Einstein dreamed about cows being zapped by an electric fence and realized that time is relative to the observer—the theory of relativity.
Mendeleev was out cold at his desk and woke up with the periodic table after a Tetris-like dream in which the elements fell into place.
Many scientists credit their dreams with their breakthroughs. However, scientists have struggled to influence people’s dreams and rigorously put the idea to test. While somewhat apocryphal, deciphering dreams entice researchers across the world. In a recent study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, playing soundtracks linked with unsolved puzzles can help the sleepers solve the problems the next day.
We have countless dreams in our sleep, irrespective of whether we remember or forget those. In the right circumstances, these dreams can be manipulated to help people look at a problem in different angles to devise a solution. Although some studies suggest that sleeping on a problem can raise the odds of solving the problem, the data is not universal. However, sleep can be beneficial, only if the person think of the problem when asleep.
Karen Konkoly, a cognitive neuroscientist who performed the study at Northwestern University in Evanston, III, and her colleagues took special interest in seeing if they could use targeted memory reactivation, or TMR, to help sleepers think about specific topics. “It’s this research technique where you have a sensory stimuli that’s associated with a memory,” Konkoly says. “It could be a very soft sound or a smell that’s presented to a sleeper, and it functions to remind the sleeping brain of the full memory.” While people dream in every stage of sleep, TMR is most effective in deep, slow-wave sleep. Konkoly wants to look at the effects of TMR at a different sleep stage— the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage, which could benefit creative thinking.
She and her colleagues recruited 20 volunteers who could lucid dream. In this case, the person can realize that they are dreaming, and can sometimes the dream as they dream. They were given sets of brain-teasing puzzles to solve, some of which they solved, and the rest, they couldn’t. Each was accompanied by a particular soundtrack unrelated to the task itself, such as a snippet of instrumental music. The scientists then hooked up the participants up to electrodes to monitor their sleep.
At 4 in the morning, the participants were awakened and encouraged to lucid dream as they went back to sleeping. Then, the researchers started playing sound cues associated with the puzzles the participant’s couldn’t solve, and asked them to sniff to indicate that they were working on the puzzle while asleep. The next morning, 75% of sleepers reported having dreamt of unsolved puzzles, however, the participants were able to lucidly dream of the problems nine times.
Sleepers who heard the sound cues in their sleep and dreamed about the puzzles, solved them about 42% of the time, while those who didn’t dream of the puzzles, managed to solve them 17% of the time.
The effects were modest, but the idea of modifying sleep into an ‘active rest’ to increase productivity and problem-solving abilities can entice some people. Konkoly does this research not to push dreams as a tool to improve creative problem-solving, but to uphold the value of dreaming. What we dream, more often than not, is a jumbled reflection of our inner lives and experiences.
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