How scientists hacked people’s dreams to help them solve real-world puzzles
If you ever fell asleep mad about a problem and woke up with a solution, your brain probably pulled a problem-solving switch overnight without actually clocking in. Now researchers are trying to guide that process on purpose with a method that feels a bit like Beginning if Beginning took place in a laboratory with little jingles.
A new study in Neuroscience of Consciousness tested whether researchers could control dream content during REM sleep using audio cues, then see if it helped people crack creative puzzles they couldn’t solve the day before. That’s it Beginning energy, minus the private plane and the existential dread.
The researchers recruited 20 people who reported experience with or interest in lucid dreaming. Before sleeping, participants worked on time-limited creative tasks, including matchstick puzzles. Each puzzle had its own short soundtrack. Like guitar riffs, whistling melodies, steel drum pieces, little sonic name tags for unresolved issues.
Scientists hacked dreams to help people solve puzzles
As the participants fell asleep, the team monitored their brain activity and eye movements. During REM, they played some of these puzzle soundtracks again with the aim of reactivating the memory of specific unsolved puzzles while the person was dreaming. They then woke the participants to collect dream reports, both immediately after the laboratory night and over the following days.
Ken Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern and a co-author, said Live Science“The motivation for this study was to see if dreams have anything to do with the benefits of sleep we get for problem solving.”
It worked, at least in the sense that the dreams were pulled in the direction the researchers wanted. About three-quarters of the participants reported dreams related to the unsolved puzzles, and dream reports more often referred to the puzzles that had been signaled by sound. When a puzzle appeared in a person’s dreams, that person was more likely to solve it the next day compared to puzzles that never made it into the dream narrative.
The strange twist came from clarity. A small number of participants signaled that they were lucid through pre-learned eye movements or breathing patterns, but in this sample, lucid dreamers solved fewer puzzles than non-lucid dreamers. Pallets told Live Science“I think we didn’t have enough lucid dreams to really be sure.”
Emma Peters, a dream engineer at the University of Bern who was not involved, offered a simple explanation Live Science. “The idea is that you can do creative problem solving in dreams because your dreams are so bizarre,” she said, adding that dreams make associations that you wouldn’t normally make while awake.
The study is small, and the authors note that you can’t pin down all the creative gains from dreaming alone. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by the basic idea. Your sleeping brain can take a hint, and sometimes it sounds like a soothing steel drum.
