By Margarita Nahapetyan
According to the experts from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, dreaming is the best way when it comes to solving creative problems. In other words, if you need to solve a problem - simply sleep on it.
In their report, the investigators wrote that rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep increases the chance of creative problem solving, possibly by forming new associative networks in the brain. "We found that -- for creative problems that you have already been working on -- the passage of time is enough to find solutions," Sara Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry, said in a news release from the university. "However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity," she added.
Professor Mednick and her colleagues have based their findings on an analysis of an experiment, which involved 77 young adults. During the study, the participants were given a number of word associated creative tasks in the morning. In particular, they were shown multiple groups of three words, such as cookie, heart, sixteen, for example, and were then asked to find a fourth word that can be linked to all the three words (like sweet). All adults were tested in the morning and again in the afternoon after a nap with REM sleep, after a nap without REM sleep or after a quiet period of rest.
The results revealed that subjects who, between morning and afternoon word-game sessions, took a nap that included a period of lively dreaming (REM), improved their later scores by 40 per cent. Those individuals who had REM sleep showed greater improvement in answering test questions, compared to their counterparts who experienced other sleep or wake states, the study found.
According to Professor Mednick, REM sleep gave the participants an opportunity to access and utilize for creative solving of the problematic issue supposedly irrelevant information. The expert speculates that without thinking about it, REM sleepers were able to create flexible new associations with the morning's winning words while they were sleeping that made it easier to call up those words later in the afternoon.
Prof. Mednick continued that solving a problem in a creative way, with an entailment of dreams, usually starts with a period of unsuccessful effort. This, in turn, is followed by a decision to put the problem aside, when the thinker does no conscious work in order to find a solution. At the end, the fresh solution enters consciousness in a dream and is being recalled as soon as a person wakes up.
And when asked why does the magic moment is likely to happen during REM or rapid-eye-movement sleep, Prof. Mednick said that this is a time when the brain's neocortex, the part of its gray matter that is linked to thinking, is free to integrate fresh data and malleable ideas and memories into a new synthesis: a eureka moment. The process works especially well for musicians, scientists and artists whose challenges are similar to those of neocortex's, the lead researcher said. That is, to create new connections among bits and pieces of familiar elements.
The findings of the study are published June 8 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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