Sleep: The Catalyst for Creativity

The twilight time between fully awake and sound asleep may be packed with creative potential.

People who recently drifted off into a light sleep later had problem-solving power. The results help demystify the fleeting early moments of sleep and may even point out ways to boost creativity. Prolific inventor and catnapper Thomas Edison was rumored to chase those twilight moments. He was said to fall asleep in a chair holding two steel ball bearings over metal pans. As he drifted off, the balls would fall. The ensuing clatter would wake him, and he could rescue his inventive ideas before they were lost to the depths of sleep. Scientists took inspiration from Edison’s method of cultivating creativity. Scientists brought 103 healthy people to their lab to solve a tricky number problem.

The volunteers were asked to convert a string of numbers into a shorter sequence, following two simple rules. What the volunteers weren’t told was that there was an easy trick: The second number in the sequence would always be the correct final number, too. Once discovered, this cheat code dramatically cut the solving time. After doing 60 of these trials on a computer, the volunteers earned a 20-minute break in a quiet, dark room. Reclined and holding an equivalent of Edison’s “alarm clock” (a light drinking bottle in one dangling hand), participants were asked to close their eyes and rest or sleep if they desired. All the while, electrodes monitored their brain waves.

About half of the participants stayed awake. Twenty-four fell asleep and stayed in the shallow, fleeting stage of sleep called N1. Fourteen people progressed to a deeper stage of sleep called N2. After their rest, participants returned to their number problem. The researchers saw a stark difference between the groups: People who had fallen into a shallow, early sleep were 2.7 times as likely to spot the hidden trick as people who didn’t fall asleep, and 5.8 times as likely to spot it as people who had reached the deeper N2 stage. Such drastic differences in these types of experiments are rare. Scientists were quite astonished by the extent of the results. The researchers also identified a “creative cocktail of brain waves,” that seemed to accompany this twilight stage — a mixture of alpha brain waves that usually mark relaxation mingled with the delta waves of deeper sleep.

CITATIONS

C. Lacaux et al. Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot. Science Advances. Vol. 7, December 8, 2021. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj5866.