Learn Edison's napping tips to stimulate your creativity.

Thomas Edison (Thomas Edison) was notoriously opposed to sleep.

In an interview with Scientific American published in 1889, the ever-energetic inventor of the light bulb claimed that he never slept more than four hours a night.

Sleep is a waste of time in his eyes.

But Edison may have relied on sleep to stimulate his creativity.

It is said that when the inventor takes a nap, each hand will take a ball, and once he falls asleep, the ball will fall on the floor and wake him up.

In this way, he can recall some of the thoughts that occurred during the nap, which we usually don't remember.

Now, sleep researchers have found that Edison's approach may be justified.

We go through a brief period of creativity and understanding during a semi-awake period in the early stages of sleep, according to a new study published recently in the journal Science Advances.

This semi-awake stage is called the first stage of non-REM sleep (stage N1).

These findings mean that if we can make good use of this stage between the fuzzy boundary between sleep and wakefulness, that is, the hypnagogic state, we may be more likely to recall our good ideas.

Solve the problem while dozing off.

Inspired by Edison, Delphine Delphine Oudiette of the Paris brain Research Institute (Paris Brain Institute) and colleagues gave 103 subjects math problems with an implicit rule that could help them solve them faster.

Sixteen people immediately cracked the clue and were excluded from the follow-up study.

The rest were given a 20-minute break, and the researchers asked them to lean back and relax while holding an object in their right hand.

If the object falls, they tell the researchers what they were thinking before they let go.

Polysomnography (polysomnography) is a technique that evaluates a person's wakefulness by monitoring brain, eye and muscle activity.

Throughout the rest, subjects underwent polysomnography, which helps determine which of them are awake based on brainwave activity, rather than in N1 or N2 (the stage of deeper sleep after N1).

After the rest, the subjects continued to solve math problems.

Those who dozed off and entered stage N1 were nearly three times as likely to break the hidden rules as those who stayed awake throughout the experiment and nearly six times as likely as those who entered phase N2.

This "flash of light" (the name given to it by the study authors) does not happen immediately, but after trying many problem-solving methods, which is consistent with previous studies on comprehension and sleep.

As for Edison's way of catching the ball, the new study argues that there is insufficient evidence that it really works.

So the researchers replaced the ball with a small glass for the subjects to hold.

There were 63 subjects who dropped the glass during sleep, 26 of whom dropped the glass on the floor after phase N1.

However, the results still show that we do have a "window" of creativity before we fall asleep.

Udiet said she herself had a similar sleep experience to Edison, which inspired the study.

"I've always had half-dreamy experiences that fascinated me for a long time," she said. "I think it's amazing that few scientists have studied this stage of sleep in the past 20 years."

A study published in 2018 found that a brief "awake quiescence", a state of quiet rest, can increase the chances of discovering implicit mathematical rules similar to those used by Udiet.

Penny Lewis, a psychologist at Cardiff University in the UK, believes that REM sleep (the stage of constant eye movement, when dreams often occur) and non-REM sleep contribute to problem-solving.

But Udiet says that apart from that, she has hardly heard of other specialized studies on the effects of falling asleep on creativity.

However, she was able to point to many examples of this phenomenon in history.

"Alexander the Great and Einstein may have used Edison's method, at least according to legend."

"some dreams that inspire great discoveries may actually occur in half-sleep rather than in real 'dreams'," she said.

In a famous example, the chemist August Kekul é discovered the ring structure of benzene when he saw a snake biting his tail during his "half-sleep" while working late. "

The surrealist painter Salvador Dali also used Edison's method in disguise: he would sleep with a key in his hand and a metal plate underneath, and he would wake up once the key fell on it and made a sound.

It is said that this can inspire his thinking in artistic images.

The "dessert" period of creativity.

"this study gives us a deep understanding of consciousness and creativity at the same time," said Adam Hal Horowitz of the MIT Media Lab.

He developed a technology that interacts with a half-awake state, but does not work with Udiet's team.

"the important thing," he added, "is that you can do this kind of research at home.

Grab a metal object, lie down, concentrate on a creative question, and see what flash you will have. "

Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the project, says the study does not necessarily prove that anyone can explore their creativity in the early stages of sleep.

He pointed out, "being half awake is the best place to be."