Waking yourself from the twilight state just before sleep may help you to solve a challenging problem, a study shows.
Thomas Edison was famously opposed to sleeping. In an 1889 interview published in Scientific American, the ever energetic inventor of the lightbulb claimed he never slept more than four hours a night. Sleep was, he thought, a waste of time.
Inspired by Edison, Delphine Oudiette of the Paris Brain Institute and her colleagues presented 103 participants with mathematical problems that had a hidden rule that allowed them to be solved much faster. The 16 people who cracked the clue right away were then excluded from the study. The rest were given a 20-minute break period and asked to relax in a reclined position while holding an object in their right hand.
As for whether Edison’s technique of gripping balls holds any weight, the new study found its efficacy unconvincing—and participants were instead given a small drinking glass to hold. Of the 63 subjects who dropped the object as they fell asleep, 26 did so after they had passed through N1 sleep. Still, the findings suggest that we do have a creative window just before falling asleep.
Yet for the most part, Oudiette is not aware of any other research specifically looking at the influence of sleep onset on creativity. She does, however, point to plenty of historical examples of this phenomenon. For University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist Jonathan Schooler, who also was not involved with the project, the study does not necessarily prove that just anyone will be able to mine their creativity during this early phase of somnolence. As he points out, “Residing in the ‘sweet zone’ might have also simply refreshed the study participants, making it easier for them to solve the problem later.
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