American scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School have proven that interfering with a person’s sleep at a certain stage increases their creative abilities while awake. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Scientific Reports (SciRep).
The team’s work built on previous research on a topic known as targeted sleep incubation. This method allows you to influence the content of a person’s dreams using sound and voice prompts.
During a night’s sleep, people go through various stages of sleep, including REM and NREM sleep. NREM sleep consists of three stages: N1, N2 and N3; where N1 is the lightest and N3 is the deepest.
To understand how incubation of specific dream themes during the N1 stage affects creativity while awake, researchers used a device called Dorimo, which monitors sleep onset, issues sleep management commands, and records subjects’ impressions upon waking.
49 people participated in the experiment. The word “tree” was chosen as the theme of his dreams. Volunteers were divided into teams; one of them was incubated, and the other was put into normal sleep.
Participants in the incubation group were told to “remember to think about the tree” every time they woke up, while the non-incubation group was told to simply “observe their thoughts.”
Next, all participants completed three creative tasks: an essay task in which they were asked to write a story involving the word “tree”, an “Alternative Uses” task in which they listed as many creative uses of wood as they could think of in three minutes, and participants were presented with a list of 31 names and a verb generation task in which they were each asked to quickly write down the first relevant verb that came to their mind.
The results showed that those who experienced dream incubation during N1 sleep performed significantly better than their counterparts; this highlighted the combined benefits of N1 sleep and incubation. There was also a positive relationship between the frequency of mentioning “tree” in dream reports and creativity, meaning that dreams focusing on a certain theme could improve a person’s creativity in that direction.
Researchers suggest that N1 sleep has the potential to provide creative insight.
Previously somnologists I learnedthat interruptions at certain times can increase a person’s creativity.