How Sleep Can Improve Creativity by 10x

Lore has it that a dream of a snake biting its own tail gave 19th c. German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé an insight about the hexagonal structure of the benzene ring.

Inventor Thomas Edison actively conjured the power of sleep to aid his creativity. As recounted by sleep researcher Robert Stickgold [1], Edison, while working through difficult problems, would nap in an armchair holding a spoon above a metal pan. Dozing off, he would drop the spoon. The noise of the spoon hitting the pan would wake him up, and he would quickly write down insights from his short nap.

The point of these anecdotes is that much more happens during sleep than we realize. But as a society, we undervalue sleep because we don’t completely understand it. Among other physical and mental benefits, sleep is an active, productive process that is critical to creative problem solving.

"As a society, we undervalue sleep because we don’t completely understand it."

Consider a fascinating study by Erin Wamsley and colleagues from Stickgold’s Sleep and Cognition Lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center [2]. The researchers had study participants learn their way through a computer maze and tested them on the maze 5 hours later. Between learning and test, one group of participants took a nap, while another group did not. The researchers asked what participants thought or dreamed about during this period. Thinking about the maze task while awake had little (non-significant) effect on performance. However, participants who slept and dreamed about the task performed 10 times better than the other participants.

Even more intriguing, participants’ dreams were not literal rehearsals of the maze task but included associations to other experiences. Stickgold describes how one participant dreamed of going around the maze and “having people as checkpoints.” Another dreamed about “bat caves” that the participant once visited on a trip. It’s as if the brain searches for relevant connections that could potentially help us interpret the world or guide future actions.

Other studies have shown that sleep improves our ability to find patterns in the environment and make predictions based on our experiences [3,4]. Specifically, the types of sleep that the brain cycles through during the night seem to process information differently. Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) helps with remembering details while Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep improves creativity and our ability to intuit patterns.

Organizations, architects and individuals should pay more attention to how our policies, physical environments and behaviors during our waking hours could impact sleep. For instance:

Companies could consider policies that set reasonable guidelines on work hours, similar to those in the Healthy Sleep Policy feature in the WELL Building Standard [5].
Better lighting in the work environment could improve sleep quality at night.
Some workplaces even provide nap rooms or nap chairs for a mid-day recharge.
Finally, individuals themselves can develop healthy habits: watching intake of caffeine and alcohol (which interferes with REM sleep); getting regular exercise (which produces serotonin, which helps sleep); and avoiding bright electronic devices at night (which can interfere with the body’s biological clock).

Sleep can be a powerful lever to improve creativity and human performance, and we should manage it more intentionally.

References:

[1] BostonMOS. (2014). Sleep, Memory, and Dreams - Robert Stickgold, PhD. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUA3fL4mzhg

[2] Wamsley, E. J., & Stickgold, R. (2011). Memory, Sleep and Dreaming: Experiencing Consolidation. Sleep Medicine Clinics, 6(1), 97–108.

[3] Barsky, M. M., Tucker, M. A., & Stickgold, R. (2015). REM Sleep Enhancement of Probabilistic Classification Learning is Sensitive to Subsequent Interference. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 122, 63–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2015.02.015

[4] Wagner, U., Gais, S., Haider, H., Verleger, R., & Born, J. (2004). Sleep inspires insight. Nature, 427(6972), 352–355. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02223

[5] Healthy sleep policy | WELL Standard. (2017). Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://standard.wellcertified.com/mind/healthy-sleep-policy