It’s official: a subject is worth sleeping on, with the help of music.
Scientists announced this month that they managed to “infiltrate” volunteers’ dreams to stimulate creativity and problem solving: suggest that it is possible to reactivate memories of puzzles during sleep and increase the probability of solving them the next day.
The work, on February 5th at Neuroscience of Consciousnesstested the common idea that it is worth “sleeping on” an issue or problem. For years, studies have indicated that sleep can improve performance on association and creative thinking tasks, but the mechanisms have never been clarified.
The new research sought to understand whether the dream content itself — especially during sleep, the phase in which dreams are more frequent — plays a direct role in these productivity gains.
The team, led by researchers at Northwestern North American University, recruited 20 participants with a history of (or interest in) .
Before sleeping in the laboratory, the volunteers tried to solve a series of time-limited puzzles. For example, one of the challenges involved matchsticks in which it was necessary to move a restricted number of pieces to form new figures.
Each presented problem was associated with a brief unique sound sequence (guitar riffs, or whistles and drum sounds), presented while participants analyzed each puzzle. The challenges were difficult enough that everyone had several unresolved problems for the next day.
With electrodes placed on the scalp to record brain activity and eye movements, the volunteers fell asleep in the laboratory. When they entered REM sleep, the researchers played some of the sounds associated with unsolved puzzles and, shortly after, woke the participants to collect reports of what they had dreamed. Over the next two weeks, the volunteers continued to record dreams and returned for another night of testing.
Nearly 75% reported dreams related to unsolved puzzlesand the data suggests that sound stimuli increased the likelihood of “activated” problems arising in dreams. Six participants showed signs of lucid dreaming through eye movements or previously agreed breathing patterns.
The next day, the results showed a pattern: when a puzzle appeared in the dream, it was more likely to be solved later. On average, Volunteers solved 42% of the puzzles they had dreamed, compared to 17% of those that did not appear in dreams.
Still, it is important to emphasize that the study sample is small and that an alternative explanation cannot be excluded: that participants may have dreamed more about the puzzles that already aroused greater curiosity in them or for which they had a better chance of success.
But, interestingly, cases of lucid dreaming seemed to be associated with a lower resolution rate. It is, according to him, something that other researchers have been discussing for years: the hypothesis that lucidity, by making dreams “more controlled”, reduces free and bizarre associations that can promote creativity.
