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Sleep is known to be important for creative thinking, but exactly how it helps and what role each sleep stage -- REM and non-REM -- plays remains unclear. A team of researchers have now developed a theory, outlined in an Opinion published May 15 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, to explain how the interleaving of REM and non-REM sleep might facilitate creative problem solving in different but complementary ways.

"Suppose I give you a creativity puzzle where you have all the information you need to solve it, but you can't, because you're stuck," says first author Penny Lewis, a professor at the Cardiff University School of Psychology. "You could think of that as you've got all the memories that you need already, but you need to restructure them -- make links between memories that you weren't linking, integrate things that you weren't integrating."

Studies show that this kind of restructuring often happens while we are asleep, so Lewis and her co-authors drew on that literature, as well as physiological and behavioral data, to create a model of what might be happening during each stage. Their model proposes that non-REM sleep helps us organize information into useful categories, whereas REM helps us see beyond those categories to discover unexpected connections.

[...] "So, what we propose is that, if you're stuck on some kind of problem, that problem is salient, and we know that salient things are replayed," Lewis says. "The slightly hypothetical part is that, when something else is randomly activated in the cortex that has an element that's similar, you'll form a link." These surprising links may be the creative leaps required to solve a problem.

Title		How REM and Non-REM Sleep May Work Together to Help Us Solve Problems
Date		Sunday May 20 2018, @05:54AM
Author		Fnord666
Topic
from the sleep-on-it dept.

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