Don't wake me up . . . I'm being creative
Scientists have produced the first hard evidence to show that to sleep on a problem is to help solve it.
Although many scientists, such as the chemists Kekule and Mendeleev, and writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, have credited sleep with providing creative insights, proving their claims has been elusive.
But research published in Nature today backs the power of sleep and also suggests that those who like to burn the midnight oil could be hampering their creativity.
Dr Ullrich Wagner, of the University of Lubeck, who reports the discovery with German colleagues, devised an experiment in which subjects were taught two simple rules to help them transform a string of eight digits into a string with a new order.
Unknown to them, there was a third hidden rule that could only be gleaned through insight and allowed subjects to improve their performance rapidly. After initial training, subjects were allowed to sleep or forced to stay awake.
Sleep worked wonders - subjects allowed an eight-hour snooze were twice as likely to work out the third rule as those kept awake.
"Thus, sleep acts as a creative learning process," said Dr Wagner.
But he added: "We do not yet know which brain areas are affected by sleep to facilitate insight." However, a memory centre called the hippocampus is thought to play a key role, perhaps by replaying a problem - "offline processing" - during sleep.
In an accompanying article in Nature Drs Pierre Maquet and Perrine Ruby, of the University of Liege, said the role of sleep in creativity "will be a mystery for some time yet".
They added that the study "gives us good reason to respect our periods of sleep" - especially given the current trend to curtail them recklessly.
telegraph.co.uk
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My first reaction to this was a - Well duh! Anyone who hasn't noticed the effect of sleep on the creative process, hasn't been paying attention. A little more reflection though, and I backed off a bit. First, it's more than a little presumptuous for me to be sure I know what the creative process is like in others. Secondly, even for myself, the effects of sleep are manifold, and I'm not sure to what this study is referring. I hope everyone has had the experience of waking up refreshed and with your head "clear as a bell". For whatever reason, the electrolytic balances are "just right" and the neurons are firing. To greater or lessor extent, is that what this study is measuring? Maybe. If so then IMO it's missing something else. There is this state of semi-sleep - you aren't asleep, but you surely aren't awake either. It can happen as you are going to sleep, or as you are wakening. It is in that state that I find I can be my most creative - may not be much, but it is still my personal best. It's as though the pieces of a puzzle are easier to move around into a new configuration while in that state. And hence, it's easier to get novel ideas. Doesn't mean that the ideas are any good. They still have to be tested and evaluated, but for me that isn't the creative part of the process. Unfortunately, I saw nothing of this in the quoted article, with the possible exception being the early mention of the chemists and writers.
Please excuse my personal digression. Just something of significance to me.
lurqer |
