You’ve learned about the positive effect that daydreaming has on creativity. The same is true for sleep, but it works on the brain in a different way than daydreaming.
Boost Your Creativity By At Least 33 Percent
If I told you that there’s a way to boost your creativity by at least 33 percent and that this method is free, you might be skeptical. But as you’ve probably already guessed, the answer is sleep! The 33 percent figure comes from Jeffrey Ellenbogen, the director of the Sleeping Brain Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. Psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out what sleep is all about for decades.
Listening To Brain Waves In Sleeping Rats
A breakthrough in understanding sleep and learning came from Matthew Wilson because of a small mistake he made in the lab. Wilson was working with rats in lab experiments on learning. He recorded signals from the rats’ brains while they were running mazes. One day he accidentally left the equipment hooked up. The rats were sleeping, but the equipment was still recording their brain signals.
When he compared the signals from the sleeping rats, he found that the signals matched the brain activity when the rats were awake and running the maze. The rats were re-running the maze in their sleep.
Consolidating Information During Sleep
Since then, sleep researchers now know that when people sleep, they review things they learned while awake that day. They “decide” (even though they’re asleep and unaware of deciding) what to keep and what to let go of from what they learned during the day.
There are four stages of sleep. A series of research studies at Robert Stickgold’s Sleep Research Lab at the Harvard Medical School shows that people jettison most of their memories of what happened during the day in Stages 1 and 2, and they transfer the memories they want to keep to long-term memory during REM sleep. REM sleep is also when most people dream. A small group of cells in the brain stem affects proteins in the amygdala and hippocampus in the brain. These cells are responsible for memory consolidation during sleep.
The Connection Between Sleep And Creativity
This reviewing and consolidation of information during sleep has an effect on creativity. A large part of being creative is making connections between new information and existing information in memory. This is part of what’s happening during consolidation when people sleep. The time connection between concentrated executive attention network focus (discussed earlier in this chapter) and sleep is important, too. For optimal creative output, you need to set that intention not too long before going to sleep.
What about naps and creativity? Naps can also improve your creativity, but only if you’re able to go into REM sleep during the nap.
Takeaways
- Restate or write down the problem you’re trying solve or the creative idea you’re seeking progress on an hour or two before you go to bed.
- Get a good night’s rest (at least six hours—eight would be better). Naps might help, but only if you enter REM sleep.
- Keep a pen and paper or recorder handy. Often the answers and ideas you’re looking for will come right upon awakening.
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