the 10 minute nap that boosts creativity – time.news

2023-10-22 08:07:35

by Antonella Sparvoli

The painter Dal and the inventor Edison had already understood that very short naps help to solve problems and reorganize the memory. Field experiments confirm this

If you’re looking for inspiration or stuck on a question that requires out-of-the-box solutions, take a nap. The sleep phase in which the organism gradually passes from wakefulness to falling asleep, when reality and dreams are mixed can give a creative boost to our thinking, facilitating problem solving. Not only that, according to a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, piloting the imaginative thoughts and vivid dreams that occur during this

sleep phase, called N1, with a specific theme can spark creativity on that topic, indicating that dreams can be a source of inspiration and ingenuity, especially if used in a controlled way.

Minutes counted but special

The scholars reached this conclusion using a particular device called Dormio: a sort of glove equipped with sensors that wrap around the user’s wrist and fingers to monitor rest and able to determine when the wearer goes into the sleep phase N1 and then to the next phase. The device can also send audio messages to users and record their voices.

Certainly the initial phase of N1 sleep, which lasts no more than ten minutes, is important from a creative point of view – confirms Luigi Ferini Strambi, head of the Sleep Medicine Center of the Irccs San Raffaele Hospital in Milan and professor of Neurology at Faculty of Psychology of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University —. The surrealist painter Salvador Dal and the American inventor Thomas Edison had already intuited this: when they had to look for inspiration or create something, they took a very short nap from which they then woke up with a greater charge of creativity.

Field experiments

In recent years, several studies have shown how sleep can help solve problems or reorganize associative memory, or the ability to remember randomly connected information, in a way that promotes creativity. An experiment conducted in 2021 by scholars from the Sorbonne University of Paris, led by Clia Lacaux, as Ferini Strambi recalls, is very illustrative in this sense.

French researchers examined around 100 people who were asked to solve mathematical problems without knowing that a hidden rule allowed them to find the solution almost instantly. Well, the specialists saw that spending at least 15 seconds in N1 during a rest period tripled the chance of discovering the hidden rule (83% versus 30% or when the participants remained awake) and that this effect vanished in individuals who were given was allowed to fall asleep and achieve a deeper sleep.

The trick of Edison and Dal

If in the past research focused mainly on the role of REM sleep and deep slow-wave sleep in creative problem solving, these recent studies reveal that light non-REM N1 sleep also has its relevance and that exploiting its potential could make it easier for us to life. If we were able to fall asleep very briefly throughout the day, we could increase not only our creativity, but also our concentration and ability to solve problems. However, it is essential that the nap is short because if you enter the deepest sleep phase you lose your creative drive, observes the expert.

But how to do it? You can try the trick invented by Dal and Edison. It seems that the painter Salvador Dal and the inventor Thomas Alva Edison had understood that to have brilliant ideas it was necessary to sleep a little while holding an object in one’s hand, for example a spoon, a brush or a ball, so that when they were to fall into a deep sleep this would fall to the floor making a noise and suddenly waking them up.

October 22, 2023 (modified October 22, 2023 | 08:07)

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