Dream engineering can help solve ‘puzzling’ questions

(Press-News.org) EVANSTON, Ill. --- We’ve all heard the best approach to solve a problem is to “sleep on it.” It turns out there may be more truth to this adage than previously thought. While stories abound of eureka moments surfacing from dreams, scientific evidence has remained elusive, due to the challenge of systematically manipulating dreams.

A new study by neuroscientists at Northwestern University validates the possibility of influencing dreams and offers a crucial step to support the theory that dreams in REM sleep — the rapid eye movement phase of sleep in which lucid dreaming can occur — may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem.

By presenting sounds during sleep that reminded study participants of a prior experience of trying to solve a specific puzzle, a method known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), the scientists were able to encourage participants to have more dreams about randomly selected unsolved puzzles. Importantly, experimenters presented sounds only with concurrent electrophysiological verification that participants were asleep.

They found that 75% of their participants experienced dreams that included fragments or ideas from the unsolved puzzles. Further, puzzles incorporated into dreams were solved more often than puzzles that were not (42% vs 17%).

This finding alone, however, does not provide conclusive evidence that dreaming about a specific puzzle increases the likelihood of solving it upon waking. Other factors — such as curiosity about the answer to a particular puzzle — might increase both dreaming and solving. Nevertheless, engineering dreams with TMR is an important step forward in understanding how dreams may be harnessed to increase creative problem-solving ability.

“Many problems in the world today require creative solutions. By learning more about how our brains are able to think creatively, think anew and generate creative new ideas, we could be closer to solving the problems we want to solve, and sleep engineering could help,” said senior author Ken Paller, the James Padilla Professor of Psychology and director of the cognitive neuroscience program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.
 

How the study was conducted

The researchers recruited 20 people who had experiences with lucid dreaming, the state of being aware of dreaming when they are dreaming. Upon arriving at the lab, participants tried to solve a set of brain-teaser puzzles within a three-minute time limit per puzzle, each puzzle having its own unique soundtrack. Because the solutions to the puzzles were difficult to find, most of the puzzles went unsolved. Then the research team set up polysomnographic recordings to measure the physiology of participants as they slept overnight in the lab.

During periods of REM sleep, the scientists presented soundtracks from 50% of the unsolved puzzles, with the aim of reactivating these puzzles selectively. Several participants performed signals agreed upon before sleep, such as a series of in-out sniffs, to indicate that they heard the cues presented and were working on the corresponding puzzles in their dreams.

After awakening, participants told the researchers about their dreams. Many dreams included fragments or ideas from the puzzles, but in 12 of 20 participants, dreams referenced the specific puzzles prompted with sound cues more often than those that were not. These individuals subsequently came up with the correct solution to reactivated puzzles more often than the other puzzles, increasing their problem-solving ability from 20% to 40% — which was significant.

The lead author of the study is Karen Konkoly, a post-doctoral researcher in Paller’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. Konkoly, who received her Ph.D. from Northwestern, said the biggest surprise of the study was the extent to which the cues influenced non-lucid dreams.

“Even without lucidity, one dreamer asked a dream character for help solving the puzzle we were cueing. Another was cued with the ‘trees’ puzzle and woke up dreaming of walking through a forest. Another dreamer was cued with a puzzle about jungles and woke up from a dream in which she was fishing in the jungle thinking about that puzzle,” Konkoly said.

“These were fascinating examples to witness because they showed how dreamers can follow instructions, and dreams can be influenced by sounds during sleep, even without lucidity.”


Implications

The researchers say the next step is to apply the methods of targeted memory reactivation and interactive dreaming to study other proposed functions of dreaming, such as emotional regulation and generalized learning.

“My hope is that these findings will help move us towards stronger conclusions about the functions of dreaming,” Konkoly said. “If scientists can definitively say that dreams are important for problem solving, creativity and emotion regulation, hopefully people will start to take dreams seriously as a priority for mental health and wellbeing.”

The study, “Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep” will be published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness on Feb. 5 at 10 a.m. CST. After it publishes online, it can be found here.

Northwestern co-authors of the study include Daniel Morris, Kaitlyn Hurka, Alysiana Martinez and Kristin Sanders.  

 

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