A sleep technique described by surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and famous inventor Thomas Edison might actually work to inspire creativity, researchers have found.
To get the creativity boost, you essentially need to wake up just as a certain sleep stage sets in, where reality seems to blend into fantasy. To use the technique, visionaries such as Dalí and Edison would hold an object, such as a spoon or a ball, while falling asleep in a chair. As they drifted off, the object would fall, make a noise and wake them up. Having spent a few moments on the brink of unconsciousness, they would be ready to start their work. This early sleep stage, known as the hypnagogia state or N1, lasts only a few minutes before you drift off to deeper sleep, but it may be the "ideal cocktail for creativity," the researchers wrote in the study, published Dec. 8 in the journal Science Advances. Humans spend about 5% of a night's sleep in N1, but it's an extremely understudied sleep stage, said senior author Delphine Oudiette, a sleep researcher at the Paris Brain Institute. In N1, you can imagine shapes, colors or even bits of dreams in front of your closed eyes, yet still hear stuff in your room, Oudiette said. "The pattern can be very different" depending on the person, Oudiette told Live Science. Inspired by the great minds who employed the technique, Oudiette and her group set out to test whether the sleep method would actually work for everyday people. They recruited 103 healthy participants who had the ability to fall asleep easily and asked them to avoid stimulants and sleep a bit less than usual the night before the experiment. Read more...
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