Why We should Sleep on it

By Kate Dowler

Many people have their best ideas in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. We explore the science behind dreams and creativity and what it means for creative practice.

As someone who tends to have their best ideas when falling asleep, I’ve always been interested in the power of sleep for creative problem-solving. Recently, I’ve been digging into the topic in a bit more detail and we’ve been running some experiments at Industry of Us to look at different ways in which we can harness the power of sleep within our creative work.

The science of dream creativity

My investigation has been inspired by Matthew Walker’s fascinating book Why we Sleep, a great read for anyone interested in understanding more about the role of sleep more generally. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to dream creativity, in which he describes a range of real world examples and experiments which demonstrate the link between sleep and creative problem solving.

One of the best known historical examples is the story of how Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev came to imagine the order of elements in the periodic table in 1869. For many years, Mendeleev had been trying to work out the organisational logic to all the known elements. He created a card deck, each with a different element, which he would continually shuffle and re-arrange to try and make sense of the structure. After many waking attempts trying to solve the problem, one night in 1869 he dreamed the solution, “I saw in a dream a table, where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary”

In recent years, many experiments have shown that it’s specifically during REM sleep that the brain is most creative. During REM sleep, the hierarchy of logical associative connections that is present during waking hours is gone. In REM sleep, the brain makes connections between distantly related memories or concepts, seeking out distance and non-obvious links between sets of information. This finding fits well with the concept of combinatorial theory in the innovation world. It’s well known that combining unrelated concepts to look for new connections is one of the main paths to creative insight. And when you are looking for more transformational creativity, increasing the “inspirational distance” between the two concepts can help to generate more unexpected and original ideas, so it appears the REM dream state is particularly good at replicating this effect.

Try-it-yourself

Fascinated by the theory, the IoU team have been doing some immersion exercises to see whether the creative state of REM sleep can help us as individuals to do some creative problem-solving.

We designed a simple anagram task, featuring 30 anagrams for the team to complete just before going to sleep, or having a nap. Each person spent 15 minutes trying to solve as many as they could before going to sleep. When they woke up, they tried again to solve some of the trickier anagrams that they’d got stuck on before sleep.

Whilst this was just a small scale immersion exercise with a few team members and no control group, it was interesting to hear each other’s experiences. Most of us felt our brains were working differently after sleep. For some people, the answers to some of the difficult anagrams seemed to just “pop out” at them. For others, their thought processes seemed more random, creative and less logical and systematic.

What do people say?

Within the scientific literature around dream creativity, it’s clear that sleep can help to generate new ideas and help with creative problem solving - but how significant is this? How important is sleep overall when thinking about how creative we are as individuals? Is it simply just one of many points in our day when we are creative?

To find out more about this, we ran a rapid phase of research using the voxpopme platform to find out what real people think. We asked a representative sample of 100 people from the UK, US and Australia “When are you most creative?”. And this is what they said!

When we analysed the data, what was striking was that a whopping 59% of people claimed that they are most creative and have their best ideas after sleep - either when waking in the middle of the night (20%) or first thing in the morning (39%). Just before falling asleep was the next most commonly mentioned (16%), typically in the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (hypnagogia). So, sleep-related categories accounted for 75% of all answers.

This is pretty significant, especially when you consider that most creative sessions and workshops are run during working hours, and in an environment which is as far removed as you could be from sleep.

How to use it

So, what does this mean for creative practice. Well, it certainly challenges conventional innovation methods structured around creative workshops which happen during office hours. It suggests that a wider range of tools and processes to enhance individual creativity, including changing the context (environment and time of day) in which these exercises occur can have a big impact on the overall creative output for a project.

We believe that the best approach is mixed. We start by thinking about people as individual innovators and consider how to maximise their creative contribution through solo creative exercises as well as more conventional group sessions and workshops. If we really want individuals to contribute their best ideas, we believe that challenging conventions and bringing in new approaches to creativity, like using the power of sleep, can make a big difference. So the next time you are planning a creative session, maybe plan in ways to help the team sleep on it!