This article will address the topic of Sleep and creativity, which has gained relevance in various areas in recent years. Since its emergence, Sleep and creativity has captured the attention of academics, experts and the general public, generating controversy and debate around its implications and consequences. Throughout the next lines, different perspectives and approaches related to Sleep and creativity, as well as its impact on society, economy and culture, will be explored. Through a detailed and rigorous analysis, the aim is to shed light on this topic and contribute to the understanding and reflection on Sleep and creativity.
The majority of studies on sleep creativity have shown that sleep can facilitate insightful behavior and flexible reasoning, and there are several hypotheses about the creative function of dreams. On the other hand, a few recent studies have supported a theory of creative insomnia, in which creativity is significantly correlated with sleep disturbance.[citation needed]
In a study on cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle, researchers discovered that when woken from REM sleep, participants had a 32% advantage on an anagram task (when compared with the number of correct responses after NREM awakenings). This was consistent with the hypothesis that due to the lack of aminergic dominance in REM sleep, this particular sleep state is highly conducive to fluid reasoning and flexible thought. Participant performance after awakening from REM sleep was not better than participants who stayed awake, which indicates that in REM sleep, there is an alternative (but just as effective) mode of problem solving that differs from the mechanism available while awake.
Participants in a study were asked to translate a string of digits using two simple rules that allowed the string to be reduced to a single digit (number reduction task). Out of three groups of participants (those who slept, those who stayed awake during the day, and those who stayed awake during the night), participants who got eight hours of sleep were two times as likely during retesting to gain insight into a hidden rule built into the task. In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep. It was found that her students were able to come up with rational solutions to their problems in their dreams. In this study published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), 50% of the students that participated reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, while 25% came up with solutions in their dreams.
Some participants in a study went 32 hours without sleep while the control participants slept normally. When tested on flexibility and originality on figural and verbal tests, the sleep-deprived participants had severe and persistent impairments in their performance. A study tested 30 undergraduate students from seven different academic institutions, half majoring in art and half majoring in social sciences. Among all the participants, the higher the level of visual creativity, the lower the quality of their sleep was. The researchers also found that the higher the participants' level of verbal creativity, the more hours they slept and the later they went to sleep and woke up.
Under hypnotic-induced sleep, participants were much more likely to produce paraphrases of jokes that they had heard before and to spontaneously create new jokes (when compared with their performance while awake).
Recent studies have also shown that sleep not only helps consolidate memory, but also integrates relational memories. In one study, the participants were tested to see if sleep helped in this aspect (Ellenbogen et al., 2007, as cited in Walker, 2009). The subjects of the experiment were taught five "premise pairs", A>B, B>C, C>D, and D>E. They were not aware of the overall hierarchy, where A>B>C>D>E. The subjects were split into 3 separate groups. The first group was tested 20 minutes after learning the pairs, the second was tested 12 hours later without sleep, and the third was tested 12 hours later with sleep in between. The groups were tested in both first degree pairs (A>B, C>D, etc.) and 2nd degree pairs (A>C, B>D, or C>E). The results were that with the first degree pairs, the first group only performed at around chance levels, and the second and third groups had significantly better performances. With the 2nd degree pairs, the first group still performed at around chance levels, and the second group performed at about the same level as in the 1st degree pair test. However, the third group performed even better than before, gaining a 25% advantage over the group without sleep. The results of this study showed that sleep is a significant factor in integrating memories, or gaining the bigger picture.
Creative insomnia refers to the idea that insomnia can actually spark creativity.
Although no studies have actually shown a causal relationship yet, various studies have suggested that the positive relationship between sleep and creativity is more complicated and less clear-cut than previously thought.