Neuroscientist Karen Konkoly is a lucid dreamer. When she’s asleep and immersed in a dream, she knows that she is, in fact, dreaming. One of her favorite things to do during these sleep sojourns is pose personal, even existential questions — probing the mysterious terrain of her own subconscious mind.
As a researcher who studies the human mind, Konkoly has read many scientific papers positing different explanations for why humans dream — and she’s made it her mission to rigorously test them.
In a new study published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, Konkoly and colleagues probe the popular question of whether dreams can spark creativity or insight. The team asked volunteers to puzzle over brainteasers that require eureka-like creative insights to be solved. Then, they went to bed in a sleep lab with instructions to try to dream about the problems they couldn’t solve.
In the early morning hours, when the dreamers were in the sleep phase associated with vivid dreaming, the researchers played “soundtracks” associated with half of the puzzles to cue people to dream of them. Upon waking, people were better at solving puzzles that were incorporated in their dreams.
“Sleep research is hard to do, and creativity research is hard to do — and when you combine them together, it’s doubly hard,” said John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University who was not involved in the research. “When I read this paper, the first thing that came into my mind was: Wow.”
Dream engineering
Dreams are the putative origins of great works of art, scientific insights or iconic pieces of music. The problem is that it’s hard to systematically test whether these are appealing just-so stories or rooted in the complex neurobiology of sleep.
And the history of humanity is filled with examples of people trying to engineer dreams. Tore Nielsen, director of the Dreams and Nightmares Laboratory at the University of Montreal, traces it to the ancient Greeks and sleep incubation rituals aimed at healing or divining new knowledge.
In the new study, researchers decided to try to engineer dreams during REM sleep, the phase of sleep most associated with vivid dreams. Volunteers were presented with brainteasers such as: How do you plant four trees an equal distance from one another?
“Do you get stuck in thinking about a problem in just the ordinary way and therefore get stuck? Or can you get beyond that and think more creatively?” said Ken Paller, who runs the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, where Konkoly was a postdoctoral researcher.
The answer comes when people think of the problem in three dimensions, rather than two dimensions. If people imagine a pyramid with one tree planted at the tip, higher than the others, and the rest on a lower plane in a triangle around it, each tree can be equidistant from all the others.
The researchers played a unique soundtrack with each puzzle. Then, during the wee hours of the morning when people were sleeping, researchers cued the people to think of half of those unsolved puzzles by playing the soundtracks. The cues worked in a little over half of the dreamers, who were deemed responders, and some people dreamed of puzzles without cuing. Forty percent of the people who incorporated the puzzles into their dreams, whether they were cued or not, solved the puzzles the next morning, twice the rate of those who did not.
People who responded to the cues and dreamed of puzzles when prompted also solved those puzzles more often, “providing preliminary causal evidence that REM-sleep dreams can promote creative problem-solving,” Konkoly said.
“I was looking through a dresser and there were papers. … The puzzles were on the papers that I was looking through. … I solved one of them and I got like a little celebration. … I don’t remember which one I solved though,” one participant recalled.
Nielsen said in an email that the study’s findings are in line with others that have found boosts to problem-solving and creativity after REM sleep.
“One explanation for this is that during REM sleep the mind’s associative networks function differently, allowing mental events to make contact with other, more remote, memory contents,” Nielsen said. “In such an altered state, a stimulus like ‘bread’ would not lead associatively to ‘butter’ like it habitually would in the waking state; rather, it might elicit the recall of wheat, flower, a panini press (all distant bread associates) — or even cash or other money (other remote associates).”
Kounios noted that a limitation of the study was that it was a relatively small number of study subjects and dreams. He would like to see the experiment repeated and expanded upon but said that the clues it provides are fascinating.
“Based on what has been done, I would say sleep might be the most powerful way to increase creativity,” Kounios said.
The next important question: What was it about sleep that was helping people come up with creative ideas? He noted other creativity research shows being in a positive mood provides a boost to creativity. But sleep is also known to help with memory consolidation, which could help a person recognize hidden details and associations. It also could aid in “fixation forgetting” — getting freed from being stuck at trying to solve a problem in one way.
The work builds off another study that cued problem-solving with sounds during a different part of the sleep cycle, slow wave sleep. Both papers suggest that sleep is important, argued Adam Haar Horowitz, chief executive of DUST Systems, a research start-up focused on dream engineering.
“REM sleep is this, it’s this beautiful reshuffling of the puzzle pieces,” Horowitz said. “It’s valuable in a way that you cannot work on while you’re awake. … You have a different mind at night.”
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