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which slept but was awoken before
reaching the REM cycle and one which
continued into REM sleep – saw the
final group far outperform the others
in creative tasks.
The study indicated that the
four or five periods of REM sleep
we experience at night (which
typically last for between 90 and 120
minutes each), enhance our creative
processing more than any other sleep
or waking state. REM sleep appears
to help achieve creative solutions by
stimulating associative networks,
“allowing the brain to make new and
useful associations between unrelated
ideas,” wrote Dr Sara Mednick,
assistant professor of psychiatry, who
conducted the study.
Penny’s work primarily focuses
on off-line learning during sleep and
wakefulness. Much of her research
investigates brain plasticity and the
changes occurring while a memory
is not being encoded, practised or
recalled when we’re both asleep and
awake. This includes investigating
what happens when we sleep to those
things we’ve learned
during the day.
“Things like finger-
tapping tasks, such as
playing the piano, are
strengthened across
sleep by about 20 per cent
and even more so across
other nights,” she says,
adding that the same
applies to “memories that
don’t involve muscles at all,” such as
remembering a list of words.
For creatives, these findings should
be particularly piquant. “Sleep doesn’t
just impact how memories are formed,
but how we form links between those
memories,” Penny says. “Creativityis all about forming new links out of
sets of information, and pulling out
or integrating things in novel ways.
There’s a lot of work investigating how
those are formed during sleep.”
The studies used to
measure such things usually
involve tests that see subjects
carry out tasks such as tapping
out a sequence of word pairs;
and using electrodes applied
to people’s scalps to measure
neural oscillations during the
various stages of REM and
non-REM sleep to predict the
memory benefits of each type
of sleep and its duration. The main
hypothesis of Penny’s current work
is that “key memories are neurally
reinstated in sleep states, so the brain
is actively replaying patterns that we
experience when we’re awake,” she
explains. “These are spontaneouslyreactivated during sleep, so there’s
work taking place that’s trying to
understand how this relates to brain
oscillations and if we can actually
control or trigger those reactivations.”SOLVING A CREATIVE
PROBLEM WHILE ASLEEP
What’s interesting about Eric’s ideas
around sleep is that it isn’t the dream-
state so often associated with creative
thought that’s the most powerful, but
the brain’s ability to actually think
through creative problems while we
sleep. He says that it’s easily possible to
“double or triple your creative thinking
or creative output by realising you
think while you sleep”.
Eric advises going to bed with a
specific problem in mind, such as how
two characters in a narrative might
next interact. The brain, he says, takes
this prompt and mulls it over as youUntitled artworks by Shuhua Xiong who says, “It’s liberating to wander and get lost in my own mind.”“Sleep doesn’t just impact how memories are formed,
but how we form links between those memories”
DR SARA MEDNICK
Dr Sara Mednick.