MIT News May 15, 2023
Recent scientific findings suggest that sleep onset (known as N1) may be an ideal brain state for creative ideation. However, the specific link between N1 dream content and creativity has remained unclear. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) investigated the contribution of N1 dream content to creative performance by administering targeted dream incubation (a protocol that presents auditory cues at sleep onset to introduce specific themes into dreams) and collected dream reports to measure incorporation of the selected theme into dream content. They assessed creative performance using a set of three theme-related creativity tasks. The findings showed enhanced creative performance and greater semantic distance in task responses following a period of N1 sleep as compared to wake, corroborating recent work identifying N1 as a creative sweet spot and offering novel evidence for N1 enabling a cognitive state with greater associative divergence. They demonstrated that successful N1 dream incubation enhances creative performance more than N1 sleep alone. According to the researchers this is the first controlled experiment investigating a direct role of incubating dream content in the enhancement of creative performance… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Experimental protocol. Credit: Scientific Reports volume 13, Article number: 7319 (2023)