakening of different components of the default neural network (DNN), a set of brain regions functionally coupled to each other that would be responsible for a large part of of the activity carried out while the mind is supposed to be at rest or not involved in any specific task.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881930/ (2023)