Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick and Robert, I want to tell you a story
Speaker 1: about visions of frog hearts dancing in the void. Do tell? Okay?
Speaker 1: So In ninety six, the German American pharmacologist and physician
Speaker 1: Otto Loewis and the English pharmacologist Henry Dale together won
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for their discoveries
Speaker 1: about how signals travel between nerve cells and then from
Speaker 1: nerve cells two organs in the body. Back then, this
Speaker 1: wasn't specifically known, like how does the nervous system transmit
Speaker 1: information back and forth? People thought, you know, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: it's electrical. We discovered electricity at the time. What exactly
Speaker 1: is going on there? And specifically, what they found is
Speaker 1: that chemicals were involved often sending these impulses back and
Speaker 1: forth in the nervous system. And in one famous experiment,
Speaker 1: Otto Lowy and some colleagues first slowed down the beating
Speaker 1: of a frog's heart by stimulating the vagus nerve connected
Speaker 1: to it. Now, that's the thing that they knew already
Speaker 1: at the time they could do, if you stimulate the
Speaker 1: vegas nerve, you can make the heartbeat decrease in rate.
Speaker 1: Then they took fluid from the slowed down heart and
Speaker 1: perfused a second frog's heart with that fluid from the
Speaker 1: slow beating first heart. Now the second frog heart also
Speaker 1: slowed down, even though no nerves had been stimulated, and
Speaker 1: this provided evidence that some chemical property of the fluid
Speaker 1: from the first heart had effects on the nerve cells
Speaker 1: in the second heart. Essentially that chemicals controlled nervous tissue behavior,
Speaker 1: and the chemical that slowed down the heartbeat was originally
Speaker 1: called vegas stuff that's a good German name for it um,
Speaker 1: but now we know it to be a setal cullen.
Speaker 1: And then in a related experiment, Lois showed that you
Speaker 1: could speed up a frog heart with fluid from another
Speaker 1: heart whose accelerated nerve had been stimulated. So Louie had
Speaker 1: hypothesized for many years that chemical transmission might have been
Speaker 1: the basis of the nervous system, but had been unable
Speaker 1: to prove it, and then these experiments eventually proved pretty
Speaker 1: decisive in demonstrating the chemical nature of nerve cell communication
Speaker 1: that there's some chemical property being traded back and forth.
Speaker 1: So where did Lowie get the idea for this breakthrough experiment.
Speaker 1: There is a very strange story about that. According to
Speaker 1: Lowie in his own words, quote the night before Easter
Speaker 1: Sunday of nineteen twenty, I awoke, turned on the light,
Speaker 1: and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip
Speaker 1: of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred
Speaker 1: to me at six o'clock in the morning that during
Speaker 1: the night I had written down something important, but I
Speaker 1: was unable to decipher the scrull. The next night, at
Speaker 1: three o'clock, the idea returned. He was the design of
Speaker 1: an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of
Speaker 1: chemical transmission that I had undered seventeen years ago was correct.
Speaker 1: I got up, immediately went to the laboratory and performed
Speaker 1: a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the
Speaker 1: nocturnal design. So we're talking about dream inspiration here. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the idea that the breakthrough, that dramatic twist
Speaker 1: in the researcher story uh comes from the world of dreams.
Speaker 1: Right now, all we have to go on here is
Speaker 1: Louie's own words, right, I mean, who knows whether the
Speaker 1: dream is as he says it was a direct imagistic
Speaker 1: inspiration for the experiment that would later prove pretty decisive
Speaker 1: in showing the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. But that's
Speaker 1: what he says, and he is not alone in telling
Speaker 1: a story like this about a breakthrough experiment, discovery, invention,
Speaker 1: artistic innovation. This is a very common type of story
Speaker 1: among people who are often characterized as geniuses. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see this all the time, and certainly just the
Speaker 1: idea of dream inspiration or something more supernatural, something more
Speaker 1: magical communication through a dream, such as from the divine.
Speaker 1: These tales go back throughout our our various religions and mythologies. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I've always thought is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting about the idea of dream inspiration is that
Speaker 1: it is taken to be an inherently supernatural thing in
Speaker 1: these ancient stories, Right, Like the gods visit you in
Speaker 1: a dream and they give you some kind of insight
Speaker 1: or they give you the solution to a problem, and
Speaker 1: it's just accepted that that is a supernatural deliverance that
Speaker 1: could not have been accessed by the person themselves. But
Speaker 1: what do our brains do? I mean, our brains think
Speaker 1: our brains figure things out. It does not actually seem
Speaker 1: all that strange to me. You're in need of a
Speaker 1: supernatural explanation that the brain could be figuring things out
Speaker 1: and gaining insights during sleep. No, not at all. And
Speaker 1: we'll get into the some of the science behind this
Speaker 1: as we proceed, but I think a couple of things
Speaker 1: are crucial here. So we talked about the the idea
Speaker 1: of the distinction between religious dreams of inspiration in these
Speaker 1: scientific dreams. But ultimately, the realm of sleep is a
Speaker 1: realm of mystery, and in olden days, uh, for the
Speaker 1: most part, dreams were a realm of religious mystery. To
Speaker 1: a scientific individual, then the dreams are still a dream,
Speaker 1: is still a realm of mystery, but it is a
Speaker 1: realm of cognitive mystery, of scientific mystery and verifiable discovery. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so in either realm, though, it seems natural that
Speaker 1: that answers might arise from them, and when they do,
Speaker 1: they can fulfill a vital storytelling role because nobody wants
Speaker 1: to hear this exchange. Oh that's a tremendous breakthrough. Dr Brundle,
Speaker 1: How did you, uh, how did you come across that breakthrough?
Speaker 1: You don't want the answer to beate, Well, I worked
Speaker 1: really hard and I thought about it a lot, and
Speaker 1: uh eventually work through the problem. No, you want to
Speaker 1: hear something like well, I was. I was working really
Speaker 1: hard on the problem and I couldn't quite crack it.
Speaker 1: And then I had a dream or some variation at
Speaker 1: or then I bumped my head while standing on the
Speaker 1: toilet to hang a clock. That would be the case
Speaker 1: of doctor the fictional Dr Emmett Brown and back to
Speaker 1: the future, right, And that was when I saw it,
Speaker 1: the flux capacitor. Yeah. I think another variation on this is, oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't know how to work out this detail, so
Speaker 1: I went on a walk in nature. Or I alight
Speaker 1: took an hallucinogenic drug into bet. You know, these are
Speaker 1: the different answers that sort of answers you often see
Speaker 1: thrown out there when creative minds, either artistic or scientific,
Speaker 1: are trying to crack something. You want there to be
Speaker 1: this dramatic turning point. Yeah, and and if we broaden
Speaker 1: it beyond dreams, just to the idea of sudden unexpected
Speaker 1: realizations in the pursuit of say scientific knowledge or experiment design,
Speaker 1: or breakthroughs in math or anything like that. There are
Speaker 1: even more examples of this, and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about plenty of examples where people think that a dream
Speaker 1: or a period of sleep gave of them the answer
Speaker 1: to something or gave them a breakthrough. But I remember
Speaker 1: hearing the story that apparently Einstein, you know, he said
Speaker 1: he had to be careful shaving because suddenly ideas would
Speaker 1: just leap into his mind while he was shaving. He'd
Speaker 1: be careful not to cut himself. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that story is true, but it is a story. It
Speaker 1: sounds great, Yeah, it does. And if your experience is
Speaker 1: anything like mine, I've never discovered anything on the scale
Speaker 1: of Einstein, but I feel like I that rings true
Speaker 1: of the characteristics of my thoughts sometimes, like I often
Speaker 1: don't know from where what feel like my best insights arise.
Speaker 1: You don't necessarily come from sitting down and concentrating real
Speaker 1: hard on a problem until you arrive at the solution.
Speaker 1: You're doing something else and then suddenly it just hits you,
Speaker 1: as if out of the void. Yeah, an an Eureka
Speaker 1: moment does often feel like something from outside yourself, and
Speaker 1: therefore I think it lends itself to these type of stories.
Speaker 1: Like for my own part, my dreams don't really give
Speaker 1: me a lot of inspiration these days. They're generally more
Speaker 1: about anxieties and petty fears. There's just just petty stuff,
Speaker 1: like petty day planning type type situations. But some of
Speaker 1: my best creative thinking, either, of course, comes during the
Speaker 1: act of writing. We know that that that that free
Speaker 1: flow mode of creative activity, or when I'm swimming laps,
Speaker 1: like when I when my perhaps when my my brain
Speaker 1: is is forced to operate in a slightly different way.
Speaker 1: That's when I can suddenly start making connections that I
Speaker 1: am not making the rest of my waking time. I
Speaker 1: often feel like the most creative I am any time, ever,
Speaker 1: is the time between when I wake up and when
Speaker 1: I get out of bed. That's for me, that's my
Speaker 1: most disoriented time. I don't know where I am or
Speaker 1: what I was working on. All I know is that
Speaker 1: the cat is making a lot of noise, and I'm
Speaker 1: afraid that a banshee has manifested in the house. So
Speaker 1: I guess we should talk about some more examples of
Speaker 1: these anecdotes. At least where people claim to have made
Speaker 1: major breakthroughs or discoveries or solved problems in dreams or
Speaker 1: during periods of sleep. There's this great quote from John
Speaker 1: Steinbeck where he writes in his nineteen four novel Suite
Speaker 1: Thursday Quote, it is a common experience that a problem
Speaker 1: difficult at night is resolved in the morning, after the
Speaker 1: Committee of Sleep has worked on it. Yes. And actually
Speaker 1: one of the authors and researchers we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about in this episode today Deadre Barrett, who is a
Speaker 1: psychologist who works on dreams and sleep creativity. She took
Speaker 1: that phrase the Committee of Sleep and made it into
Speaker 1: a title of a book she wrote about dreams and creativity. Now,
Speaker 1: we've talked about dreams and stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: quite a bit over the years. Again, it's this realm
Speaker 1: of mystery. We can't help but study and discuss it,
Speaker 1: how we interpret them, how we might manipulate them, and
Speaker 1: what they're actually for. And there is no consensus on
Speaker 1: the purpose of dreams. I thought that we might just
Speaker 1: play a clip from a previous interview that we conducted
Speaker 1: with Dr Moran surf Uh We talked to us in
Speaker 1: our episode the nine dream Worlds of Frederick van eden
Speaker 1: uh and I. And this is his response to to
Speaker 1: my question, is there a consensus on the purpose of dreams?
Speaker 1: There isn't. There are like five different theories that try
Speaker 1: to explain what dreams are full, and they range from
Speaker 1: therefore nothing to they're the most important things that our
Speaker 1: brain can do. So here's like the kind of layout
Speaker 1: of those. One of the theo is says that dreams
Speaker 1: are basically our brain's way of defragmenting the hard lives
Speaker 1: you kind of overnight. You have to choose which wem
Speaker 1: always to erase, which ones to keep, and your brains
Speaker 1: sort them out. And because you see the visuals, if
Speaker 1: you want of those mem always passing by, you create
Speaker 1: a narrative of that, and this is what you call
Speaker 1: a dream. This is a theory that says that they
Speaker 1: don't really mean much. It's just that they're kind of
Speaker 1: an artifact of our brain doing things. That's on the
Speaker 1: one explain or the other explain that. The theory that
Speaker 1: our brain is essentially looking and fishing inside at things
Speaker 1: that we suppressed during the day. This is the free
Speaker 1: game theory. It said, we're kind of very stuff deep
Speaker 1: inside that you want to not deal with it. And
Speaker 1: then at night, because our god or down no, because
Speaker 1: our brain speaks without anyone suppressing things, we get exposed
Speaker 1: to things that kind of come up from from our psyche.
Speaker 1: A third one that's really popular right now that I'm
Speaker 1: supporting in many ways is one way the brain is
Speaker 1: using the dream to simulate futures for us and kind
Speaker 1: of leave to them in the ultimate visuality, so we
Speaker 1: would actually know when we wake up if we should
Speaker 1: do do not. So the idea is that you're debating
Speaker 1: whether to marry her and move to Alabama or break
Speaker 1: up and decide to start a campaign in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and you really don't know what to do, so overnight
Speaker 1: your brain plays both movies of you moving to Alabama
Speaker 1: with her and you started the company in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: And because it's such a cool virtuality with the brains,
Speaker 1: we doesn't know that it's not really going to the experience.
Speaker 1: You filter all of this movie through your values and emotions,
Speaker 1: and when you wake up, even though the memory itself
Speaker 1: is lost and you have no collection of the dream,
Speaker 1: what survives is the feeling towards those choices. So when
Speaker 1: you wake up, you kind of have a better answer
Speaker 1: to what you should do. So those are three CEO
Speaker 1: is there's two more along the same lines, but they
Speaker 1: cannot fall into those packets. They mean nothing, but they're
Speaker 1: just our brains way of working. They mean a lot,
Speaker 1: because there are brains way of reflecting things that we
Speaker 1: are self suppressed, and they are are brains way of
Speaker 1: stimulating futures that we didn't experience yet in an ultimate
Speaker 1: virtuality device. That's so amazing that we are fooled by
Speaker 1: it ourselves, thinking that we are the character in this movie,
Speaker 1: and then waking up and knowing what to do now.
Speaker 1: Some have speculated that dreams are tied to the brains
Speaker 1: crunching of waking world problems. So the idea of solving
Speaker 1: problems and our dreams that just seems to fit, right,
Speaker 1: But it also fits are these much older ideas of
Speaker 1: dreams as prophet your communication with the divine, And you
Speaker 1: can see the danger there. The idea of inspiration and
Speaker 1: dreams is just so romantically captivating. Uh, Even as if
Speaker 1: one is above outright lying about dream inspiration to improve
Speaker 1: their storytelling, it's still rather easy to manipulate our memories
Speaker 1: of dreams. Oh yeah, I bet you've had this experience
Speaker 1: where you start trying to explain a dream you just
Speaker 1: had and suddenly you can't tell if what you're saying
Speaker 1: about your memory of the dream is really what you
Speaker 1: dreamed or if you're just making it up. Now it
Speaker 1: feels very blurry the line between the two. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe you didn't see the answer in a dream. Maybe
Speaker 1: the dream just contain fragments of the problem, but it
Speaker 1: makes for a better story. Though then again, if it
Speaker 1: contained fragments of the problem that leads you to the answer,
Speaker 1: is that fundamentally all that different from seeing the answer
Speaker 1: in the dream. That's true. That's true. And if you
Speaker 1: go with any of these interpretations where dreams are important,
Speaker 1: where they are, uh, there, there's there's something more than
Speaker 1: just uh, you steam being released from the from the
Speaker 1: cognitive engine. Uh, then it makes sense that that they
Speaker 1: would play a role. Now, we mentioned that there were
Speaker 1: a bunch of anecdotes throughout history of people claiming that
Speaker 1: dreams gave them some kind of creative breakthrough and solving
Speaker 1: a problem or in in doing doing something creative and original. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's talk about a few of them. Okay, Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: let's We're not gonna run through all of them, but
Speaker 1: we'll run through a few notable ones here, and all
Speaker 1: of them, all of them, all dreams that have ever occurred,
Speaker 1: will be cataloged for you to know. No, these are
Speaker 1: just a few, uh that pop up from time to
Speaker 1: time and or and in many cases are often cited.
Speaker 1: So starting with some artists, Salvador Dolly, he attributed the
Speaker 1: persistence of memory to dream inspiration. It's not hard to imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a dreamlike quality, an overt dreamlike quality
Speaker 1: to his work. Also, I think Dolly was a liar,
Speaker 1: so who knows what he if what he says about
Speaker 1: the inspiration of anything is true, that's true his stories
Speaker 1: about the creation of his work or often you can
Speaker 1: see them as just extensions of the fantastic painting. Paul
Speaker 1: McCartney claims the melody for Yesterday came to him in
Speaker 1: a dream. Sure. Stephen King, of course, I had this
Speaker 1: life threatening accident in n and he experienced vivid dreams
Speaker 1: in recovery, and he claims that a lot of dream
Speaker 1: Catcher came from those dreams. Okay, is that I've never
Speaker 1: read that book. I think I've tried to watch the movie.
Speaker 1: Is the book more interesting than the movie? I haven't
Speaker 1: neither seen nor read it because there was kind of
Speaker 1: a negative buzz about both of them. I've always been
Speaker 1: fascinated with the idea sound. I need to read it
Speaker 1: or see it. I need to commit to one or
Speaker 1: the other because I love the concept. I remember extended
Speaker 1: sequences of people defecating alien life forms. See there you go.
Speaker 1: That sounds great. Um. Also, you have some some athletic
Speaker 1: creative types in the on the mix here, golfer Jack
Speaker 1: Nicholas claim names that he improved his golf golf game
Speaker 1: based on a dream in which he saw a new
Speaker 1: way to grasp his club. Okay, yeah, who knows if
Speaker 1: that's true, but all right. William Blake would attribute to
Speaker 1: some of his ideas to dream visitations of his dead brother.
Speaker 1: We of course, also have to look to Coleridge's opium
Speaker 1: induced dreams. Oh yeah, the poem Kubla Khan, right was
Speaker 1: supposedly inspired by a dream or even did he even
Speaker 1: say it was composed in the dream? He may have it,
Speaker 1: I remember. Some of this also factors into confessions of
Speaker 1: an English opium eater as well. Um. Also, you have
Speaker 1: Robert Louis Stevenson who claims to have dreamt two scenes
Speaker 1: from Dr Jacqueline mr. Hyde. But these are all artists
Speaker 1: and creative types, right. Well, maybe Putting, who knows of
Speaker 1: Jack Nicholas, counts there, but he he is an artist
Speaker 1: of the green. It's harder to see, it's harder to
Speaker 1: see what's all that unusual about dreams inspiring artists and
Speaker 1: musicians and stuff, because in a way, there's no wrong
Speaker 1: answer in art, right, So what's really interesting is when
Speaker 1: you get like an experiment, design, or something in science
Speaker 1: that is either valid or not, or how or actually
Speaker 1: has a right answer or not. Yeah, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: get into some of the scientific examples that this first one, though,
Speaker 1: kind of I guess, straddles the realm here between the
Speaker 1: purely artistic and the purely scientific. Because you had scholar
Speaker 1: Hermann Hilprecht who lived eighteen fifty nine through nine, and
Speaker 1: he reported that he dreamed an Assyrian priest came to
Speaker 1: him and revealed the accurate translation of the stone of Nebuchadnezzar,
Speaker 1: which that just sounds amazing. Well, I know she wasn't Assyrian,
Speaker 1: but I want to hear the dream where in Headuana
Speaker 1: comes and poses some wrathful poetry about Anana. Yeah. What
Speaker 1: it makes for a nice footnote too, when you have
Speaker 1: visitations like this. Uh. And that's something to keep in
Speaker 1: mind as we roll through a number of these. You
Speaker 1: have individuals making scientific break breakthroughs, and they don't necessary
Speaker 1: like a lot of our accounts of the dream inspiration
Speaker 1: are not coming directly from that individual, or they're coming
Speaker 1: years after the fact. It varies from case to case,
Speaker 1: because I guess ultimately it's not the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you would necessarily put into your scientific paper and say
Speaker 1: and then I had a dream and this was the result. Well.
Speaker 1: A classic example of the scientific inspiration from a dream,
Speaker 1: apart from Otto Loewi, was also Dimitri mendal aev right, yes,
Speaker 1: who of course live at eighteen thirty four through nine seven,
Speaker 1: the Russian chemist who gave us the periodic table. The
Speaker 1: story goes that he saw a complete periodic table in
Speaker 1: a dream. Um. And maybe I've just been thinking too
Speaker 1: much about Ghostbusters, but I want to imagine what it
Speaker 1: would have been like if mental had had been forced
Speaker 1: to choose the form of gozer, which they're taken on
Speaker 1: the form of the periodic table, what's the atomic number
Speaker 1: of Gozer? Now, as G. W. Baylor points out, there
Speaker 1: are some problems with this story, so we have no
Speaker 1: dream journal to go off here. We just have a
Speaker 1: colleague secondhand account, And it seems like he'd already crafted
Speaker 1: the periodic table before the alleged dream took place, and
Speaker 1: merely saw an improved version of it in his dreams,
Speaker 1: a version of the story that sounds maybe a lot
Speaker 1: more sensible, but and and maybe more in line with
Speaker 1: some of these other stories. Either way, you can still
Speaker 1: call that dream inspiration, you know, if you're if the
Speaker 1: thing you're trying to create either appears to you wholesale
Speaker 1: in the dream based on your work and experience, or
Speaker 1: some updated version, some twist on it appears in your dream. Now,
Speaker 1: since we're in the realm of chemistry, we should go
Speaker 1: to maybe the single most often cited example of dream
Speaker 1: inspiration in science, which is August ka Yes lived eight
Speaker 1: uh and he dreamt of whirling snakes and allegedly discovered
Speaker 1: the ring shape of the benzene molecule by seeing an
Speaker 1: aora boris in his dream. Or a boris, of course,
Speaker 1: is the serpent consuming its own tail. One thing to
Speaker 1: keep in mind, that is this account didn't emerge until
Speaker 1: twenty eight years later, So that's more than enough time
Speaker 1: obviously for memory to have been altered or the story
Speaker 1: to have been maybe a little embellished dramaticized, but it's
Speaker 1: it's still one of the examples that you see cited
Speaker 1: time after time for dream inspiration in science. Well, anything
Speaker 1: we can get smaller than a benzine molecule. Oh, we
Speaker 1: can move on to the work of Neil's Bore, who've
Speaker 1: talked about recently. Through nineteen so he claimed to have
Speaker 1: developed his model of the atom based on a dream
Speaker 1: he had in which he sat on the Sun and
Speaker 1: the planets moved around him on tiny chords. Now that's
Speaker 1: cosmic terror. Up next on our list of considerations. Here
Speaker 1: there's J. B. Parkinson, who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one. He got invented computer controlled anti aircraft guns,
Speaker 1: and this is an excerpt from his New York Times
Speaker 1: oh bit. Mr Parkinson, who was a member of the
Speaker 1: technical staff of Bell Laboratories in New York in nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: had a dream that had that a device he designed
Speaker 1: to guide a marking stylist could be used to control
Speaker 1: anti aircraft guns. He developed a prototype, and the Western
Speaker 1: Electric Company began mass producing it. His achievements won him
Speaker 1: a presidential award and a Franklin Institute Medal. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: whether or not you like the fact that it was
Speaker 1: a weapon, even weapons take creativity to produce, true, and
Speaker 1: and it was a defensive weapon, we can say that
Speaker 1: anti aircraft gun for the most part. Okay. Up next,
Speaker 1: we have a sewing machine inventor and handsome werewolf Elias.
Speaker 1: How I recommend everyone look up a picture of of
Speaker 1: old Elias here because he was something else that, Like,
Speaker 1: I've never seen somebody's sport one of those kind of
Speaker 1: a neck beard so glamorously. It's the beard without the mustache.
Speaker 1: But it looks it's very fluffy and luxurious. It looks
Speaker 1: like he's been brushing it a lot. Yeah, it's there's
Speaker 1: this seam seamless flow from his his thick head of
Speaker 1: hair into this beard. Uh. I just get a very
Speaker 1: handsome werewolf off of him. They should have cast him
Speaker 1: in that Wolfman remake. Yeah. Well, he allegedly dreamt he
Speaker 1: was building a sewing machine for a savage king in
Speaker 1: a strange country. I love that. So there's not a
Speaker 1: lot to back this up, but the story appeared in
Speaker 1: a later family history. Here's a quote. He thought the
Speaker 1: king gave him twenty four hours in which to complete
Speaker 1: the machine and make it so if not finished in
Speaker 1: that time, death was to be the punishment. How it
Speaker 1: worked and worked and puzzled, and finally gave it up.
Speaker 1: Then he thought he was taken out to be executed.
Speaker 1: He noticed that the warriors carried spears that were pierced
Speaker 1: near the head. Instantly came the solution of the difficulty,
Speaker 1: and while the inventor was was begging for time, he awoke.
Speaker 1: It was four o'clock in the morning. He jumped out
Speaker 1: of bed, ran to his workshop, and by nine a
Speaker 1: needle with an eye at the point had been rudely modeled.
Speaker 1: After that, it was easy. That is the true story
Speaker 1: of an important incident in the invention of the sewing machine.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I mean, again, who knows if it's true,
Speaker 1: but doing it is true. If you just play with
Speaker 1: that for a second, Okay, say that story is true.
Speaker 1: It's interesting the way in which these revelations seem to
Speaker 1: be arriving, you know, not necessarily through literal ideas, right,
Speaker 1: like seeing a snake eating its tail or seeing the
Speaker 1: spear with the hole at the tip of the spear.
Speaker 1: They're not through literal understandings of say a dream about
Speaker 1: trying to design a sewing machine and coming up with
Speaker 1: the idea of a needle with a hole at its tip.
Speaker 1: But there's some kind of like image association thing their
Speaker 1: visual type dreams where you see an association between unrelated things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's almost a sense of you know, someone like, oh,
Speaker 1: spending his his day trying to crack this problem with
Speaker 1: the left brain, and then at night is kind of this,
Speaker 1: uh hey, right brain, what have you got anything? Anything
Speaker 1: like just tumbling around? You want to throw at it,
Speaker 1: maybe not to do well. I wonder to what degree
Speaker 1: the hemispheric division does play into that, But I think
Speaker 1: some version of that will come through and some of
Speaker 1: the research we're gonna talk about later, right. I I
Speaker 1: don't want to imply that people are dolphins and have
Speaker 1: uni hemospheric sleep, but though that would be an entirely
Speaker 1: different scenario to try to imagine how that would play
Speaker 1: into problem solving. Okay, and finally we're gonna mention Albert
Speaker 1: Einstein one last time because he in addition to his
Speaker 1: uh his crazy sparks of razor flinging um eureka moments,
Speaker 1: he once said that his entire career was it was
Speaker 1: an extended meditation on a slaying dream he had as
Speaker 1: a child, leading him to contemplate the speed of light. Now,
Speaker 1: that's slaying with an e I g H. Not like
Speaker 1: a dragon slay, not not running around with the razor blade,
Speaker 1: but no like moving quickly through the snow in uh
Speaker 1: in a in a vehicle of sorts that that you
Speaker 1: can see how that would lead to, say, contemplations about
Speaker 1: what would happen if you were trying to catch up
Speaker 1: with a beam of light. Yeah. Now, again, we've tried
Speaker 1: to display enough skepticism about these anecdotal accounts because, as
Speaker 1: we've said, a lot of times, they're they're self reported
Speaker 1: or the are reported much later. I mean, who knows
Speaker 1: if into what extent they're exactly correct in saying where
Speaker 1: these ideas came from. But I do feel like there's
Speaker 1: an emerging theme that there does appear to be some
Speaker 1: link between creativity and sleep or dreams, at least there
Speaker 1: appears to be. Uh. The one thing I want to
Speaker 1: stress here is that creativity? The kind of creativity we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about today's creativity. I think as psychologists
Speaker 1: would tend to use the word which means something like
Speaker 1: one's ability to use adaptive problem solving, and not necessarily
Speaker 1: like how artistic or how unique you are other things
Speaker 1: we would usually think of when we use the word creative.
Speaker 1: In the psychological sense, creative means something like the ability
Speaker 1: to think in novel ways to achieve a goal. And
Speaker 1: this of course includes artistic creativity, but it's not limited
Speaker 1: to it, right, It can very well include uh, hey,
Speaker 1: what have I held the golf club like this instead
Speaker 1: of like that? Yeah? Yeah, it's novel thinking, so uh
Speaker 1: It basically, to use a cliche, I mean thinking outside
Speaker 1: the box to solve a problem. Whether that problem is
Speaker 1: how should we picture the structure of an atom? Or
Speaker 1: how can I figure out why my lawnmower won't start?
Speaker 1: Or how should I tie up all the narrative threads
Speaker 1: in my novel? In each case it's requiring novel thinking.
Speaker 1: It's creativity. But okay, anecdotes, of course, as we all know,
Speaker 1: can be cheap. Is there, like any evidence from controlled
Speaker 1: research that shows a relationship between sleep, dreams, and creativity
Speaker 1: or are these just sort of cute, cherry picked stories.
Speaker 1: I think we should address that after we come back
Speaker 1: from a break. Thank alright, we're back. So, yeah, we've
Speaker 1: talked about these examples and how they might tie into creativity.
Speaker 1: But what happens when we start looking to uh, to
Speaker 1: actual control research for answers. That's a great question. So
Speaker 1: to be clear, researches tended to show that sleep has
Speaker 1: several roles in improving and maintaining areas of brain functions. Specifically,
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of research on sleep in memory,
Speaker 1: Like studies have Indica hated that R E M sleep
Speaker 1: may play a role in memory consolidation, improving the memory
Speaker 1: of things learned throughout the day, and even things like
Speaker 1: emotional associations with those memories. But actually, yes, there is
Speaker 1: also controlled research on sleep and creativity. Actually, there's too
Speaker 1: much of it to cover here, so we're just going
Speaker 1: to have to discuss a few interesting highlights that came
Speaker 1: to our attention. In general, it seems that it has
Speaker 1: yielded some very interesting but sometimes contradictory findings. So to
Speaker 1: begin a smattering of recent studies, One was by CEO
Speaker 1: Monahan and Ormad called sleep on it, but only if
Speaker 1: it is difficult. Effects of sleep on problem solving in
Speaker 1: memory and cognition in So this took twenty seven male
Speaker 1: and thirty four female students from Lancaster University, all native
Speaker 1: English speakers. Uh These were the subjects and they were
Speaker 1: given a set of thirty problems from what's known as
Speaker 1: the Remote Associates Test or the RAT test. Though I
Speaker 1: guess it's only the RAT test in the way that
Speaker 1: the A T M machine is a machine. The rat
Speaker 1: We'll just say the RAT is a common battery used
Speaker 1: to test people's creative potential using word association. Have you
Speaker 1: ever done a test like this, Robert, I haven't, But
Speaker 1: I have to say that sentence that you just said
Speaker 1: about the rat, that that feels like the most cut
Speaker 1: up machine statement I've heard heard in recent In recent times,
Speaker 1: it's the opening of a william Us Burrows and the
Speaker 1: rat is a common battery used to test creative potential.
Speaker 1: So here's how the rat works. I'm gonna give you
Speaker 1: three words, and you tell me a fourth word that
Speaker 1: is related to all three of the original words. In
Speaker 1: my experience, these are funny because they can seem really
Speaker 1: difficult for a moment until you see the answer, either
Speaker 1: by figuring it out or by or by just cheating
Speaker 1: and looking at it, at which point then it immediately
Speaker 1: feels embarrassingly obvious and you don't know why you couldn't
Speaker 1: figure it out for a minute. So a couple of examples. Robert,
Speaker 1: what's the fourth word associated with these three room, blood salts?
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with slug slug, room, slug blood. It's
Speaker 1: just what came to mind. That's how this works, right,
Speaker 1: So supposed to be whatever pops into my head? Or
Speaker 1: am I trying to determine a path? No, you're trying
Speaker 1: to solve it. Okay, well that's different. Um let's say room,
Speaker 1: blood salts, room blood salts, room, blood salts, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm still going with slugs, show I don't know, bath
Speaker 1: bath bath, bathroom blood bath, bath salts. Okay, yeah, so
Speaker 1: they all relate to that word. Okay, now I see
Speaker 1: how that how this is working. Okay, So, yeah, you
Speaker 1: had your training session. Are you ready to be subjected
Speaker 1: to more? Yes, let's go. Okay, these three words, what's
Speaker 1: the fourth word? See home stomach, see home stomach? I
Speaker 1: mean slug would work with all of these again, uh
Speaker 1: if I were pressed. Uh, but let's see sick. Oh exactly,
Speaker 1: there you go see sick, homesick, sick to your stomach. Okay,
Speaker 1: I got a third third one for you. Car swimming
Speaker 1: q Oh, that's pool, right, exactly, car pool swimming, pool
Speaker 1: pool que Okay. Alright. So that's how this test works,
Speaker 1: and it's a pretty good concise way of trying to
Speaker 1: test for creative potential thinking, right, because you're you're trying
Speaker 1: to get people to think laterally, right, there's no direct
Speaker 1: way to solve this. You have to kind of think
Speaker 1: by sideways association. And so anyway, the participants were given
Speaker 1: questions of this sort, and then after they were initially
Speaker 1: given the questions they were there was a delay, and
Speaker 1: the delay either included sleep or included no sleep, or
Speaker 1: there was no delay, and participants then tried again to
Speaker 1: solve rat problems that they couldn't solve on their first attempt,
Speaker 1: and the group that had slept in between attempts solved
Speaker 1: a greater number of problems rated quote difficult than other groups,
Speaker 1: but there was no difference between groups for the problems
Speaker 1: that were rated easy, So it looks like sleep did
Speaker 1: play some role in aiding creative problem solving, especially on
Speaker 1: harder than average problems that required this kind of sideways
Speaker 1: associative thinking. And I think that matches up with with
Speaker 1: our experience, you know. I think we've all been in
Speaker 1: a situation where we've been studying for something, or studying
Speaker 1: up on something, and we reached kind of a breaking point.
Speaker 1: We go to bed, we hopefully get a full night's sleep,
Speaker 1: and then the next day everything is a little clear,
Speaker 1: everything's a little more assembled, as if the pieces did
Speaker 1: some sort of partial assembly on their own in the night. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And there's another study I want to mention that is
Speaker 1: kind of similar in nature. So this one is called
Speaker 1: sleep promotes analogical transfer and problem solving. This was from Cognition,
Speaker 1: has a couple of the same authors from the previous
Speaker 1: study and then some different authors, and they wanted to
Speaker 1: study of sleep actually had any effect on quote analogical
Speaker 1: problem solving, and this means using a known solution from
Speaker 1: one problem to solve a different but related problem, So basically,
Speaker 1: to solve a similar type of problem. So what would
Speaker 1: be an example of analogical problem solving. Well, I've got
Speaker 1: one here, I'm gonna start to do two questions. Here's
Speaker 1: the first question. This is the sample question. How can
Speaker 1: a gardener plant four trees so that the trees are
Speaker 1: equi distant from one another? If you want to pause
Speaker 1: it and try to figure that out for a second,
Speaker 1: be my guest, but you'll you'll immediately run into problems
Speaker 1: if you're trying to map it out on a piece
Speaker 1: of paper, right, Because if you put them, say, in
Speaker 1: a square in a square pattern, the ones at the
Speaker 1: corners are going to be farther away from each other
Speaker 1: than they are from the ones that are one side
Speaker 1: away from them, right, So how can you put four
Speaker 1: trees equidistant from from one another? The answer is you
Speaker 1: put one of them on a hill. So, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to picture this, three of the trees are in
Speaker 1: an equilateral triangle at the bottom of the hill, and
Speaker 1: then the fourth tree is at the middle of a
Speaker 1: hill in between them, at such a height that it's
Speaker 1: the same distance from all of the trees below, all
Speaker 1: three of the trees below, So you've essentially made a
Speaker 1: triangular pyramid of trees, right, yes, okay, or some sort
Speaker 1: of you know, an ancient pagan temple. I like that.
Speaker 1: That's good. Yeah, the one tree at the top of
Speaker 1: the hill. It conjures to mind like the sacred priest
Speaker 1: keeper of the tree, or who you have to slay
Speaker 1: in order to become the new the new priest. That's
Speaker 1: slay with an a y, not Einstein sligh. But so
Speaker 1: once you've seen the solution to that problem, you're given
Speaker 1: another problem. Here's the analogical problem. Can you assemble six
Speaker 1: matches to form four equilateral triangles, each side of which
Speaker 1: is equal to the length of one match? Again, if
Speaker 1: you want to try to pause and solve this for yourself,
Speaker 1: be our guests r under your nearest restaurant, UH that
Speaker 1: has a complimentary matches UH, start assembling them on the table.
Speaker 1: You're gonna want to order a drink just or some
Speaker 1: appetizer just so that you can have a seat to
Speaker 1: do this and then report back. So, given that we've
Speaker 1: just primed you with the past example, it might not
Speaker 1: take you very long because the solution is very similar. Right,
Speaker 1: think not in two day, but in three d exactly.
Speaker 1: So the answer follows a similar logical leap. If you
Speaker 1: keep lying the matches flat on the table, you're just
Speaker 1: never going to be able to make four equilateral triangles
Speaker 1: with a side length of one match. The answer is
Speaker 1: to build into three dimensions. Like you say, M make
Speaker 1: a tetrahedron, you make a triangular pyramid, and then you've
Speaker 1: solved this the Sprain teaser. So in the first experiment
Speaker 1: of the study, participants were shown a set of source
Speaker 1: problems to demonstrate general styles of solutions like the trees
Speaker 1: and the hill example we gave. Then there was a
Speaker 1: twelve hour period which involved either sleeping or not sleeping.
Speaker 1: Then participants tried to solve problems related to the source
Speaker 1: problems they had been exposed to, but with different features,
Speaker 1: sort of like the second example with the matches. Then
Speaker 1: a second experiment controlled for time of day effects on
Speaker 1: results by testing in both the morning and the evening,
Speaker 1: and the authors found when controlling for other variables like
Speaker 1: drowsiness and time of day, sleep did still appear to
Speaker 1: somewhat improve analogical transfer. Participants who slept were better at
Speaker 1: applying types of outside the box reasoning that they had
Speaker 1: seen used before two new problems, And again, I feel
Speaker 1: like this lines up with our experiences. Yeah, though in
Speaker 1: in the wild sort of when you've had this experience
Speaker 1: of sleeping on a problem and then coming to a solution,
Speaker 1: you might wonder, like, which variables are at play? Right?
Speaker 1: You might just think, think, okay, I got some rest.
Speaker 1: Maybe getting some rest is the thing that did it.
Speaker 1: That's true. If you really wanted to, you could just
Speaker 1: cut dreams out of it entirely and go with one
Speaker 1: of those dream interpretations that relegates dreams to just mere
Speaker 1: steam from the machine ep epiphenomenal dreams. Yeah, um, but no,
Speaker 1: that the what we're trying to look for here is
Speaker 1: a test showing that dreams specifically or not necessarily dreams specifically,
Speaker 1: but sleep specifically, is doing something to help you solve
Speaker 1: the problem. And it's not just that, say, some time
Speaker 1: has passed in between and you've gotten some rest. You know,
Speaker 1: one thing we haven't mentioned in all of this is
Speaker 1: the the idea of book absorption. You know, the idea
Speaker 1: that certain this is completely nonsense, but you see it
Speaker 1: come occasionally, the idea of someone could lay their head
Speaker 1: upon a book and sleep and in doing so absorb
Speaker 1: the data from the book. I did not know that
Speaker 1: anybody thought that would actually happen. Do people think that
Speaker 1: actually happens. I think there may be like one account
Speaker 1: of someone claiming to have had that ability, but uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's not like they passed the Randy test with
Speaker 1: it or anything. Uh. The only way I could see
Speaker 1: that making a difference is if you've already read the
Speaker 1: book and then maybe by sleeping with your head on it,
Speaker 1: you would continually notice that you're uncomfortable as you're trying
Speaker 1: to go to sleep, and this would continually bring your
Speaker 1: mind back to the contents of the book. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that would make sense. Or you're so wrapped up
Speaker 1: in the idea of dream absorption of the book that
Speaker 1: you dream of the book maybe and you know you're
Speaker 1: not drawing new information out of a book you have
Speaker 1: not read, but perhaps your brain kind of puts things
Speaker 1: together like it reminds me of the situation I've I've
Speaker 1: mentioned this on the podcast before, and I imagine lots
Speaker 1: of you have experienced this. You're falling asleep and you're reading,
Speaker 1: and you begin to read words and sentences and even
Speaker 1: the whole pages that are not there, and then you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: I just need to go to sleep because I'm I'm
Speaker 1: experiencing hallucination. I'm dream reading. Yeah, now there's a bunch
Speaker 1: more research on this type of subject. For example, I
Speaker 1: was just looking at one study in PS one in
Speaker 1: which uh students who were trying to solve a puzzle
Speaker 1: video game level did better after they'd had a nap
Speaker 1: as opposed to just waiting for an equivalent amount of
Speaker 1: time and not sleeping. Uh So, but that was a
Speaker 1: small study. Another interesting one is the cognitive neuroscientist Aaron Wamsley,
Speaker 1: who has apparently performed research training people on solving a
Speaker 1: virtual maze. So there's you get trained on a virtual maze,
Speaker 1: and then there's a rest period involving no sleep, non
Speaker 1: rem sleep, or full rim sleep, and only the participants
Speaker 1: who underwent rim sleep showed improved performance on the maze. Now,
Speaker 1: if you know anything about sleep, you know that Wait
Speaker 1: a minute, Okay, the rim sleep is where the dreams happen.
Speaker 1: So this should bring us back to the question of Okay,
Speaker 1: we're showing like the sleep does appear to help people
Speaker 1: in solving problems one way or another, But do the
Speaker 1: dreams play any role? Is that what matters? You know?
Speaker 1: In the video games are an interesting example because I
Speaker 1: think of my own use of video games. Video games
Speaker 1: are not something I play first thing in the morning,
Speaker 1: when I'm fresh. These are things that I play, um
Speaker 1: towards the end of the day or perhaps even late
Speaker 1: at night, when my brain is spent for the evening.
Speaker 1: So if I'm if I gain advantage over a puzzle
Speaker 1: within a video game the next day, it seems more
Speaker 1: likely that it is due to something that's happening in
Speaker 1: my dreams rather than just being fresh, because again, I'm
Speaker 1: probably mentally exhausted if I'm playing a video game. That's
Speaker 1: true and also strikes me as a good use of
Speaker 1: your time. I mean, you don't want to be squandering
Speaker 1: your best creative energy on video games. I don't. I
Speaker 1: mean not to say that some some of some of
Speaker 1: those games are great and you don't kind of want
Speaker 1: to be fresh for, but that's just not how I
Speaker 1: currently live my life. No, I mean, my my opinion
Speaker 1: on video games is they are a great recreational relaxation activity,
Speaker 1: not something that that I think of in terms of
Speaker 1: achievement in right, unless you're being paid to participate in
Speaker 1: a study and then you can, you know, do whatever.
Speaker 1: But okay, we got to bring it back to dreams. Okay,
Speaker 1: So so do the dreams specifically play a role in
Speaker 1: creative problem solving? Now, I think we should look at
Speaker 1: the work of a psychologist named Deirdre Barrett. We mentioned
Speaker 1: her earlier in the episode, but she's a psychologist who
Speaker 1: at various points you've been on faculty at Suffolk University
Speaker 1: at Harvard Medical School. I believe she runs a private
Speaker 1: clinical practice in Cambridge and a lot of her work
Speaker 1: has been on study of dreams. So let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about Barrett's ideas. So Barrett has a ted
Speaker 1: talk from where she kind of summarizes some of her
Speaker 1: thinking about dreams and dream research. So she mentions three
Speaker 1: big questions. First, why is there any content to our
Speaker 1: nighttime sleep? Second, why is that content so different from
Speaker 1: our waking thinking? Why is it bizarre? You know, why
Speaker 1: is dream like even a thing? And then finally, do
Speaker 1: dreams have a function and if so, what? And Barrett
Speaker 1: seems to believe that dreams are basically just thinking in
Speaker 1: a different biochemical state. Quote the demands of our bodies
Speaker 1: during sleep and makes certain areas of our brains less active.
Speaker 1: So you can imagine that certain areas of the brain
Speaker 1: are getting different kinds of energy or oxygen or blood flow.
Speaker 1: But we keep thinking about the same kinds of concerns
Speaker 1: that preoccupy us when we're awake, and in this altered
Speaker 1: biochemical state, the sleeping brain approaches these concerns using very
Speaker 1: different systems and modes than we would use while are awake.
Speaker 1: So despite how bizarre these modes of thinking can feel
Speaker 1: in the moment in the dream, it is very odd.
Speaker 1: Barrett thinks these different perspectives provided by the dreaming mind
Speaker 1: can be helpful to problem solving. So under this model,
Speaker 1: by dreaming about the problems that concern us while we're awake,
Speaker 1: it's almost like we're having two different people working in
Speaker 1: tandem on solving the problem. Right, and what are these
Speaker 1: two people like? What are the different strengths they bring.
Speaker 1: So human sleep occurs in ninety minutes cycles, each one
Speaker 1: containing a period of what's known as rapid eye movement
Speaker 1: sleep or rims sleep, which we've mentioned, and each of
Speaker 1: these RIM periods contains dreaming. We don't tend to remember
Speaker 1: all of our dream cycles in the morning, but if
Speaker 1: you wake people up after each RIM period, they'll be
Speaker 1: able to describe five dreams in a night, and pet
Speaker 1: scans show that parts of the brain associated with visual imagery, movement,
Speaker 1: and emotion are active, often even more active than when
Speaker 1: we're awake. Meanwhile, frontal areas associated with abstract thinking, planning,
Speaker 1: and especially like UH, limitations on behavior and self censorship,
Speaker 1: these areas of the brain are suppressed. So you've got
Speaker 1: two different people working on the problem. The waking brain
Speaker 1: can work on it in a more controlled, focused, abstract,
Speaker 1: and planned way, while the dreaming brain can sort of
Speaker 1: play with the problem in an experimental, unfocused, visual, uncensored,
Speaker 1: associative way. And one of the ways this is often
Speaker 1: expressed is how do you solve problem? Hard problems? You
Speaker 1: often have to solve them by approaching them in a
Speaker 1: way that seems wrong at first, right, But the prefrontal
Speaker 1: part of the brain that's suppressed during rim sleep is
Speaker 1: the part of the brain that tells you no, no, no,
Speaker 1: don't think like that, that's wrong, Like the part of
Speaker 1: your your brain it says, well, if they're fighting over
Speaker 1: this baby, I'll just cut it in half, which is
Speaker 1: a well, no, the prefrontal part would tell you that's
Speaker 1: not an option, so you'd have to suppress that part
Speaker 1: of the brain. King Solomon, there is using dream logic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but and it ends up solving the problem spoiler for
Speaker 1: the Old Testament. But the two mothers stopped fighting over
Speaker 1: the child because the one who who cares the most
Speaker 1: about the child says, wait, don't cut the kid in half.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a social brain teaser. R. How do
Speaker 1: you get these people fighting over who who's the real
Speaker 1: mother of the baby to reveal their identities? And yeah,
Speaker 1: So so that that's a way of outside the box
Speaker 1: thinking that you might say is could be helped by
Speaker 1: rem sleep and dreaming. So you've got this one team
Speaker 1: member this very organized and logical, and the other team
Speaker 1: member is weird and creative and visual, and they sort
Speaker 1: of hand the problem off back and forth. That's an
Speaker 1: interesting possibility. So it looked at paper by Barrett, The
Speaker 1: Committee of Sleep, a Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving. Now,
Speaker 1: she would later go on to write a book called
Speaker 1: The Committee of Sleep, but yeah, this was an earlier
Speaker 1: piece of research that she did. Right. So she points
Speaker 1: out that most accounts of solving problems or producing crea
Speaker 1: of products during sleep are of realm like dreams or
Speaker 1: hypnogogic imagery. Again, that's the nether world between wakefulness and sleep. Now,
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention that she brings up she sort
Speaker 1: of reviews briefly some existing literature at the time of
Speaker 1: the research on on the connection between dreams and problem solving.
Speaker 1: So just to mention a few of the papers that
Speaker 1: go into the background of her research here. One is
Speaker 1: Cartwright in nineteen seventy four, who gave subjects three types
Speaker 1: of problems, crossword puzzles, word association tests maybe kind of
Speaker 1: like the rat UH, and story completion, and subjects either
Speaker 1: got a sleep period with at least one rim cycle
Speaker 1: or an equal amount of waking time. And in this
Speaker 1: study there was no difference found between sleepers and non
Speaker 1: sleepers in terms of problems solved correctly in the crossword
Speaker 1: puzzles or the word association tests. So that's that's a
Speaker 1: kind of different result, right, We're getting some contradiction there
Speaker 1: no difference there. Also, sleepers apparently wrote story completions with
Speaker 1: more negative ending. I don't know what that's about. Nobody
Speaker 1: tried to figure out whether the story completions were were
Speaker 1: better in one group than another. A big one in
Speaker 1: the field is Dement in nineteen seventy four, which took
Speaker 1: five hundred undergraduate students and they got three brain teasers,
Speaker 1: and they were asked to read the brain teasers before
Speaker 1: going to bed. Then they were asked to record whether
Speaker 1: solutions to the brain teasers appeared in dreams. And this
Speaker 1: is from Barrett's summary quote of one thousand, one forty
Speaker 1: eight attempts at solving problems. Eight seven dreams address the
Speaker 1: problem without finding a solution. Seven students reported dreams which
Speaker 1: solved the problem, and a few others had dreams which
Speaker 1: seemed to hint at a solution, without the waking subject
Speaker 1: catching the hint. That's interesting, how would that work? Well,
Speaker 1: she gives an example. It would be in the problem
Speaker 1: quote H I J K L M n oh. What
Speaker 1: one word does this sequence represent? The subject reported I
Speaker 1: had several dreams, all of which had water somewhere, and
Speaker 1: described the water in each stream. However, his guess at
Speaker 1: the solution to the problem was alphabet rather than water,
Speaker 1: which is H two oh sotion to the brain teaser.
Speaker 1: It's the alphabet H two oh. And I was also
Speaker 1: thinking the next letter is P. And if you think
Speaker 1: about water too much, you will be in the bed.
Speaker 1: In the bed. It all makes sense I don't know
Speaker 1: if there's any science behind. Uh. Now, of course that
Speaker 1: could be easily be a coincidence, but you do have
Speaker 1: to wonder. That's kind of interesting. Um but yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: So so that's some of the background leading into the
Speaker 1: research that she performed in this study. Yeah, particularly, she
Speaker 1: connected an experiment she got to seventy six college students
Speaker 1: together that it consisted of forty seven women, twenty nine men,
Speaker 1: everybody ages nineteen through twenty four, so the modal age
Speaker 1: was twenty one. They were asked to incubate dreams addressing
Speaker 1: problems as a homework assignment in a class on dreams.
Speaker 1: So they were instructed to select a problem of personal
Speaker 1: relevance with a recognizable solution, so no wicked problems, you know,
Speaker 1: like something something that can be tackled. Come up with
Speaker 1: a solution to the nuclear standoff. So they were asked
Speaker 1: to write out their problem in a simple fashion, and
Speaker 1: immediately prior to the first night of dream incubation, they
Speaker 1: had to attend a lecture summarizing the literature on problem
Speaker 1: solving in dreams. So they're getting, you know, a nice
Speaker 1: and primed on a number of the concepts that we've
Speaker 1: talked about already. They did this nightly for one week
Speaker 1: or until they had a dream which they felt solved
Speaker 1: the problem. They recorded all of their dreams during this time,
Speaker 1: and they they noted which ones were a on topic
Speaker 1: on the topic of the problem, including addressing any aspect
Speaker 1: of the problem or any attempted solution of it, and
Speaker 1: then also be of these ones they believed contained a
Speaker 1: satisfactory solution to the problem. And then these were judged
Speaker 1: by I think two judges. Now, approximately half of the
Speaker 1: subjects recalled a dream which they felt was related to
Speaker 1: the problem. And uh, and it's worth pointing out that
Speaker 1: se these believe their dream contained a solution to the problem. Now,
Speaker 1: most of the individuals here selected a personal problem, something
Speaker 1: related to relationship dilemmas, or educational vocational desires. And again
Speaker 1: we have to remember that these are a bunch of
Speaker 1: twenty one year olds for the most part. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not surprising to me, because dreams very often. I mean,
Speaker 1: one thing, you see when you look at did your
Speaker 1: dream address the solution to this brain teaser you've been
Speaker 1: trying to solve? I don't think people dream about stuff
Speaker 1: like that very often. People tend more often to dream
Speaker 1: about stuff of strong personal importance, which tends to have
Speaker 1: to do with like work, life and relationships with people
Speaker 1: and family and friends. Yeah, and I mean arguably too
Speaker 1: if it's something seemingly more fantastic, like I was being
Speaker 1: chased by the hounds of Hell. All those hounds of
Speaker 1: hell just represent all the other crap in your life
Speaker 1: that is not literally a hound of hell. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this might actually be a better approach than seeing did
Speaker 1: your dream literally address the contents of a brain teaser?
Speaker 1: Because we might just not be primed to dream about
Speaker 1: things like brain teasers if our dreams are somehow adaptive.
Speaker 1: If they do address problems, you'd think those problems would
Speaker 1: be the kinds of problems humans normally face, not like
Speaker 1: written abstract puzzles. And indeed, in this experiment, personal problems
Speaker 1: were much more likely to be viewed as solved by
Speaker 1: the dreamer than once of an academic nature, because again,
Speaker 1: most of the individuals in the study chose personal problems
Speaker 1: and a few chose academic I want to give one
Speaker 1: example of the type of problem that that was given
Speaker 1: in the study. So this is a quote from a
Speaker 1: supposedly solved problem. Quote I recently moved from one apartment
Speaker 1: to a smaller one. Every way I try to arrange
Speaker 1: my bedroom furniture in the new room looks crowded. I've
Speaker 1: been trying to decide if there is a better way,
Speaker 1: or if I have to get rid of something dream.
Speaker 1: I come home and all the boxes are unpacked and
Speaker 1: the pictures hung. Everything looks real nice. The little chest
Speaker 1: of drawer is in the living room, up against a
Speaker 1: wall like a sideboard, and it blends right in there.
Speaker 1: I'm puzzled because I didn't remember doing this. I can't
Speaker 1: figure out if I move the chest and unpacked or
Speaker 1: if someone else has but I like it awake. The
Speaker 1: chest actually fit their real well when I tried it,
Speaker 1: so I left it there. I'm glad someone else has
Speaker 1: dreams as boring as mine. I mean, that's boring, but
Speaker 1: that does actually represent a solution. I mean it sounds
Speaker 1: like the kind of thing that if you were to
Speaker 1: imagine that your your dreams are kind of like thinking
Speaker 1: about things that are on your mind, how to arrange
Speaker 1: the stuff in your apartment might well be one of
Speaker 1: those problems. So this is Barrett's conclusion from the paper quote.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the Committee of Sleep may have workers outside of rim,
Speaker 1: and the spokesperson roll of the dream may be more
Speaker 1: than a metaphor even more likely, given what is known
Speaker 1: about the cortical activation, the problem may get solved by
Speaker 1: some part of the waking mind and communicated to consciousness
Speaker 1: only in the dream state. In summary, there remain many
Speaker 1: questions about the mechanism of problem solving and dreams, and
Speaker 1: about the quality of these solutions compared with waking ones.
Speaker 1: It is clear, however, the dream interested persons incubating problems
Speaker 1: can often dream what they feel to be solutions of
Speaker 1: which they are not consciously aware, and it's such dreams
Speaker 1: can provide them considerable personal satisfaction. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take one more break. When we come back, we'll continue
Speaker 1: to discuss uh problem solving during dreams. Alright, we're back. Now.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about how a sleep apparently aids in
Speaker 1: creative problem solving, and apparently how dreams themselves could play
Speaker 1: some role in that. But what if dreams in rem
Speaker 1: sleep play a role in problem solving even if they
Speaker 1: don't necessarily consciously provide you with solutions to problems. This
Speaker 1: is something I was often thinking about when looking at
Speaker 1: this research, like people were looking for examples of where
Speaker 1: you were able to solve a brain teaser because you
Speaker 1: had a dream about the brain teaser and the content
Speaker 1: of the dreams specifically told you what to do. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of times it might be very different,
Speaker 1: like a dream might help you solve problems, not because
Speaker 1: it shows you the solution to the problem, because but
Speaker 1: because it unconsciously primes you to solve the problem later
Speaker 1: when you're awake. Yeah, it just kind of turns everything
Speaker 1: the thing on its head potentially, and then you have
Speaker 1: that sort of mirror vision of everything still knocking around
Speaker 1: your memory when you tackle the problem and it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think that's a possibility to consider as well.
Speaker 1: There's an interesting research paper that just came out this year,
Speaker 1: just in eighteen and appeared in Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Speaker 1: by the Cardiff University neuroscientists penelop Lewis, the cognitive scientists
Speaker 1: gun Through Noblitch, and the u c l A neuroscientist
Speaker 1: Gina Poe, and they have an interesting new hypothesis about
Speaker 1: why the brain might be aided in problem solving by
Speaker 1: sleep and dreaming, and they point out that many lines
Speaker 1: of evidence of course, as we've been talking about, show
Speaker 1: that's leap is important for creativity. But the question is
Speaker 1: which part of sleep is that the rim sleep, is
Speaker 1: it the non rim sleep? How do sleep encourage creative
Speaker 1: approaches to behavior? And is one stage of sleep more
Speaker 1: important than another stage of sleep? So I'll just try
Speaker 1: to give you the very basics of their theory. Their
Speaker 1: new theory is that studies seem to show that the
Speaker 1: brain replays memories from the day in non rim sleep,
Speaker 1: and that through this process the brain creates just information.
Speaker 1: Essentially by replaying memories of what happened, it pulls out
Speaker 1: sort of overarching rules that quote, define a set of
Speaker 1: related memories. So this is this might be how your
Speaker 1: brain sort of forms categories of things and themes of memories.
Speaker 1: That when you're sleeping before you go into your dream state,
Speaker 1: when you're in this non rim sleep state often known
Speaker 1: as slow wave sleep, you are experiencing replaying of memories
Speaker 1: and the brain is making rules based on those memories.
Speaker 1: Then in the following periods of rem sleep, the brain
Speaker 1: essentially plays with this existing cortically coded knowledge. Uh, and
Speaker 1: that the that you've got these high levels of excitation
Speaker 1: and the uncensored, unbridled capability for connections between things, and
Speaker 1: this quote provides an ideal setting for the formation of
Speaker 1: novel unexpected connections. They write, quote, the synergistic interleaving of
Speaker 1: rim and non rim sleep may promote complex analogical problem solving.
Speaker 1: So again, this is kind of like the idea of
Speaker 1: you have two consultants, yes, weighing in on the problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly so. In in summary, the slow wave sleep, the
Speaker 1: non rim sleep forms concepts and rules out of our
Speaker 1: daily memories, and then rim sleep, the dreaming part of sleep,
Speaker 1: plays around by trying to get connections between them, sort
Speaker 1: of trying out different weird things in an uncensored, uncontrolled way.
Speaker 1: And this cycle repeatedly happens throughout the night in roughly
Speaker 1: ninety minute periods as we mentioned earlier. So the implication
Speaker 1: is that if you get more sleep, your brain has
Speaker 1: more opportunities to form connections and solve problems in strange
Speaker 1: and unexpected ways in your waking life. Of course, this
Speaker 1: can translate into creativity and out of the box thinking. Now,
Speaker 1: Penelope Lewis agrees that the model she and her co
Speaker 1: authors have constructed here is probably not exactly correct yet
Speaker 1: but thinks it's sort of in the right direction of
Speaker 1: forming a final explanation of how sleep aids and creativity. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there was a good article I read in The
Speaker 1: Atlantic by Ed Young that discussed this new research and
Speaker 1: quoted at least one of the researcher in the field
Speaker 1: who who agrees it might not be totally there yet,
Speaker 1: but it's a step in the right direction. Now, as
Speaker 1: we begin our final approach here towards the closing out
Speaker 1: the episode, I thought we should maybe get into a
Speaker 1: little futurism and sci fi. All right, man, let's do it.
Speaker 1: In a previous episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, uh,
Speaker 1: titled Conjoined Dreamers, we discussed this really interesting work of
Speaker 1: a futurism that came out. It was it was commissioned
Speaker 1: by Travel Lodge. Yeah, in two thousand and eleven they
Speaker 1: got noted futurist Dr Ian Pearson to weigh in on
Speaker 1: where hotel technology is going and indeed what the experience
Speaker 1: of checking into a hotel might consist of in the
Speaker 1: year five more vivid hotel nightmares. Wait, Robert, do you
Speaker 1: get hotel nightmares? I have certainly experienced this before, because
Speaker 1: this is a known situation like the first night you
Speaker 1: spend in a new location, such as a hotel, you're
Speaker 1: going to have trouble sleeping. You're gonna have a lot more.
Speaker 1: I believe it's the default mode network that is more active. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not just that huge surplus of pillows that that
Speaker 1: makes you dream bad. It's it's being in an unfamiliar place.
Speaker 1: Oh man, all those cool pillows. It's it's an attractive idea.
Speaker 1: But there's too too many pillows on hotel beds. Wouldn't
Speaker 1: you agree, Why didn't that many pillows? Yes, there are,
Speaker 1: there are way too many, but they go on the floor.
Speaker 1: So when you have that that nightmare the first night,
Speaker 1: you fall out onto pillow. So, following a six month study,
Speaker 1: A Pierson laid out his vision of the future, and
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty tremendous. You can you can look this,
Speaker 1: uh this travel Edge study up. It's available online. But
Speaker 1: you know, he said that any surface or fabric in
Speaker 1: the hotel room might be electronically enhanced to make you
Speaker 1: see your stay better. Uh, they may admit a particular
Speaker 1: nostalgic cent serve as a virtual display. It's just this
Speaker 1: sci fi vision really of what a hotel room could be,
Speaker 1: but what do we do in the hotel room will
Speaker 1: obviously we sleep and we dream. So Pearson's predictions play
Speaker 1: a great deal with the idea of not only virtual
Speaker 1: reality and even virtual sex, but technologically augmented dream states.
Speaker 1: He wrote, quote, the benefits of sleep time learning will
Speaker 1: be more widely known in we will be able to
Speaker 1: use the dream management system as our own external coach,
Speaker 1: delivering training programs or giving sleepers the opportunity to learn
Speaker 1: and practice useful life skills whilst to sleep. Sleepers will
Speaker 1: be able to learn a new language whilst following asleep,
Speaker 1: or study towards a qualification or learning new skill. Ye okay,
Speaker 1: I mean I I'm not sure I am confident that
Speaker 1: all of that is true, but that's it's interesting to
Speaker 1: entertain as a possibility. Now. Another interesting treatment of this
Speaker 1: comes from a nine novel by sci fi author Peter Watts.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and this is the novel Starfish that I've
Speaker 1: I've already referenced on the show before. And Watts really
Speaker 1: loads his books with a lot of of scientific material.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, what What's I think? Has some of the
Speaker 1: best most interesting reads on the implications of future technology
Speaker 1: and sort of transhuman consciousness states of pretty much anybody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again he puts a lot of ideas into his books.
Speaker 1: So that's why the book has come up yet again.
Speaker 1: But I'm just gonna read a quick paragraph from it
Speaker 1: to give you a taste of how he uses kind
Speaker 1: of this kind of dream augmentation technology In the novel quote,
Speaker 1: a lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night,
Speaker 1: they'd get of him an injection to help him learn,
Speaker 1: Scanlon said. Afterwards, a machine beside his bed would feed
Speaker 1: him dreams. He could never exactly remember them, but something
Speaker 1: must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the
Speaker 1: console with his tutor, a real person though not a program,
Speaker 1: and all the text and diagrams she showed him would
Speaker 1: be strangely familiar, like he'd known it all years ago
Speaker 1: and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything. I love
Speaker 1: how Watts calibrates this. So you have the you have
Speaker 1: the dream technology. We also have a pharmaceutical component and
Speaker 1: a waking world a tutoring component, all seeming to work
Speaker 1: in tandem just to like rapidly educate you on a topic. Now,
Speaker 1: I wonder, in in contradistinction, to these two visions we've
Speaker 1: been talking about about the possibility of learning in your sleep,
Speaker 1: whether if that were possible, it would interfere with sleep's
Speaker 1: importance in strengthening and consolidating what you've learned while you
Speaker 1: were awake. Ah. I like that, and you know, we
Speaker 1: on one one hand, I like it in the sci
Speaker 1: fi sense because I don't like the idea of staying
Speaker 1: at a hotel in the hotel is keeping me from um,
Speaker 1: you know, from from actively processing my memories of the day.
Speaker 1: But it does fit into a very sci fi context,
Speaker 1: like this company is training you to do some sort
Speaker 1: of hazardous job. They don't really care if you're able
Speaker 1: to work through your daily anxiety and social stress. They
Speaker 1: just want you to know how to you know, tend
Speaker 1: some sort of you know, underwater power station. Right. So,
Speaker 1: I think this is a valid point to what extent
Speaker 1: would you be interfering with the purpose of dreams. Now
Speaker 1: here's a weird thing. This actually just occurred to me.
Speaker 1: But I wonder, in a kind of sci fi sense,
Speaker 1: if directed disruption of memory consolidation during sleep phaces could
Speaker 1: actually be used in a pinpointed way to disrupt the
Speaker 1: consolidation of negative memory. You've got somebody who's had a
Speaker 1: traumatic experience during the day, the next time they go
Speaker 1: to sleep. I wonder if you know, Okay, so, is
Speaker 1: that night's sleep going to begin consolidating negative memories that
Speaker 1: are going to form the basis of a post traumatic
Speaker 1: stress disorder? And would it be possible to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: with tonight's sleep, we've got a way to to target
Speaker 1: the consolidation of that memory and disrupt it, to prevent
Speaker 1: it from taking hold in such a strongly emotional way
Speaker 1: as it might on its own. I can't help but
Speaker 1: feel like these possibilities are inevitable, because, like we say,
Speaker 1: we're still figuring out the mysteries of sleep. We're still
Speaker 1: figuring out exactly what sleep and dream is really all about.
Speaker 1: But once we do, if and when we get there,
Speaker 1: it seems inevitable that we will find new ways to
Speaker 1: manipulate it. Yeah, I think that's probably true. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think sleep still holds many mysteries. Even with all
Speaker 1: the research we've been talking about today, We've just been
Speaker 1: talking about one avenue. You know, the role of sleep
Speaker 1: and dreams and creative problem solving. There's all this memory
Speaker 1: consolidation stuff, we didn't really get into in any depth.
Speaker 1: And then there are other questions as well. I think
Speaker 1: that there are are deep, deep unsolved mysteries about the
Speaker 1: role of sleep, and it's a lot of fertile ground
Speaker 1: for scientific exploration. Yeah, like one idea we didn't even
Speaker 1: get into here that I think we discussed in our
Speaker 1: past episode. And lucid dreaming is like the question, well,
Speaker 1: when you lucid dream, are you interfering in the true
Speaker 1: purpose of dreaming? If you were taking control of the wheel,
Speaker 1: then is that just does that make a difference? What
Speaker 1: if dreaming is not recreational or epiphenomenal, what if it's
Speaker 1: doing something important? Yeah, what if you buy a machine
Speaker 1: or get a prescription in the future that keeps you
Speaker 1: from having nightmares? Well I can't help but feel in
Speaker 1: a very kind of like black mirror sci fi way,
Speaker 1: that there have to be ramifications for that. Or maybe
Speaker 1: I'm thinking more mythically. Surely there's the gods take something away,
Speaker 1: They're going to inflict something else on you in return.
Speaker 1: It's the curse of Zeus. Yeah, it gives you that
Speaker 1: eternal life, but not eternal youth, but eventually eternal sleep.
Speaker 1: So it all works out, and then it takes away
Speaker 1: your nightmares, but takes a way your soul, all right.
Speaker 1: So there you have it, um sleep, dreaming, learning while
Speaker 1: we dream of. Obviously, this is a topic that everyone
Speaker 1: is going to be able to relate to, so we
Speaker 1: would love to hear from everyone. I know. Sometimes people say, oh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear about anyone's dreams. Dreams are
Speaker 1: only interesting the person who dreamt them. I have never
Speaker 1: agreed with that. Tell me all about your dreams, even
Speaker 1: the boring ones. If they're just as boring as mine,
Speaker 1: then at least I'll feel content all right in the
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out more
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including the various
Speaker 1: dream and sleep related episodes we've recorded over the years,
Speaker 1: head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mothership. That's where we'll find all those episodes,
Speaker 1: links out to our various social media accounts, And as always,
Speaker 1: if you want to support the show, make sure that
Speaker 1: you rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Big thanks as always to our wonderful, excellent audio producers
Speaker 1: Alex Williams and Tari Harrison. If you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us to let us know your feedback
Speaker 1: about this episode or any other, or to uh, let
Speaker 1: us know a top you'd like us to cover in
Speaker 1: the future, or to just say hi, let us know
Speaker 1: where you listen from, how you found out about the show,
Speaker 1: what you think, what what creative avenues it's taking you down.
Speaker 1: You can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com