The majority of studies on sleep creativity have shown that sleep can facilitate insightful behavior and flexible reasoning, and there are several hypotheses about the creative function of dreams. On the other hand, a few recent studies have supported a theory of creative insomnia, in which creativity is significantly correlated with sleep disturbance.
Anecdotal accounts of sleep and creativity Jack Nicklaus had a dream that allowed him to correct his golf swing. German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé stated that the idea for the ring structure of benzene came to him in a day-dream, in which he saw snakes biting their own tails. Jasper Johns was inspired to paint his first flag painting as a result of a dream. Aphex Twin wrote much of the music on his album Selected Ambient Works Volume II by going to sleep in the studio, and then recreating the sounds he heard in dreams as soon as he woke up. Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde during a dream. Paul McCartney discovered the tune for the song "Yesterday" in a dream and was inspired to write "Yellow Submarine" during hypnagogia. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by a dream at Lord Byron's villa. British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan" after finding inspiration from an opium induced dream. Otto Loewi, a German physiologist, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. He discovered in a dream how to prove his theory. Giuseppe Tartini, a composer, gained inspiration for his Devil's Trill Sonata in a dream where the Devil appeared to him and played the melody on Tartini's violin. An alternative interpretation of The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters considers Francisco Goya's commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares as made possible by the unconscious.
Sleep and creativity studies
REM sleep as a state of increased cognitive flexibility In a study on cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle, researchers discovered that when woken from REM sleep, participants had a 32% advantage on an anagram task (when compared with the number of correct responses after NREM awakenings). This was consistent with the hypothesis that due to the lack of aminergic dominance in REM sleep, this particular sleep state is highly conducive to fluid reasoning and flexible thought. Participant performance after awakening from REM sleep was not better than participants who stayed awake, which indicates that in REM sleep, there is an alternative (but just as effective) mode of problem solving that differs from the mechanism available while awake.
Sleep facilitates insight Participants in a study were asked to translate a string of digits using two simple rules that allowed the string to be reduced to a single digit (number reduction task). Out of three groups of participants (those who slept, those who stayed awake during the day, and those who stayed awake during the night), participants who got eight hours of sleep were two times as likely during retesting to gain insight into a hidden rule built into the task. In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep. It was found that her students were able to come up with rational solutions to their problems in their dreams. In this study published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), 50% of the students that participated reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, while 25% came up with solutions in their dreams. Results presented in a study published in Science Advances (2021) demonstrated that the brain activity during sleep onset (N1 sleep) increased creativity after waking, with even a single minute of N1 inspiring insight. However, this effect vanished if subjects reached deeper sleep.
Lack of sleep impairs creativity Some participants in a study went 32 hours without sleep while the control participants slept normally. When tested on flexibility and originality on figural and verbal tests, the sleep-deprived participants had severe and persistent impairments in their performance. A study tested 30 undergraduate students from seven different academic institutions, half majoring in art and half majoring in social sciences. Among all the participants, the higher the level of visual creativity, the lower the quality of their sleep was. The researchers also found that the higher the participants' level of verbal creativity, the more hours they slept and the later they went to sleep and woke up.
Sleep and Humor Under hypnotic-induced sleep, participants were much more likely to produce paraphrases of jokes that they had heard before and to spontaneously create new jokes (when compared with their performance while awake).
Integration of relational memory Recent studies have also shown that sleep not only helps consolidate memory, but also integrates relational memories. In one study, the participants were tested to see if sleep helped in this aspect (Ellenbogen et al., 2007, as cited in Walker, 2009). The subjects of the experiment were taught five "premise pairs", A>B, B>C, C>D, and D>E. They were not aware of the overall hierarchy, where A>B>C>D>E. The subjects were split into 3 separate groups. The first group was tested 20 minutes after learning the pairs, the second was tested 12 hours later without sleep, and the third was tested 12 hours later with sleep in between. The groups were tested in both first degree pairs (A>B, C>D, etc.) and 2nd degree pairs (A>C, B>D, or C>E). The results were that with the first degree pairs, the first group only performed at around chance levels, and the second and third groups had significantly better performances. With the 2nd degree pairs, the first group still performed at around chance levels, and the second group performed at about the same level as in the 1st degree pair test. However, the third group performed even better than before, gaining a 25% advantage over the group without sleep. The results of this study showed that sleep is a significant factor in integrating memories, or gaining the bigger picture.
Creative insomnia Creative insomnia refers to the idea that insomnia can actually spark creativity.
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