Sleep and creativity
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The majority of studies on sleep and creativity have shown that sleep can facilitate insightful behavior and flexible reasoning. 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.
- Jasper Johns was inspired to paint his first flag painting as a result of a dream.
- Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde during a dream.
- Paul McCartney discovered the tune for the song "Yesterday" in a dream.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by a dream at Lord Byron's villa.
- 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.
Sleep and Creativity Studies
===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)[1].
Creative Insomnia
Creative Insomnia refers to the idea that insomnia can actually spark creativity.
Anecdotal Accounts of Creative Insomnia
- Marcel Proust wrote most of his Á la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) while staying awake in the night due to an illness.
- Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (edited by Lisa Russ Spaar) is a collection of over 80 poems inspired during sleepless nights by famous poets like Walt Whitman , Emily Bronté and Robert Frost. Fifteen of the poems actually have "insomnia" in the title.
Studies
Although no studies have actually shown a causal relationship yet, one study with children in New Zealand demonstrated a correlation between the two. This study looked at the incidence of sleep disturbances in thirty highly creative children when compared with thirty control children. The hypothesis was that there would be a higher incidence of sleep disturbance in the highly creative children than in the control children. Results showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups, with the creative children reporting more sleep disturbance, therefore suggesting that creative ability may indeed affect an individual's sleep patterns. More specifically, sixty children between the ages of 10 and 12 were tested on a standard creativity test and seventeen of the highly creative children indicated that they had higher levels of sleep disturbance (compared to only eight of the control children)[2]
References
- ^ Walker, P., Liston, C., Allan Hobson, J., and Stickgold, R. (2002) Cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle: REM-sleep enhancement of anagram problem solving. Cognitive Brain Research 14, 317-324
- ^ Healey, D. and Runco, M. (2006). Could Creativity be Associated with Insomnia? Creativity Research Journal 18:1, 39-43.