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Jun 30, 2023

‘Dream glove’ boosts creativity during sleep

On a stormy night in 1816, Mary Shelley had a terrifying dream about a corpse

On a stormy night in 1816, Mary Shelley had a terrifying dream about a corpse coming to life—a nightmare that inspired her to write Frankenstein. More than a century later, a melody in a dream led Paul McCartney to compose one of The Beatles's most beloved songs, Yesterday.

Is there something about dreaming that enhances our creativity? Or is it just sleep itself? Scientists say they’re closer to an answer, thanks to an unusual study that used an electronic glove to guide people's dreams while they slumbered.

"This is a truly seminal scientific contribution," says Jonathan Schooler, who studies creativity at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but was not involved in the work. "It makes major inroads on a topic that has fascinated humanity for centuries, if not millennia."

To conduct the work, researchers invited 50 volunteers, mostly students and professors, to either stay awake or take a nap in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those in the nap group laid down with an eye mask, while wearing a Dormio, a glovelike device with sensors that measure heart rate and muscle tone changes to track sleep stages. A computer linked to the device relayed audio cues to inspire the wearers to dream about specific subjects—a process called "targeted dream incubation."

In the first set of experiments, the computer instructed the volunteers to close their eyes and relax. When they started to drift off, a recording told them to "think about trees." The team then waited for the glove to detect that participants had entered the first stage of sleep, or "N1," a semilucid state considered a creativity sweet spot. During this stage, we can still process information from the outside, but our mind is less constrained than when we are awake, and our thoughts flow uncontrolled. In N1, people experience short and vivid dreams that usually slip away unnoticed unless interrupted by awakening.

And that's what the team did. After the volunteers had been in N1 for about 5 minutes, a second audio cue roused them from their nap by telling them to speak out loud what was on their minds. The recording then directed them to go back to sleep. This process was repeated several times over 45 minutes, waking the participants up to report their dreams and letting them sleep again.

All of the volunteers who used Dormio reported dreaming about trees: One remembered having arms made of old wood; another recalled being so big that he could "eat trees like finger food."

Many participants who considered themselves "stuck and uncreative" were surprised at how inventive they could be in their dreams, says study co-author Adam Haar, a cognitive scientist at MIT. "Most people don't know that there's a piece of themselves that is biologically designed to be totally unstuck, but they’re forgetting it every night."

Not everyone was told to dream about trees. In one control group, people slept without any specific prompt. In two other control groups, people remained awake, either thinking about trees or just paying attention to their general thoughts.

After the sessions, all volunteers took creativity tests asking them to list alternative uses for a tree—answers varied from "making musical instruments" to serving as a "toothpick for a giant"—write down actions associated with trees, such as "eat" and "burn"—and compose a story about trees.

Independent evaluators rated the stories on a scale of creativity widely used in psychology studies, taking into account the narrative's originality, humor, and emotiveness. (All of the volunteers took a survey prior to the experiment where they self-assigned their creativity levels. This ensured that there were not big differences in creativity between the participants before the intervention, the team says.)

The researchers also used a computer program to measure the "semantic distance" in the volunteers’ answers, or how closely the words they chose were related to the word "tree." This measurement is often used in creativity studies: The more creative the person is, the less related their answers will be. ("Leaves" is semantically closer to "tree" than "toothpick," for example.)

Overall, volunteers who dreamt about trees scored 78% higher on the creativity metrics than those who stayed awake just observing their thoughts and 63% higher than those who stayed awake thinking about trees. Participants who napped without hearing the prompt still got a creativity boost, but those who dreamed about trees still performed 48% better than them, the authors report today in Scientific Reports.

The researchers also noticed that the volunteers used the content of their dreams to answer the tests. The person who dreamed that their limbs were made of old wood wrote a story about an oak king with a wood body, for example. The person who dreamed of becoming bigger than trees, meanwhile, listed "toothpick for a giant" as an alternative use for a tree.

"The more tree-related dreams that people had, the more creative they were," says co-author Kathleen Esfahany, who was an undergraduate researcher at MIT when the experiment was conducted. Esfahany explains that the findings indicate it is not just sleeping, but "dreaming about that specific topic that helps us be creative about it."

The technique of waking up right after falling asleep to boost creativity isn't new. Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison reported using this method. A study published in 2021 confirmed that the trick helps people become more creative and come up with insights to solve problems.

But the Dormio device allows an unprecedented level of control with this process, says study co-author Robert Stickgold, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who has been studying dreams for 4 decades (and also adopts this strategy in his personal life). The glove, he says, will allow scientists to explore "consciousness and dreams in a way that has never been possible before."

And the applications may stretch well beyond boosting creativity. The researchers are currently working with sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder to see whether the glove can help them gain control over their nightmares and better recover from trauma.

Ken Paller, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who also studies dreams, likes the study's results but believes there are still questions to be answered about the connection between dreams and creativity. For one thing, Paller notes that it's still unclear whether the creativity enhancement observed in the experiment also happens after normal dreams, that are not guided in any way. "The link [of creativity] with ordinary dreaming remains to be fleshed out," he says. "There is much about dreaming that remains mysterious."