Sleep and creativity have long been associated. Paul McCartney composed "Yesterday" in a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the idea for Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a dream. Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("Kubla Khan") were both inspired to write their masterpieces in a dream. Friedrich August Kekulé solved the problem of the structure of benzene in a dream. Otto Loewi dreamed a way to confirm his theory of cell communication by means of neurotransmitters.
But how are sleep and creativity linked?
We cycle through phases of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep during the night.
Up to now, there has been a debate about the role the two phases of sleep play in creativity.
A new paper argues that both phases of sleep play crucial roles in creativity in different, but complementary, ways. It is the alternation of REM and non-REM sleep that sets the stage for creative thought.
Creativity depends on the reorganization of existing knowledge in new configurations. We can solve problems when we find unexpected links between known information.
Penny Lewis, a professor at the Cardiff University School of Psychology, explains: "Suppose I give you a creativity puzzle where you have all the information you need to solve it, but you can't, because you're stuck. You could think of that as you've got all the memories that you need already, but you need to restructure them--make links between memories that you weren't linking, integrate things that you weren't integrating."
During sleep, memories are captured and replayed during non-REM sleep. These reruns of events consolidate and strengthen newly formed memories, integrating them into existing knowledge.
The new model proposes that non-REM sleep helps us organize this information into useful categories.
During REM sleep, on the other hand, the researchers believe that the brain replays stored memories in any combination, regardless of whether they are similar. It is thus during this phase of sleep that we can see beyond those categories to discover unexpected connections.
As an illustration, professor Lewis refers to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the structure of an atom. Rutherford connected two seemingly unconnected things: an atom and the solar system. In the model that Lewis and her co-authors created, had Rutherford solved this problem in his sleep, his knowledge of atoms and solar systems would have been categorized into different schemas during non-REM sleep. Then, during REM sleep, his memories of atoms could have been replayed along with the randomly activated memory of the solar system. The accidental association would have triggered his insight into the structure of an atom.
Sleep does not always solve problems, but it creates a space that creativity experts call incubation: a period during which a problem is set aside for a few hours, a nap, or a good night's rest. It is known that such a period of incubation brings you back to the problem in a fresh state of mind, and sometimes you do have the solution. However, incubation is only fruitful when you have spent a good deal of time and energy on a problem, really worked on a solution.
What can we take away from this? Keep a notepad and pen nearby when you go to sleep. And if you have any pressing problems that you have tried to solve unsuccessfully, go through the information you have about it just before sleep. This gives the unconscious mind the best chance to solve the problem.
Sources
Cell Press. (2018, May 15). How REM and non-REM sleep may work together to help us solve problems. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 2, 2018, from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180515113629.htm
Lewis, P.A, Knoblich, G, & Poe, G. (2018). How memory replay in sleep boosts creative problem-solving. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(6), DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.03.009
Sleep and creativity (n.d.). Retrieved 11 September 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_creativity