Sleep and Creativity

So In ninety six, the German American pharmacologist and physician Otto Loewis and the English pharmacologist Henry Dale together won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for their discoveries about how signals travel between nerve cells and then from nerve cells two organs in the body. Back then, this wasn't specifically known, like how does the nervous system transmit information back and forth? People thought, you know, maybe maybe

it's electrical. We discovered electricity at the time. What exactly is going on there? And specifically, what they found is that chemicals were involved often sending these impulses back and forth in the nervous system. And in one famous experiment, Otto Lowy and some colleagues first slowed down the beating of a frog's heart by stimulating the vagus nerve connected

to it. Now, that's the thing that they knew already at the time they could do, if you stimulate the vegas nerve, you can make the heartbeat decrease in rate. Then they took fluid from the slowed down heart and perfused a second frog's heart with that fluid from the slow beating first heart. Now the second frog heart also slowed down, even though no nerves had been stimulated, and this provided evidence that some chemical property of the fluid from the first heart had effects on the nerve cells

in the second heart. Essentially that chemicals controlled nervous tissue behavior, and the chemical that slowed down the heartbeat was originally called vegas stuff that's a good German name for it um, but now we know it to be a setal cullen. And then in a related experiment, Lois showed that you could speed up a frog heart with fluid from another

heart whose accelerated nerve had been stimulated. So Louie had hypothesized for many years that chemical transmission might have been the basis of the nervous system, but had been unable to prove it, and then these experiments eventually proved pretty decisive in demonstrating the chemical nature of nerve cell communication that there's some chemical property being traded back and forth. So where did Lowie get the idea for this breakthrough experiment.

There is a very strange story about that. According to Lowie in his own words, quote the night before Easter Sunday of nineteen twenty, I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o'clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something important, but I was unable to decipher the scrull. The next night, at

three o'clock, the idea returned. He was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had undered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up, immediately went to the laboratory and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design. So we're talking about dream inspiration here. We're talking about the idea that the breakthrough, that dramatic twist in the researcher story uh comes from the world of dreams.

Right now, all we have to go on here is Louie's own words, right, I mean, who knows whether the dream is as he says it was a direct imagistic inspiration for the experiment that would later prove pretty decisive in showing the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. But that's what he says, and he is not alone in telling a story like this about a breakthrough experiment, discovery, invention, artistic innovation. This is a very common type of story

among people who are often characterized as geniuses. Right, Yeah, you see this all the time, and certainly just the idea of dream inspiration or something more supernatural, something more magical communication through a dream, such as from the divine.

These tales go back throughout our our various religions and mythologies. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I've always thought is kind of interesting about the idea of dream inspiration is that it is taken to be an inherently supernatural thing in these ancient stories, Right, Like the gods visit you in a dream and they give you some kind of insight or they give you the solution to a problem, and it's just accepted that that is a supernatural deliverance that

could not have been accessed by the person themselves. But what do our brains do? I mean, our brains think our brains figure things out. It does not actually seem all that strange to me. You're in need of a supernatural explanation that the brain could be figuring things out and gaining insights during sleep. No, not at all. And we'll get into the some of the science behind this as we proceed, but I think a couple of things

are crucial here. So we talked about the the idea of the distinction between religious dreams of inspiration in these scientific dreams. But ultimately, the realm of sleep is a realm of mystery, and in olden days, uh, for the most part, dreams were a realm of religious mystery. To a scientific individual, then the dreams are still a dream, is still a realm of mystery, but it is a

realm of cognitive mystery, of scientific mystery and verifiable discovery. Right. Yeah, And so in either realm, though, it seems natural that that answers might arise from them, and when they do, they can fulfill a vital storytelling role because nobody wants to hear this exchange. Oh that's a tremendous breakthrough. Dr Brundle, How did you, uh, how did you come across that breakthrough? You don't want the answer to beate, Well, I worked really hard and I thought about it a lot, and

uh eventually work through the problem. No, you want to hear something like well, I was. I was working really hard on the problem and I couldn't quite crack it. And then I had a dream or some variation at or then I bumped my head while standing on the toilet to hang a clock. That would be the case of doctor the fictional Dr Emmett Brown and back to the future, right, And that was when I saw it,

the flux capacitor. Yeah. I think another variation on this is, oh, I didn't know how to work out this detail, so I went on a walk in nature. Or I alight took an hallucinogenic drug into bet. You know, these are the different answers that sort of answers you often see thrown out there when creative minds, either artistic or scientific, are trying to crack something. You want there to be

this dramatic turning point. Yeah, and and if we broaden it beyond dreams, just to the idea of sudden unexpected realizations in the pursuit of say scientific knowledge or experiment design, or breakthroughs in math or anything like that. There are even more examples of this, and we're going to talk about plenty of examples where people think that a dream or a period of sleep gave of them the answer

to something or gave them a breakthrough. But I remember hearing the story that apparently Einstein, you know, he said he had to be careful shaving because suddenly ideas would just leap into his mind while he was shaving. He'd be careful not to cut himself. I don't know if that story is true, but it is a story. It

sounds great, Yeah, it does. And if your experience is anything like mine, I've never discovered anything on the scale of Einstein, but I feel like I that rings true of the characteristics of my thoughts sometimes, like I often don't know from where what feel like my best insights arise. You don't necessarily come from sitting down and concentrating real hard on a problem until you arrive at the solution. You're doing something else and then suddenly it just hits you,

as if out of the void. Yeah, an an Eureka moment does often feel like something from outside yourself, and therefore I think it lends itself to these type of stories. Like for my own part, my dreams don't really give me a lot of inspiration these days. They're generally more about anxieties and petty fears. There's just just petty stuff, like petty day planning type type situations. But some of my best creative thinking, either, of course, comes during the

act of writing. We know that that that that free flow mode of creative activity, or when I'm swimming laps, like when I when my perhaps when my my brain is is forced to operate in a slightly different way. That's when I can suddenly start making connections that I am not making the rest of my waking time. I often feel like the most creative I am any time, ever, is the time between when I wake up and when I get out of bed. That's for me, that's my most disoriented time. I don't know where I am or

what I was working on. All I know is that the cat is making a lot of noise, and I'm afraid that a banshee has manifested in the house. So I guess we should talk about some more examples of these anecdotes. At least where people claim to have made major breakthroughs or discoveries or solved problems in dreams or

during periods of sleep. There's this great quote from John Steinbeck where he writes in his nineteen four novel Suite Thursday Quote, it is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning, after the Committee of Sleep has worked on it. Yes. And actually one of the authors and researchers we're going to talk about in this episode today Deadre Barrett, who is a

psychologist who works on dreams and sleep creativity. She took that phrase the Committee of Sleep and made it into a title of a book she wrote about dreams and creativity. Now, we've talked about dreams and stuff to blow your mind quite a bit over the years. Again, it's this realm of mystery. We can't help but study and discuss it, how we interpret them, how we might manipulate them, and what they're actually for. And there is no consensus on

the purpose of dreams. I thought that we might just play a clip from a previous interview that we conducted with Dr Moran surf Uh We talked to us in our episode the nine dream Worlds of Frederick van eden uh and I. And this is his response to to my question, is there a consensus on the purpose of dreams? There isn't. There are like five different theories that try to explain what dreams are full, and they range from therefore nothing to they're the most important things that our

brain can do. So here's like the kind of layout of those. One of the theo is says that dreams are basically our brain's way of defragmenting the hard lives you kind of overnight. You have to choose which wem always to erase, which ones to keep, and your brains sort them out. And because you see the visuals, if you want of those mem always passing by, you create a narrative of that, and this is what you call a dream. This is a theory that says that they

don't really mean much. It's just that they're kind of an artifact of our brain doing things. That's on the one explain or the other explain that. The theory that our brain is essentially looking and fishing inside at things that we suppressed during the day. This is the free game theory. It said, we're kind of very stuff deep

inside that you want to not deal with it. And then at night, because our god or down no, because our brain speaks without anyone suppressing things, we get exposed to things that kind of come up from from our psyche. A third one that's really popular right now that I'm supporting in many ways is one way the brain is using the dream to simulate futures for us and kind of leave to them in the ultimate visuality, so we would actually know when we wake up if we should

do do not. So the idea is that you're debating whether to marry her and move to Alabama or break up and decide to start a campaign in San Francisco, and you really don't know what to do, so overnight your brain plays both movies of you moving to Alabama with her and you started the company in San Francisco. And because it's such a cool virtuality with the brains, we doesn't know that it's not really going to the experience.

You filter all of this movie through your values and emotions, and when you wake up, even though the memory itself is lost and you have no collection of the dream, what survives is the feeling towards those choices. So when you wake up, you kind of have a better answer to what you should do. So those are three CEO is there's two more along the same lines, but they cannot fall into those packets. They mean nothing, but they're

just our brains way of working. They mean a lot, because there are brains way of reflecting things that we are self suppressed, and they are are brains way of stimulating futures that we didn't experience yet in an ultimate virtuality device. That's so amazing that we are fooled by it ourselves, thinking that we are the character in this movie, and then waking up and knowing what to do now. Some have speculated that dreams are tied to the brains

crunching of waking world problems. So the idea of solving problems and our dreams that just seems to fit, right, But it also fits are these much older ideas of dreams as prophet your communication with the divine, And you can see the danger there. The idea of inspiration and dreams is just so romantically captivating. Uh, Even as if one is above outright lying about dream inspiration to improve their storytelling, it's still rather easy to manipulate our memories

of dreams. Oh yeah, I bet you've had this experience where you start trying to explain a dream you just had and suddenly you can't tell if what you're saying about your memory of the dream is really what you dreamed or if you're just making it up. Now it feels very blurry the line between the two. So, yeah, maybe you didn't see the answer in a dream. Maybe the dream just contain fragments of the problem, but it

makes for a better story. Though then again, if it contained fragments of the problem that leads you to the answer, is that fundamentally all that different from seeing the answer in the dream. That's true. That's true. And if you go with any of these interpretations where dreams are important, where they are, uh, there, there's there's something more than just uh, you steam being released from the from the cognitive engine. Uh, then it makes sense that that they

would play a role. Now, we mentioned that there were a bunch of anecdotes throughout history of people claiming that dreams gave them some kind of creative breakthrough and solving a problem or in in doing doing something creative and original. Uh, let's talk about a few of them. Okay, Yeah, let's let's We're not gonna run through all of them, but we'll run through a few notable ones here, and all of them, all of them, all dreams that have ever occurred,

will be cataloged for you to know. No, these are just a few, uh that pop up from time to time and or and in many cases are often cited. So starting with some artists, Salvador Dolly, he attributed the persistence of memory to dream inspiration. It's not hard to imagine. Yeah, there's a there's a dreamlike quality, an overt dreamlike quality

to his work. Also, I think Dolly was a liar, so who knows what he if what he says about the inspiration of anything is true, that's true his stories about the creation of his work or often you can see them as just extensions of the fantastic painting. Paul McCartney claims the melody for Yesterday came to him in a dream. Sure. Stephen King, of course, I had this life threatening accident in n and he experienced vivid dreams in recovery, and he claims that a lot of dream

Catcher came from those dreams. Okay, is that I've never read that book. I think I've tried to watch the movie. Is the book more interesting than the movie? I haven't neither seen nor read it because there was kind of a negative buzz about both of them. I've always been fascinated with the idea sound. I need to read it or see it. I need to commit to one or the other because I love the concept. I remember extended sequences of people defecating alien life forms. See there you go.

That sounds great. Um. Also, you have some some athletic creative types in the on the mix here, golfer Jack Nicholas claim names that he improved his golf golf game based on a dream in which he saw a new way to grasp his club. Okay, yeah, who knows if that's true, but all right. William Blake would attribute to some of his ideas to dream visitations of his dead brother. We of course, also have to look to Coleridge's opium

induced dreams. Oh yeah, the poem Kubla Khan, right was supposedly inspired by a dream or even did he even say it was composed in the dream? He may have it, I remember. Some of this also factors into confessions of an English opium eater as well. Um. Also, you have Robert Louis Stevenson who claims to have dreamt two scenes from Dr Jacqueline mr. Hyde. But these are all artists and creative types, right. Well, maybe Putting, who knows of Jack Nicholas, counts there, but he he is an artist

of the green. It's harder to see, it's harder to see what's all that unusual about dreams inspiring artists and musicians and stuff, because in a way, there's no wrong answer in art, right, So what's really interesting is when you get like an experiment, design, or something in science that is either valid or not, or how or actually

has a right answer or not. Yeah, so we're gonna get into some of the scientific examples that this first one, though, kind of I guess, straddles the realm here between the purely artistic and the purely scientific. Because you had scholar Hermann Hilprecht who lived eighteen fifty nine through nine, and he reported that he dreamed an Assyrian priest came to him and revealed the accurate translation of the stone of Nebuchadnezzar,

which that just sounds amazing. Well, I know she wasn't Assyrian, but I want to hear the dream where in Headuana comes and poses some wrathful poetry about Anana. Yeah. What it makes for a nice footnote too, when you have visitations like this. Uh. And that's something to keep in

mind as we roll through a number of these. You have individuals making scientific break breakthroughs, and they don't necessary like a lot of our accounts of the dream inspiration are not coming directly from that individual, or they're coming years after the fact. It varies from case to case, because I guess ultimately it's not the kind of thing you would necessarily put into your scientific paper and say and then I had a dream and this was the result. Well.

A classic example of the scientific inspiration from a dream, apart from Otto Loewi, was also Dimitri mendal aev right, yes, who of course live at eighteen thirty four through nine seven, the Russian chemist who gave us the periodic table. The story goes that he saw a complete periodic table in

a dream. Um. And maybe I've just been thinking too much about Ghostbusters, but I want to imagine what it would have been like if mental had had been forced to choose the form of gozer, which they're taken on the form of the periodic table, what's the atomic number of Gozer? Now, as G. W. Baylor points out, there are some problems with this story, so we have no

dream journal to go off here. We just have a colleague secondhand account, And it seems like he'd already crafted the periodic table before the alleged dream took place, and merely saw an improved version of it in his dreams, a version of the story that sounds maybe a lot more sensible, but and and maybe more in line with

some of these other stories. Either way, you can still call that dream inspiration, you know, if you're if the thing you're trying to create either appears to you wholesale in the dream based on your work and experience, or

some updated version, some twist on it appears in your dream. Now, since we're in the realm of chemistry, we should go to maybe the single most often cited example of dream inspiration in science, which is August ka Yes lived eight uh and he dreamt of whirling snakes and allegedly discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule by seeing an aora boris in his dream. Or a boris, of course,

is the serpent consuming its own tail. One thing to keep in mind, that is this account didn't emerge until twenty eight years later, So that's more than enough time obviously for memory to have been altered or the story to have been maybe a little embellished dramaticized, but it's it's still one of the examples that you see cited time after time for dream inspiration in science. Well, anything we can get smaller than a benzine molecule. Oh, we can move on to the work of Neil's Bore, who've

talked about recently. Through nineteen so he claimed to have developed his model of the atom based on a dream he had in which he sat on the Sun and the planets moved around him on tiny chords. Now that's cosmic terror. Up next on our list of considerations. Here there's J. B. Parkinson, who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen ninety one. He got invented computer controlled anti aircraft guns, and this is an excerpt from his New York Times

oh bit. Mr Parkinson, who was a member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories in New York in nineteen forty, had a dream that had that a device he designed to guide a marking stylist could be used to control anti aircraft guns. He developed a prototype, and the Western Electric Company began mass producing it. His achievements won him

a presidential award and a Franklin Institute Medal. Okay, well, whether or not you like the fact that it was a weapon, even weapons take creativity to produce, true, and and it was a defensive weapon, we can say that anti aircraft gun for the most part. Okay. Up next, we have a sewing machine inventor and handsome werewolf Elias. How I recommend everyone look up a picture of of old Elias here because he was something else that, Like, I've never seen somebody's sport one of those kind of

a neck beard so glamorously. It's the beard without the mustache. But it looks it's very fluffy and luxurious. It looks like he's been brushing it a lot. Yeah, it's there's this seam seamless flow from his his thick head of hair into this beard. Uh. I just get a very handsome werewolf off of him. They should have cast him in that Wolfman remake. Yeah. Well, he allegedly dreamt he was building a sewing machine for a savage king in

a strange country. I love that. So there's not a lot to back this up, but the story appeared in a later family history. Here's a quote. He thought the king gave him twenty four hours in which to complete the machine and make it so if not finished in that time, death was to be the punishment. How it worked and worked and puzzled, and finally gave it up. Then he thought he was taken out to be executed. He noticed that the warriors carried spears that were pierced

near the head. Instantly came the solution of the difficulty, and while the inventor was was begging for time, he awoke. It was four o'clock in the morning. He jumped out of bed, ran to his workshop, and by nine a needle with an eye at the point had been rudely modeled. After that, it was easy. That is the true story of an important incident in the invention of the sewing machine. That's interesting. I mean, again, who knows if it's true,

but doing it is true. If you just play with that for a second, Okay, say that story is true. It's interesting the way in which these revelations seem to be arriving, you know, not necessarily through literal ideas, right, like seeing a snake eating its tail or seeing the spear with the hole at the tip of the spear. They're not through literal understandings of say a dream about trying to design a sewing machine and coming up with the idea of a needle with a hole at its tip.

But there's some kind of like image association thing their visual type dreams where you see an association between unrelated things. Yeah, there's almost a sense of you know, someone like, oh, spending his his day trying to crack this problem with the left brain, and then at night is kind of this, uh hey, right brain, what have you got anything? Anything like just tumbling around? You want to throw at it,

maybe not to do well. I wonder to what degree the hemispheric division does play into that, But I think some version of that will come through and some of the research we're gonna talk about later, right. I I don't want to imply that people are dolphins and have uni hemospheric sleep, but though that would be an entirely different scenario to try to imagine how that would play

into problem solving. Okay, and finally we're gonna mention Albert Einstein one last time because he in addition to his uh his crazy sparks of razor flinging um eureka moments, he once said that his entire career was it was an extended meditation on a slaying dream he had as

a child, leading him to contemplate the speed of light. Now, that's slaying with an e I g H. Not like a dragon slay, not not running around with the razor blade, but no like moving quickly through the snow in uh in a in a vehicle of sorts that that you can see how that would lead to, say, contemplations about what would happen if you were trying to catch up

with a beam of light. Yeah. Now, again, we've tried to display enough skepticism about these anecdotal accounts because, as we've said, a lot of times, they're they're self reported or the are reported much later. I mean, who knows if into what extent they're exactly correct in saying where these ideas came from. But I do feel like there's an emerging theme that there does appear to be some link between creativity and sleep or dreams, at least there appears to be. Uh. The one thing I want to

stress here is that creativity? The kind of creativity we're gonna be talking about today's creativity. I think as psychologists would tend to use the word which means something like one's ability to use adaptive problem solving, and not necessarily like how artistic or how unique you are other things we would usually think of when we use the word creative. In the psychological sense, creative means something like the ability

to think in novel ways to achieve a goal. And this of course includes artistic creativity, but it's not limited to it, right, It can very well include uh, hey, what have I held the golf club like this instead of like that? Yeah? Yeah, it's novel thinking, so uh It basically, to use a cliche, I mean thinking outside the box to solve a problem. Whether that problem is how should we picture the structure of an atom? Or how can I figure out why my lawnmower won't start?

Or how should I tie up all the narrative threads in my novel? In each case it's requiring novel thinking. It's creativity. But okay, anecdotes, of course, as we all know, can be cheap. Is there, like any evidence from controlled research that shows a relationship between sleep, dreams, and creativity or are these just sort of cute, cherry picked stories. I think we should address that after we come back

from a break. Thank alright, we're back. So, yeah, we've talked about these examples and how they might tie into creativity. But what happens when we start looking to uh, to actual control research for answers. That's a great question. So to be clear, researches tended to show that sleep has

several roles in improving and maintaining areas of brain functions. Specifically, I think there's a lot of research on sleep in memory, Like studies have Indica hated that R E M sleep may play a role in memory consolidation, improving the memory of things learned throughout the day, and even things like emotional associations with those memories. But actually, yes, there is

also controlled research on sleep and creativity. Actually, there's too much of it to cover here, so we're just going to have to discuss a few interesting highlights that came to our attention. In general, it seems that it has yielded some very interesting but sometimes contradictory findings. So to begin a smattering of recent studies, One was by CEO Monahan and Ormad called sleep on it, but only if

it is difficult. Effects of sleep on problem solving in memory and cognition in So this took twenty seven male and thirty four female students from Lancaster University, all native English speakers. Uh These were the subjects and they were given a set of thirty problems from what's known as the Remote Associates Test or the RAT test. Though I guess it's only the RAT test in the way that the A T M machine is a machine. The rat We'll just say the RAT is a common battery used

to test people's creative potential using word association. Have you ever done a test like this, Robert, I haven't, But I have to say that sentence that you just said about the rat, that that feels like the most cut up machine statement I've heard heard in recent In recent times, it's the opening of a william Us Burrows and the rat is a common battery used to test creative potential. So here's how the rat works. I'm gonna give you three words, and you tell me a fourth word that

is related to all three of the original words. In my experience, these are funny because they can seem really difficult for a moment until you see the answer, either by figuring it out or by or by just cheating and looking at it, at which point then it immediately feels embarrassingly obvious and you don't know why you couldn't figure it out for a minute. So a couple of examples. Robert, what's the fourth word associated with these three room, blood salts?

I'm gonna go with slug slug, room, slug blood. It's just what came to mind. That's how this works, right, So supposed to be whatever pops into my head? Or am I trying to determine a path? No, you're trying to solve it. Okay, well that's different. Um let's say room, blood salts, room blood salts, room, blood salts, I don't know. I'm still going with slugs, show I don't know, bath bath bath, bathroom blood bath, bath salts. Okay, yeah, so they all relate to that word. Okay, now I see

how that how this is working. Okay, So, yeah, you had your training session. Are you ready to be subjected to more? Yes, let's go. Okay, these three words, what's the fourth word? See home stomach, see home stomach? I mean slug would work with all of these again, uh if I were pressed. Uh, but let's see sick. Oh exactly, there you go see sick, homesick, sick to your stomach. Okay, I got a third third one for you. Car swimming q Oh, that's pool, right, exactly, car pool swimming, pool

pool que Okay. Alright. So that's how this test works, and it's a pretty good concise way of trying to test for creative potential thinking, right, because you're you're trying to get people to think laterally, right, there's no direct way to solve this. You have to kind of think

by sideways association. And so anyway, the participants were given questions of this sort, and then after they were initially given the questions they were there was a delay, and the delay either included sleep or included no sleep, or there was no delay, and participants then tried again to solve rat problems that they couldn't solve on their first attempt, and the group that had slept in between attempts solved a greater number of problems rated quote difficult than other groups,

but there was no difference between groups for the problems that were rated easy, So it looks like sleep did play some role in aiding creative problem solving, especially on harder than average problems that required this kind of sideways associative thinking. And I think that matches up with with our experience, you know. I think we've all been in a situation where we've been studying for something, or studying up on something, and we reached kind of a breaking point.

We go to bed, we hopefully get a full night's sleep, and then the next day everything is a little clear, everything's a little more assembled, as if the pieces did some sort of partial assembly on their own in the night. Yeah, totally. And there's another study I want to mention that is kind of similar in nature. So this one is called

sleep promotes analogical transfer and problem solving. This was from Cognition, has a couple of the same authors from the previous study and then some different authors, and they wanted to study of sleep actually had any effect on quote analogical problem solving, and this means using a known solution from one problem to solve a different but related problem, So basically, to solve a similar type of problem. So what would be an example of analogical problem solving. Well, I've got

one here, I'm gonna start to do two questions. Here's the first question. This is the sample question. How can a gardener plant four trees so that the trees are

equi distant from one another? If you want to pause it and try to figure that out for a second, be my guest, but you'll you'll immediately run into problems if you're trying to map it out on a piece of paper, right, Because if you put them, say, in a square in a square pattern, the ones at the corners are going to be farther away from each other than they are from the ones that are one side away from them, right, So how can you put four trees equidistant from from one another? The answer is you

put one of them on a hill. So, if you're trying to picture this, three of the trees are in an equilateral triangle at the bottom of the hill, and then the fourth tree is at the middle of a hill in between them, at such a height that it's the same distance from all of the trees below, all three of the trees below, So you've essentially made a triangular pyramid of trees, right, yes, okay, or some sort of you know, an ancient pagan temple. I like that. That's good. Yeah, the one tree at the top of

the hill. It conjures to mind like the sacred priest keeper of the tree, or who you have to slay in order to become the new the new priest. That's slay with an a y, not Einstein sligh. But so once you've seen the solution to that problem, you're given another problem. Here's the analogical problem. Can you assemble six matches to form four equilateral triangles, each side of which

is equal to the length of one match? Again, if you want to try to pause and solve this for yourself, be our guests r under your nearest restaurant, UH that has a complimentary matches UH, start assembling them on the table. You're gonna want to order a drink just or some appetizer just so that you can have a seat to do this and then report back. So, given that we've just primed you with the past example, it might not

take you very long because the solution is very similar. Right, think not in two day, but in three d exactly. So the answer follows a similar logical leap. If you keep lying the matches flat on the table, you're just never going to be able to make four equilateral triangles with a side length of one match. The answer is to build into three dimensions. Like you say, M make a tetrahedron, you make a triangular pyramid, and then you've

solved this the Sprain teaser. So in the first experiment of the study, participants were shown a set of source problems to demonstrate general styles of solutions like the trees and the hill example we gave. Then there was a twelve hour period which involved either sleeping or not sleeping. Then participants tried to solve problems related to the source problems they had been exposed to, but with different features,

sort of like the second example with the matches. Then a second experiment controlled for time of day effects on results by testing in both the morning and the evening, and the authors found when controlling for other variables like drowsiness and time of day, sleep did still appear to somewhat improve analogical transfer. Participants who slept were better at applying types of outside the box reasoning that they had seen used before two new problems, And again, I feel

like this lines up with our experiences. Yeah, though in in the wild sort of when you've had this experience of sleeping on a problem and then coming to a solution, you might wonder, like, which variables are at play? Right? You might just think, think, okay, I got some rest. Maybe getting some rest is the thing that did it. That's true. If you really wanted to, you could just cut dreams out of it entirely and go with one of those dream interpretations that relegates dreams to just mere

steam from the machine ep epiphenomenal dreams. Yeah, um, but no, that the what we're trying to look for here is a test showing that dreams specifically or not necessarily dreams specifically, but sleep specifically, is doing something to help you solve the problem. And it's not just that, say, some time has passed in between and you've gotten some rest. You know, one thing we haven't mentioned in all of this is

the the idea of book absorption. You know, the idea that certain this is completely nonsense, but you see it come occasionally, the idea of someone could lay their head upon a book and sleep and in doing so absorb the data from the book. I did not know that anybody thought that would actually happen. Do people think that actually happens. I think there may be like one account of someone claiming to have had that ability, but uh, it's it's not like they passed the Randy test with

it or anything. Uh. The only way I could see that making a difference is if you've already read the book and then maybe by sleeping with your head on it, you would continually notice that you're uncomfortable as you're trying to go to sleep, and this would continually bring your mind back to the contents of the book. Yeah, yeah,

that that would make sense. Or you're so wrapped up in the idea of dream absorption of the book that you dream of the book maybe and you know you're not drawing new information out of a book you have not read, but perhaps your brain kind of puts things together like it reminds me of the situation I've I've mentioned this on the podcast before, and I imagine lots

of you have experienced this. You're falling asleep and you're reading, and you begin to read words and sentences and even the whole pages that are not there, and then you realize, oh, I just need to go to sleep because I'm I'm experiencing hallucination. I'm dream reading. Yeah, now there's a bunch

more research on this type of subject. For example, I was just looking at one study in PS one in which uh students who were trying to solve a puzzle video game level did better after they'd had a nap as opposed to just waiting for an equivalent amount of time and not sleeping. Uh So, but that was a small study. Another interesting one is the cognitive neuroscientist Aaron Wamsley, who has apparently performed research training people on solving a

virtual maze. So there's you get trained on a virtual maze, and then there's a rest period involving no sleep, non rem sleep, or full rim sleep, and only the participants who underwent rim sleep showed improved performance on the maze. Now, if you know anything about sleep, you know that Wait a minute, Okay, the rim sleep is where the dreams happen.

So this should bring us back to the question of Okay, we're showing like the sleep does appear to help people in solving problems one way or another, But do the dreams play any role? Is that what matters? You know? In the video games are an interesting example because I think of my own use of video games. Video games are not something I play first thing in the morning,

when I'm fresh. These are things that I play, um towards the end of the day or perhaps even late at night, when my brain is spent for the evening. So if I'm if I gain advantage over a puzzle within a video game the next day, it seems more likely that it is due to something that's happening in my dreams rather than just being fresh, because again, I'm probably mentally exhausted if I'm playing a video game. That's true and also strikes me as a good use of

your time. I mean, you don't want to be squandering your best creative energy on video games. I don't. I mean not to say that some some of some of those games are great and you don't kind of want to be fresh for, but that's just not how I

currently live my life. No, I mean, my my opinion on video games is they are a great recreational relaxation activity, not something that that I think of in terms of achievement in right, unless you're being paid to participate in a study and then you can, you know, do whatever. But okay, we got to bring it back to dreams. Okay, So so do the dreams specifically play a role in creative problem solving? Now, I think we should look at

the work of a psychologist named Deirdre Barrett. We mentioned her earlier in the episode, but she's a psychologist who at various points you've been on faculty at Suffolk University at Harvard Medical School. I believe she runs a private clinical practice in Cambridge and a lot of her work has been on study of dreams. So let's talk a little bit about Barrett's ideas. So Barrett has a ted talk from where she kind of summarizes some of her

thinking about dreams and dream research. So she mentions three big questions. First, why is there any content to our nighttime sleep? Second, why is that content so different from our waking thinking? Why is it bizarre? You know, why is dream like even a thing? And then finally, do dreams have a function and if so, what? And Barrett seems to believe that dreams are basically just thinking in

a different biochemical state. Quote the demands of our bodies during sleep and makes certain areas of our brains less active. So you can imagine that certain areas of the brain are getting different kinds of energy or oxygen or blood flow. But we keep thinking about the same kinds of concerns that preoccupy us when we're awake, and in this altered biochemical state, the sleeping brain approaches these concerns using very different systems and modes than we would use while are awake.

So despite how bizarre these modes of thinking can feel in the moment in the dream, it is very odd. Barrett thinks these different perspectives provided by the dreaming mind can be helpful to problem solving. So under this model, by dreaming about the problems that concern us while we're awake, it's almost like we're having two different people working in tandem on solving the problem. Right, and what are these two people like? What are the different strengths they bring.

So human sleep occurs in ninety minutes cycles, each one containing a period of what's known as rapid eye movement sleep or rims sleep, which we've mentioned, and each of

these RIM periods contains dreaming. We don't tend to remember all of our dream cycles in the morning, but if you wake people up after each RIM period, they'll be able to describe five dreams in a night, and pet scans show that parts of the brain associated with visual imagery, movement, and emotion are active, often even more active than when we're awake. Meanwhile, frontal areas associated with abstract thinking, planning, and especially like UH, limitations on behavior and self censorship,

these areas of the brain are suppressed. So you've got two different people working on the problem. The waking brain can work on it in a more controlled, focused, abstract, and planned way, while the dreaming brain can sort of play with the problem in an experimental, unfocused, visual, uncensored, associative way. And one of the ways this is often

expressed is how do you solve problem? Hard problems? You often have to solve them by approaching them in a way that seems wrong at first, right, But the prefrontal part of the brain that's suppressed during rim sleep is the part of the brain that tells you no, no, no, don't think like that, that's wrong, Like the part of your your brain it says, well, if they're fighting over this baby, I'll just cut it in half, which is a well, no, the prefrontal part would tell you that's

not an option, so you'd have to suppress that part of the brain. King Solomon, there is using dream logic. Yeah, but and it ends up solving the problem spoiler for the Old Testament. But the two mothers stopped fighting over the child because the one who who cares the most about the child says, wait, don't cut the kid in half. It's sort of a social brain teaser. R. How do you get these people fighting over who who's the real

mother of the baby to reveal their identities? And yeah, So so that that's a way of outside the box thinking that you might say is could be helped by rem sleep and dreaming. So you've got this one team member this very organized and logical, and the other team member is weird and creative and visual, and they sort of hand the problem off back and forth. That's an interesting possibility. So it looked at paper by Barrett, The

Committee of Sleep, a Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving. Now, she would later go on to write a book called The Committee of Sleep, but yeah, this was an earlier piece of research that she did. Right. So she points out that most accounts of solving problems or producing crea of products during sleep are of realm like dreams or

hypnogogic imagery. Again, that's the nether world between wakefulness and sleep. Now, I wanted to mention that she brings up she sort of reviews briefly some existing literature at the time of the research on on the connection between dreams and problem solving. So just to mention a few of the papers that

go into the background of her research here. One is Cartwright in nineteen seventy four, who gave subjects three types of problems, crossword puzzles, word association tests maybe kind of like the rat UH, and story completion, and subjects either got a sleep period with at least one rim cycle or an equal amount of waking time. And in this study there was no difference found between sleepers and non sleepers in terms of problems solved correctly in the crossword

puzzles or the word association tests. So that's that's a kind of different result, right, We're getting some contradiction there no difference there. Also, sleepers apparently wrote story completions with more negative ending. I don't know what that's about. Nobody tried to figure out whether the story completions were were

better in one group than another. A big one in the field is Dement in nineteen seventy four, which took five hundred undergraduate students and they got three brain teasers, and they were asked to read the brain teasers before going to bed. Then they were asked to record whether solutions to the brain teasers appeared in dreams. And this is from Barrett's summary quote of one thousand, one forty eight attempts at solving problems. Eight seven dreams address the

problem without finding a solution. Seven students reported dreams which solved the problem, and a few others had dreams which seemed to hint at a solution, without the waking subject catching the hint. That's interesting, how would that work? Well, she gives an example. It would be in the problem quote H I J K L M n oh. What one word does this sequence represent? The subject reported I had several dreams, all of which had water somewhere, and

described the water in each stream. However, his guess at the solution to the problem was alphabet rather than water, which is H two oh sotion to the brain teaser. It's the alphabet H two oh. And I was also thinking the next letter is P. And if you think about water too much, you will be in the bed. In the bed. It all makes sense I don't know if there's any science behind. Uh. Now, of course that could be easily be a coincidence, but you do have

to wonder. That's kind of interesting. Um but yeah, anyway, So so that's some of the background leading into the research that she performed in this study. Yeah, particularly, she connected an experiment she got to seventy six college students together that it consisted of forty seven women, twenty nine men, everybody ages nineteen through twenty four, so the modal age was twenty one. They were asked to incubate dreams addressing problems as a homework assignment in a class on dreams.

So they were instructed to select a problem of personal relevance with a recognizable solution, so no wicked problems, you know, like something something that can be tackled. Come up with a solution to the nuclear standoff. So they were asked to write out their problem in a simple fashion, and immediately prior to the first night of dream incubation, they had to attend a lecture summarizing the literature on problem

solving in dreams. So they're getting, you know, a nice and primed on a number of the concepts that we've talked about already. They did this nightly for one week or until they had a dream which they felt solved the problem. They recorded all of their dreams during this time, and they they noted which ones were a on topic on the topic of the problem, including addressing any aspect of the problem or any attempted solution of it, and then also be of these ones they believed contained a

satisfactory solution to the problem. And then these were judged by I think two judges. Now, approximately half of the subjects recalled a dream which they felt was related to the problem. And uh, and it's worth pointing out that se these believe their dream contained a solution to the problem. Now, most of the individuals here selected a personal problem, something related to relationship dilemmas, or educational vocational desires. And again we have to remember that these are a bunch of

twenty one year olds for the most part. Well, I mean, that's not surprising to me, because dreams very often. I mean, one thing, you see when you look at did your dream address the solution to this brain teaser you've been trying to solve? I don't think people dream about stuff like that very often. People tend more often to dream about stuff of strong personal importance, which tends to have to do with like work, life and relationships with people

and family and friends. Yeah, and I mean arguably too if it's something seemingly more fantastic, like I was being chased by the hounds of Hell. All those hounds of hell just represent all the other crap in your life that is not literally a hound of hell. Yeah, so this might actually be a better approach than seeing did your dream literally address the contents of a brain teaser? Because we might just not be primed to dream about things like brain teasers if our dreams are somehow adaptive.

If they do address problems, you'd think those problems would be the kinds of problems humans normally face, not like written abstract puzzles. And indeed, in this experiment, personal problems were much more likely to be viewed as solved by the dreamer than once of an academic nature, because again, most of the individuals in the study chose personal problems and a few chose academic I want to give one example of the type of problem that that was given in the study. So this is a quote from a

supposedly solved problem. Quote I recently moved from one apartment to a smaller one. Every way I try to arrange my bedroom furniture in the new room looks crowded. I've been trying to decide if there is a better way, or if I have to get rid of something dream. I come home and all the boxes are unpacked and the pictures hung. Everything looks real nice. The little chest of drawer is in the living room, up against a wall like a sideboard, and it blends right in there.

I'm puzzled because I didn't remember doing this. I can't figure out if I move the chest and unpacked or if someone else has but I like it awake. The chest actually fit their real well when I tried it, so I left it there. I'm glad someone else has dreams as boring as mine. I mean, that's boring, but

that does actually represent a solution. I mean it sounds like the kind of thing that if you were to imagine that your your dreams are kind of like thinking about things that are on your mind, how to arrange the stuff in your apartment might well be one of those problems. So this is Barrett's conclusion from the paper quote.

Perhaps the Committee of Sleep may have workers outside of rim, and the spokesperson roll of the dream may be more than a metaphor even more likely, given what is known about the cortical activation, the problem may get solved by some part of the waking mind and communicated to consciousness only in the dream state. In summary, there remain many questions about the mechanism of problem solving and dreams, and about the quality of these solutions compared with waking ones.

It is clear, however, the dream interested persons incubating problems can often dream what they feel to be solutions of which they are not consciously aware, and it's such dreams can provide them considerable personal satisfaction. All right, we're gonna take one more break. When we come back, we'll continue to discuss uh problem solving during dreams. Alright, we're back. Now.

We've been talking about how a sleep apparently aids in creative problem solving, and apparently how dreams themselves could play some role in that. But what if dreams in rem sleep play a role in problem solving even if they

don't necessarily consciously provide you with solutions to problems. This is something I was often thinking about when looking at this research, like people were looking for examples of where you were able to solve a brain teaser because you had a dream about the brain teaser and the content

of the dreams specifically told you what to do. I think a lot of times it might be very different, like a dream might help you solve problems, not because it shows you the solution to the problem, because but because it unconsciously primes you to solve the problem later when you're awake. Yeah, it just kind of turns everything the thing on its head potentially, and then you have that sort of mirror vision of everything still knocking around

your memory when you tackle the problem and it. Yeah, so I think that's a possibility to consider as well.

There's an interesting research paper that just came out this year, just in eighteen and appeared in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by the Cardiff University neuroscientists penelop Lewis, the cognitive scientists gun Through Noblitch, and the u c l A neuroscientist Gina Poe, and they have an interesting new hypothesis about why the brain might be aided in problem solving by sleep and dreaming, and they point out that many lines of evidence of course, as we've been talking about, show

that's leap is important for creativity. But the question is which part of sleep is that the rim sleep, is it the non rim sleep? How do sleep encourage creative approaches to behavior? And is one stage of sleep more important than another stage of sleep? So I'll just try to give you the very basics of their theory. Their new theory is that studies seem to show that the brain replays memories from the day in non rim sleep, and that through this process the brain creates just information.

Essentially by replaying memories of what happened, it pulls out sort of overarching rules that quote, define a set of related memories. So this is this might be how your brain sort of forms categories of things and themes of memories. That when you're sleeping before you go into your dream state, when you're in this non rim sleep state often known as slow wave sleep, you are experiencing replaying of memories and the brain is making rules based on those memories.

Then in the following periods of rem sleep, the brain essentially plays with this existing cortically coded knowledge. Uh, and that the that you've got these high levels of excitation and the uncensored, unbridled capability for connections between things, and this quote provides an ideal setting for the formation of novel unexpected connections. They write, quote, the synergistic interleaving of rim and non rim sleep may promote complex analogical problem solving.

So again, this is kind of like the idea of you have two consultants, yes, weighing in on the problem. Yeah, exactly so. In in summary, the slow wave sleep, the non rim sleep forms concepts and rules out of our daily memories, and then rim sleep, the dreaming part of sleep, plays around by trying to get connections between them, sort of trying out different weird things in an uncensored, uncontrolled way. And this cycle repeatedly happens throughout the night in roughly

ninety minute periods as we mentioned earlier. So the implication is that if you get more sleep, your brain has more opportunities to form connections and solve problems in strange and unexpected ways in your waking life. Of course, this can translate into creativity and out of the box thinking. Now, Penelope Lewis agrees that the model she and her co authors have constructed here is probably not exactly correct yet but thinks it's sort of in the right direction of

forming a final explanation of how sleep aids and creativity. Uh. And there was a good article I read in The Atlantic by Ed Young that discussed this new research and quoted at least one of the researcher in the field who who agrees it might not be totally there yet, but it's a step in the right direction. Now, as we begin our final approach here towards the closing out the episode, I thought we should maybe get into a little futurism and sci fi. All right, man, let's do it.

In a previous episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, uh, titled Conjoined Dreamers, we discussed this really interesting work of a futurism that came out. It was it was commissioned by Travel Lodge. Yeah, in two thousand and eleven they got noted futurist Dr Ian Pearson to weigh in on where hotel technology is going and indeed what the experience of checking into a hotel might consist of in the year five more vivid hotel nightmares. Wait, Robert, do you

get hotel nightmares? I have certainly experienced this before, because this is a known situation like the first night you spend in a new location, such as a hotel, you're going to have trouble sleeping. You're gonna have a lot more. I believe it's the default mode network that is more active. Yeah, it's not just that huge surplus of pillows that that makes you dream bad. It's it's being in an unfamiliar place. Oh man, all those cool pillows. It's it's an attractive idea.

But there's too too many pillows on hotel beds. Wouldn't you agree, Why didn't that many pillows? Yes, there are, there are way too many, but they go on the floor. So when you have that that nightmare the first night, you fall out onto pillow. So, following a six month study, A Pierson laid out his vision of the future, and it's it's pretty tremendous. You can you can look this,

uh this travel Edge study up. It's available online. But you know, he said that any surface or fabric in the hotel room might be electronically enhanced to make you see your stay better. Uh, they may admit a particular nostalgic cent serve as a virtual display. It's just this sci fi vision really of what a hotel room could be, but what do we do in the hotel room will

obviously we sleep and we dream. So Pearson's predictions play a great deal with the idea of not only virtual reality and even virtual sex, but technologically augmented dream states. He wrote, quote, the benefits of sleep time learning will be more widely known in we will be able to use the dream management system as our own external coach, delivering training programs or giving sleepers the opportunity to learn

and practice useful life skills whilst to sleep. Sleepers will be able to learn a new language whilst following asleep, or study towards a qualification or learning new skill. Ye okay, I mean I I'm not sure I am confident that all of that is true, but that's it's interesting to entertain as a possibility. Now. Another interesting treatment of this comes from a nine novel by sci fi author Peter Watts. Oh yeah, and this is the novel Starfish that I've

I've already referenced on the show before. And Watts really loads his books with a lot of of scientific material. Uh yeah, what What's I think? Has some of the best most interesting reads on the implications of future technology and sort of transhuman consciousness states of pretty much anybody. Yeah, and again he puts a lot of ideas into his books. So that's why the book has come up yet again.

But I'm just gonna read a quick paragraph from it to give you a taste of how he uses kind of this kind of dream augmentation technology In the novel quote, a lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night, they'd get of him an injection to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards, a machine beside his bed would feed

him dreams. He could never exactly remember them, but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor, a real person though not a program, and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar, like he'd known it all years ago and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything. I love how Watts calibrates this. So you have the you have

the dream technology. We also have a pharmaceutical component and a waking world a tutoring component, all seeming to work in tandem just to like rapidly educate you on a topic. Now, I wonder, in in contradistinction, to these two visions we've been talking about about the possibility of learning in your sleep, whether if that were possible, it would interfere with sleep's importance in strengthening and consolidating what you've learned while you

were awake. Ah. I like that, and you know, we on one one hand, I like it in the sci fi sense because I don't like the idea of staying at a hotel in the hotel is keeping me from um, you know, from from actively processing my memories of the day. But it does fit into a very sci fi context, like this company is training you to do some sort of hazardous job. They don't really care if you're able to work through your daily anxiety and social stress. They just want you to know how to you know, tend

some sort of you know, underwater power station. Right. So, I think this is a valid point to what extent would you be interfering with the purpose of dreams. Now here's a weird thing. This actually just occurred to me. But I wonder, in a kind of sci fi sense, if directed disruption of memory consolidation during sleep phaces could actually be used in a pinpointed way to disrupt the

consolidation of negative memory. You've got somebody who's had a traumatic experience during the day, the next time they go to sleep. I wonder if you know, Okay, so, is that night's sleep going to begin consolidating negative memories that are going to form the basis of a post traumatic

stress disorder? And would it be possible to say, Okay, with tonight's sleep, we've got a way to to target the consolidation of that memory and disrupt it, to prevent it from taking hold in such a strongly emotional way as it might on its own. I can't help but feel like these possibilities are inevitable, because, like we say, we're still figuring out the mysteries of sleep. We're still figuring out exactly what sleep and dream is really all about.

But once we do, if and when we get there, it seems inevitable that we will find new ways to manipulate it. Yeah, I think that's probably true. I mean, I think sleep still holds many mysteries. Even with all the research we've been talking about today, We've just been talking about one avenue. You know, the role of sleep and dreams and creative problem solving. There's all this memory consolidation stuff, we didn't really get into in any depth.

And then there are other questions as well. I think that there are are deep, deep unsolved mysteries about the role of sleep, and it's a lot of fertile ground for scientific exploration. Yeah, like one idea we didn't even get into here that I think we discussed in our past episode. And lucid dreaming is like the question, well, when you lucid dream, are you interfering in the true purpose of dreaming? If you were taking control of the wheel,

then is that just does that make a difference? What if dreaming is not recreational or epiphenomenal, what if it's doing something important? Yeah, what if you buy a machine or get a prescription in the future that keeps you from having nightmares? Well I can't help but feel in a very kind of like black mirror sci fi way, that there have to be ramifications for that. Or maybe

I'm thinking more mythically. Surely there's the gods take something away, They're going to inflict something else on you in return. It's the curse of Zeus. Yeah, it gives you that eternal life, but not eternal youth, but eventually eternal sleep. So it all works out, and then it takes away your nightmares, but takes a way your soul, all right. So there you have it, um sleep, dreaming, learning while we dream of. Obviously, this is a topic that everyone is going to be able to relate to, so we

would love to hear from everyone. I know. Sometimes people say, oh, I don't want to hear about anyone's dreams. Dreams are only interesting the person who dreamt them. I have never agreed with that. Tell me all about your dreams, even

the boring ones. If they're just as boring as mine, then at least I'll feel content all right in the In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including the various dream and sleep related episodes we've recorded over the years, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all those episodes, links out to our various social media accounts, And as always, if you want to support the show, make sure that you rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Big thanks as always to our wonderful, excellent audio producers

Alex Williams and Tari Harrison. If you want to get in touch with us to let us know your feedback about this episode or any other, or to uh, let us know a top you'd like us to cover in the future, or to just say hi, let us know where you listen from, how you found out about the show, what you think, what what creative avenues it's taking you down. You can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com