Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert, I want to tell you a story
about visions of frog hearts dancing in the void. Do tell? Okay?
(00:24):
So In ninety six, the German American pharmacologist and physician
Otto Loewis and the English pharmacologist Henry Dale together won
the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for their discoveries
about how signals travel between nerve cells and then from
nerve cells two organs in the body. Back then, this
(00:44):
wasn't specifically known, like how does the nervous system transmit
information back and forth? People thought, you know, maybe maybe
it's electrical. We discovered electricity at the time. What exactly
is going on there? And specifically, what they found is
that chemicals were involved often sending these impulses back and
forth in the nervous system. And in one famous experiment,
(01:05):
Otto Lowy and some colleagues first slowed down the beating
of a frog's heart by stimulating the vagus nerve connected
to it. Now, that's the thing that they knew already
at the time they could do, if you stimulate the
vegas nerve, you can make the heartbeat decrease in rate.
Then they took fluid from the slowed down heart and
(01:26):
perfused a second frog's heart with that fluid from the
slow beating first heart. Now the second frog heart also
slowed down, even though no nerves had been stimulated, and
this provided evidence that some chemical property of the fluid
from the first heart had effects on the nerve cells
in the second heart. Essentially that chemicals controlled nervous tissue behavior,
(01:51):
and the chemical that slowed down the heartbeat was originally
called vegas stuff that's a good German name for it um,
but now we know it to be a setal cullen.
And then in a related experiment, Lois showed that you
could speed up a frog heart with fluid from another
heart whose accelerated nerve had been stimulated. So Louie had
hypothesized for many years that chemical transmission might have been
(02:13):
the basis of the nervous system, but had been unable
to prove it, and then these experiments eventually proved pretty
decisive in demonstrating the chemical nature of nerve cell communication
that there's some chemical property being traded back and forth.
So where did Lowie get the idea for this breakthrough experiment.
There is a very strange story about that. According to
(02:36):
Lowie in his own words, quote the night before Easter
Sunday of nineteen twenty, I awoke, turned on the light,
and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip
of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred
to me at six o'clock in the morning that during
the night I had written down something important, but I
was unable to decipher the scrull. The next night, at
(02:58):
three o'clock, the idea returned. He was the design of
an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of
chemical transmission that I had undered seventeen years ago was correct.
I got up, immediately went to the laboratory and performed
a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the
nocturnal design. So we're talking about dream inspiration here. We're
(03:20):
talking about the idea that the breakthrough, that dramatic twist
in the researcher story uh comes from the world of dreams.
Right now, all we have to go on here is
Louie's own words, right, I mean, who knows whether the
dream is as he says it was a direct imagistic
inspiration for the experiment that would later prove pretty decisive
(03:40):
in showing the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. But that's
what he says, and he is not alone in telling
a story like this about a breakthrough experiment, discovery, invention,
artistic innovation. This is a very common type of story
among people who are often characterized as geniuses. Right, Yeah,
you see this all the time, and certainly just the
(04:02):
idea of dream inspiration or something more supernatural, something more
magical communication through a dream, such as from the divine.
These tales go back throughout our our various religions and mythologies. Yeah. Now,
one of the things that I've always thought is kind
of interesting about the idea of dream inspiration is that
it is taken to be an inherently supernatural thing in
(04:25):
these ancient stories, Right, Like the gods visit you in
a dream and they give you some kind of insight
or they give you the solution to a problem, and
it's just accepted that that is a supernatural deliverance that
could not have been accessed by the person themselves. But
what do our brains do? I mean, our brains think
our brains figure things out. It does not actually seem
(04:46):
all that strange to me. You're in need of a
supernatural explanation that the brain could be figuring things out
and gaining insights during sleep. No, not at all. And
we'll get into the some of the science behind this
as we proceed, but I think a couple of things
are crucial here. So we talked about the the idea
of the distinction between religious dreams of inspiration in these
(05:08):
scientific dreams. But ultimately, the realm of sleep is a
realm of mystery, and in olden days, uh, for the
most part, dreams were a realm of religious mystery. To
a scientific individual, then the dreams are still a dream,
is still a realm of mystery, but it is a
realm of cognitive mystery, of scientific mystery and verifiable discovery. Right. Yeah,
(05:30):
And so in either realm, though, it seems natural that
that answers might arise from them, and when they do,
they can fulfill a vital storytelling role because nobody wants
to hear this exchange. Oh that's a tremendous breakthrough. Dr Brundle,
How did you, uh, how did you come across that breakthrough?
You don't want the answer to beate, Well, I worked
(05:51):
really hard and I thought about it a lot, and
uh eventually work through the problem. No, you want to
hear something like well, I was. I was working really
hard on the problem and I couldn't quite crack it.
And then I had a dream or some variation at
or then I bumped my head while standing on the
toilet to hang a clock. That would be the case
of doctor the fictional Dr Emmett Brown and back to
(06:12):
the future, right, And that was when I saw it,
the flux capacitor. Yeah. I think another variation on this is, oh,
I didn't know how to work out this detail, so
I went on a walk in nature. Or I alight
took an hallucinogenic drug into bet. You know, these are
the different answers that sort of answers you often see
thrown out there when creative minds, either artistic or scientific,
(06:34):
are trying to crack something. You want there to be
this dramatic turning point. Yeah, and and if we broaden
it beyond dreams, just to the idea of sudden unexpected
realizations in the pursuit of say scientific knowledge or experiment design,
or breakthroughs in math or anything like that. There are
even more examples of this, and we're going to talk
about plenty of examples where people think that a dream
(06:57):
or a period of sleep gave of them the answer
to something or gave them a breakthrough. But I remember
hearing the story that apparently Einstein, you know, he said
he had to be careful shaving because suddenly ideas would
just leap into his mind while he was shaving. He'd
be careful not to cut himself. I don't know if
that story is true, but it is a story. It
sounds great, Yeah, it does. And if your experience is
(07:18):
anything like mine, I've never discovered anything on the scale
of Einstein, but I feel like I that rings true
of the characteristics of my thoughts sometimes, like I often
don't know from where what feel like my best insights arise.
You don't necessarily come from sitting down and concentrating real
hard on a problem until you arrive at the solution.
(07:40):
You're doing something else and then suddenly it just hits you,
as if out of the void. Yeah, an an Eureka
moment does often feel like something from outside yourself, and
therefore I think it lends itself to these type of stories.
Like for my own part, my dreams don't really give
me a lot of inspiration these days. They're generally more
(08:01):
about anxieties and petty fears. There's just just petty stuff,
like petty day planning type type situations. But some of
my best creative thinking, either, of course, comes during the
act of writing. We know that that that that free
flow mode of creative activity, or when I'm swimming laps,
like when I when my perhaps when my my brain
(08:23):
is is forced to operate in a slightly different way.
That's when I can suddenly start making connections that I
am not making the rest of my waking time. I
often feel like the most creative I am any time, ever,
is the time between when I wake up and when
I get out of bed. That's for me, that's my
most disoriented time. I don't know where I am or
(08:46):
what I was working on. All I know is that
the cat is making a lot of noise, and I'm
afraid that a banshee has manifested in the house. So
I guess we should talk about some more examples of
these anecdotes. At least where people claim to have made
major breakthroughs or discoveries or solved problems in dreams or
(09:07):
during periods of sleep. There's this great quote from John
Steinbeck where he writes in his nineteen four novel Suite
Thursday Quote, it is a common experience that a problem
difficult at night is resolved in the morning, after the
Committee of Sleep has worked on it. Yes. And actually
one of the authors and researchers we're going to talk
about in this episode today Deadre Barrett, who is a
(09:29):
psychologist who works on dreams and sleep creativity. She took
that phrase the Committee of Sleep and made it into
a title of a book she wrote about dreams and creativity. Now,
we've talked about dreams and stuff to blow your mind
quite a bit over the years. Again, it's this realm
of mystery. We can't help but study and discuss it,
how we interpret them, how we might manipulate them, and
(09:49):
what they're actually for. And there is no consensus on
the purpose of dreams. I thought that we might just
play a clip from a previous interview that we conducted
with Dr Moran surf Uh We talked to us in
our episode the nine dream Worlds of Frederick van eden
uh and I. And this is his response to to
(10:09):
my question, is there a consensus on the purpose of dreams?
There isn't. There are like five different theories that try
to explain what dreams are full, and they range from
therefore nothing to they're the most important things that our
brain can do. So here's like the kind of layout
of those. One of the theo is says that dreams
are basically our brain's way of defragmenting the hard lives
(10:33):
you kind of overnight. You have to choose which wem
always to erase, which ones to keep, and your brains
sort them out. And because you see the visuals, if
you want of those mem always passing by, you create
a narrative of that, and this is what you call
a dream. This is a theory that says that they
don't really mean much. It's just that they're kind of
an artifact of our brain doing things. That's on the
one explain or the other explain that. The theory that
(10:55):
our brain is essentially looking and fishing inside at things
that we suppressed during the day. This is the free
game theory. It said, we're kind of very stuff deep
inside that you want to not deal with it. And
then at night, because our god or down no, because
our brain speaks without anyone suppressing things, we get exposed
(11:16):
to things that kind of come up from from our psyche.
A third one that's really popular right now that I'm
supporting in many ways is one way the brain is
using the dream to simulate futures for us and kind
of leave to them in the ultimate visuality, so we
would actually know when we wake up if we should
(11:37):
do do not. So the idea is that you're debating
whether to marry her and move to Alabama or break
up and decide to start a campaign in San Francisco,
and you really don't know what to do, so overnight
your brain plays both movies of you moving to Alabama
with her and you started the company in San Francisco.
And because it's such a cool virtuality with the brains,
(11:58):
we doesn't know that it's not really going to the experience.
You filter all of this movie through your values and emotions,
and when you wake up, even though the memory itself
is lost and you have no collection of the dream,
what survives is the feeling towards those choices. So when
you wake up, you kind of have a better answer
to what you should do. So those are three CEO
is there's two more along the same lines, but they
(12:21):
cannot fall into those packets. They mean nothing, but they're
just our brains way of working. They mean a lot,
because there are brains way of reflecting things that we
are self suppressed, and they are are brains way of
stimulating futures that we didn't experience yet in an ultimate
virtuality device. That's so amazing that we are fooled by
it ourselves, thinking that we are the character in this movie,
(12:44):
and then waking up and knowing what to do now.
Some have speculated that dreams are tied to the brains
crunching of waking world problems. So the idea of solving
problems and our dreams that just seems to fit, right,
But it also fits are these much older ideas of
dreams as prophet your communication with the divine, And you
can see the danger there. The idea of inspiration and
(13:04):
dreams is just so romantically captivating. Uh, Even as if
one is above outright lying about dream inspiration to improve
their storytelling, it's still rather easy to manipulate our memories
of dreams. Oh yeah, I bet you've had this experience
where you start trying to explain a dream you just
had and suddenly you can't tell if what you're saying
(13:26):
about your memory of the dream is really what you
dreamed or if you're just making it up. Now it
feels very blurry the line between the two. So, yeah,
maybe you didn't see the answer in a dream. Maybe
the dream just contain fragments of the problem, but it
makes for a better story. Though then again, if it
contained fragments of the problem that leads you to the answer,
is that fundamentally all that different from seeing the answer
(13:49):
in the dream. That's true. That's true. And if you
go with any of these interpretations where dreams are important,
where they are, uh, there, there's there's something more than
just uh, you steam being released from the from the
cognitive engine. Uh, then it makes sense that that they
would play a role. Now, we mentioned that there were
a bunch of anecdotes throughout history of people claiming that
(14:11):
dreams gave them some kind of creative breakthrough and solving
a problem or in in doing doing something creative and original. Uh,
let's talk about a few of them. Okay, Yeah, let's
let's We're not gonna run through all of them, but
we'll run through a few notable ones here, and all
of them, all of them, all dreams that have ever occurred,
will be cataloged for you to know. No, these are
(14:32):
just a few, uh that pop up from time to
time and or and in many cases are often cited.
So starting with some artists, Salvador Dolly, he attributed the
persistence of memory to dream inspiration. It's not hard to imagine. Yeah,
there's a there's a dreamlike quality, an overt dreamlike quality
to his work. Also, I think Dolly was a liar,
so who knows what he if what he says about
(14:55):
the inspiration of anything is true, that's true his stories
about the creation of his work or often you can
see them as just extensions of the fantastic painting. Paul
McCartney claims the melody for Yesterday came to him in
a dream. Sure. Stephen King, of course, I had this
life threatening accident in n and he experienced vivid dreams
(15:17):
in recovery, and he claims that a lot of dream
Catcher came from those dreams. Okay, is that I've never
read that book. I think I've tried to watch the movie.
Is the book more interesting than the movie? I haven't
neither seen nor read it because there was kind of
a negative buzz about both of them. I've always been
(15:38):
fascinated with the idea sound. I need to read it
or see it. I need to commit to one or
the other because I love the concept. I remember extended
sequences of people defecating alien life forms. See there you go.
That sounds great. Um. Also, you have some some athletic
creative types in the on the mix here, golfer Jack
(15:59):
Nicholas claim names that he improved his golf golf game
based on a dream in which he saw a new
way to grasp his club. Okay, yeah, who knows if
that's true, but all right. William Blake would attribute to
some of his ideas to dream visitations of his dead brother.
We of course, also have to look to Coleridge's opium
induced dreams. Oh yeah, the poem Kubla Khan, right was
(16:20):
supposedly inspired by a dream or even did he even
say it was composed in the dream? He may have it,
I remember. Some of this also factors into confessions of
an English opium eater as well. Um. Also, you have
Robert Louis Stevenson who claims to have dreamt two scenes
from Dr Jacqueline mr. Hyde. But these are all artists
(16:42):
and creative types, right. Well, maybe Putting, who knows of
Jack Nicholas, counts there, but he he is an artist
of the green. It's harder to see, it's harder to
see what's all that unusual about dreams inspiring artists and
musicians and stuff, because in a way, there's no wrong
answer in art, right, So what's really interesting is when
(17:03):
you get like an experiment, design, or something in science
that is either valid or not, or how or actually
has a right answer or not. Yeah, so we're gonna
get into some of the scientific examples that this first one, though,
kind of I guess, straddles the realm here between the
purely artistic and the purely scientific. Because you had scholar
(17:24):
Hermann Hilprecht who lived eighteen fifty nine through nine, and
he reported that he dreamed an Assyrian priest came to
him and revealed the accurate translation of the stone of Nebuchadnezzar,
which that just sounds amazing. Well, I know she wasn't Assyrian,
but I want to hear the dream where in Headuana
comes and poses some wrathful poetry about Anana. Yeah. What
(17:48):
it makes for a nice footnote too, when you have
visitations like this. Uh. And that's something to keep in
mind as we roll through a number of these. You
have individuals making scientific break breakthroughs, and they don't necessary
like a lot of our accounts of the dream inspiration
are not coming directly from that individual, or they're coming
years after the fact. It varies from case to case,
(18:09):
because I guess ultimately it's not the kind of thing
you would necessarily put into your scientific paper and say
and then I had a dream and this was the result. Well.
A classic example of the scientific inspiration from a dream,
apart from Otto Loewi, was also Dimitri mendal aev right, yes,
who of course live at eighteen thirty four through nine seven,
the Russian chemist who gave us the periodic table. The
(18:30):
story goes that he saw a complete periodic table in
a dream. Um. And maybe I've just been thinking too
much about Ghostbusters, but I want to imagine what it
would have been like if mental had had been forced
to choose the form of gozer, which they're taken on
the form of the periodic table, what's the atomic number
of Gozer? Now, as G. W. Baylor points out, there
(18:54):
are some problems with this story, so we have no
dream journal to go off here. We just have a
colleague secondhand account, And it seems like he'd already crafted
the periodic table before the alleged dream took place, and
merely saw an improved version of it in his dreams,
a version of the story that sounds maybe a lot
more sensible, but and and maybe more in line with
some of these other stories. Either way, you can still
(19:15):
call that dream inspiration, you know, if you're if the
thing you're trying to create either appears to you wholesale
in the dream based on your work and experience, or
some updated version, some twist on it appears in your dream. Now,
since we're in the realm of chemistry, we should go
to maybe the single most often cited example of dream
(19:36):
inspiration in science, which is August ka Yes lived eight
uh and he dreamt of whirling snakes and allegedly discovered
the ring shape of the benzene molecule by seeing an
aora boris in his dream. Or a boris, of course,
is the serpent consuming its own tail. One thing to
(19:56):
keep in mind, that is this account didn't emerge until
twenty eight years later, So that's more than enough time
obviously for memory to have been altered or the story
to have been maybe a little embellished dramaticized, but it's
it's still one of the examples that you see cited
time after time for dream inspiration in science. Well, anything
we can get smaller than a benzine molecule. Oh, we
(20:18):
can move on to the work of Neil's Bore, who've
talked about recently. Through nineteen so he claimed to have
developed his model of the atom based on a dream
he had in which he sat on the Sun and
the planets moved around him on tiny chords. Now that's
cosmic terror. Up next on our list of considerations. Here
(20:39):
there's J. B. Parkinson, who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen
ninety one. He got invented computer controlled anti aircraft guns,
and this is an excerpt from his New York Times
oh bit. Mr Parkinson, who was a member of the
technical staff of Bell Laboratories in New York in nineteen forty,
had a dream that had that a device he designed
(21:01):
to guide a marking stylist could be used to control
anti aircraft guns. He developed a prototype, and the Western
Electric Company began mass producing it. His achievements won him
a presidential award and a Franklin Institute Medal. Okay, well,
whether or not you like the fact that it was
a weapon, even weapons take creativity to produce, true, and
and it was a defensive weapon, we can say that
(21:23):
anti aircraft gun for the most part. Okay. Up next,
we have a sewing machine inventor and handsome werewolf Elias.
How I recommend everyone look up a picture of of
old Elias here because he was something else that, Like,
I've never seen somebody's sport one of those kind of
a neck beard so glamorously. It's the beard without the mustache.
(21:46):
But it looks it's very fluffy and luxurious. It looks
like he's been brushing it a lot. Yeah, it's there's
this seam seamless flow from his his thick head of
hair into this beard. Uh. I just get a very
handsome werewolf off of him. They should have cast him
in that Wolfman remake. Yeah. Well, he allegedly dreamt he
(22:06):
was building a sewing machine for a savage king in
a strange country. I love that. So there's not a
lot to back this up, but the story appeared in
a later family history. Here's a quote. He thought the
king gave him twenty four hours in which to complete
the machine and make it so if not finished in
that time, death was to be the punishment. How it
worked and worked and puzzled, and finally gave it up.
(22:29):
Then he thought he was taken out to be executed.
He noticed that the warriors carried spears that were pierced
near the head. Instantly came the solution of the difficulty,
and while the inventor was was begging for time, he awoke.
It was four o'clock in the morning. He jumped out
of bed, ran to his workshop, and by nine a
needle with an eye at the point had been rudely modeled.
(22:50):
After that, it was easy. That is the true story
of an important incident in the invention of the sewing machine.
That's interesting. I mean, again, who knows if it's true,
but doing it is true. If you just play with
that for a second, Okay, say that story is true.
It's interesting the way in which these revelations seem to
be arriving, you know, not necessarily through literal ideas, right,
(23:13):
like seeing a snake eating its tail or seeing the
spear with the hole at the tip of the spear.
They're not through literal understandings of say a dream about
trying to design a sewing machine and coming up with
the idea of a needle with a hole at its tip.
But there's some kind of like image association thing their
visual type dreams where you see an association between unrelated things. Yeah,
(23:37):
there's almost a sense of you know, someone like, oh,
spending his his day trying to crack this problem with
the left brain, and then at night is kind of this,
uh hey, right brain, what have you got anything? Anything
like just tumbling around? You want to throw at it,
maybe not to do well. I wonder to what degree
the hemispheric division does play into that, But I think
(23:59):
some version of that will come through and some of
the research we're gonna talk about later, right. I I
don't want to imply that people are dolphins and have
uni hemospheric sleep, but though that would be an entirely
different scenario to try to imagine how that would play
into problem solving. Okay, and finally we're gonna mention Albert
Einstein one last time because he in addition to his
uh his crazy sparks of razor flinging um eureka moments,
(24:24):
he once said that his entire career was it was
an extended meditation on a slaying dream he had as
a child, leading him to contemplate the speed of light. Now,
that's slaying with an e I g H. Not like
a dragon slay, not not running around with the razor blade,
but no like moving quickly through the snow in uh
in a in a vehicle of sorts that that you
(24:45):
can see how that would lead to, say, contemplations about
what would happen if you were trying to catch up
with a beam of light. Yeah. Now, again, we've tried
to display enough skepticism about these anecdotal accounts because, as
we've said, a lot of times, they're they're self reported
or the are reported much later. I mean, who knows
if into what extent they're exactly correct in saying where
these ideas came from. But I do feel like there's
(25:07):
an emerging theme that there does appear to be some
link between creativity and sleep or dreams, at least there
appears to be. Uh. The one thing I want to
stress here is that creativity? The kind of creativity we're
gonna be talking about today's creativity. I think as psychologists
would tend to use the word which means something like
one's ability to use adaptive problem solving, and not necessarily
(25:31):
like how artistic or how unique you are other things
we would usually think of when we use the word creative.
In the psychological sense, creative means something like the ability
to think in novel ways to achieve a goal. And
this of course includes artistic creativity, but it's not limited
to it, right, It can very well include uh, hey,
(25:52):
what have I held the golf club like this instead
of like that? Yeah? Yeah, it's novel thinking, so uh
It basically, to use a cliche, I mean thinking outside
the box to solve a problem. Whether that problem is
how should we picture the structure of an atom? Or
how can I figure out why my lawnmower won't start?
Or how should I tie up all the narrative threads
(26:12):
in my novel? In each case it's requiring novel thinking.
It's creativity. But okay, anecdotes, of course, as we all know,
can be cheap. Is there, like any evidence from controlled
research that shows a relationship between sleep, dreams, and creativity
or are these just sort of cute, cherry picked stories.
I think we should address that after we come back
from a break. Thank alright, we're back. So, yeah, we've
(26:37):
talked about these examples and how they might tie into creativity.
But what happens when we start looking to uh, to
actual control research for answers. That's a great question. So
to be clear, researches tended to show that sleep has
several roles in improving and maintaining areas of brain functions. Specifically,
I think there's a lot of research on sleep in memory,
(26:58):
Like studies have Indica hated that R E M sleep
may play a role in memory consolidation, improving the memory
of things learned throughout the day, and even things like
emotional associations with those memories. But actually, yes, there is
also controlled research on sleep and creativity. Actually, there's too
much of it to cover here, so we're just going
to have to discuss a few interesting highlights that came
(27:20):
to our attention. In general, it seems that it has
yielded some very interesting but sometimes contradictory findings. So to
begin a smattering of recent studies, One was by CEO
Monahan and Ormad called sleep on it, but only if
it is difficult. Effects of sleep on problem solving in
memory and cognition in So this took twenty seven male
(27:44):
and thirty four female students from Lancaster University, all native
English speakers. Uh These were the subjects and they were
given a set of thirty problems from what's known as
the Remote Associates Test or the RAT test. Though I
guess it's only the RAT test in the way that
the A T M machine is a machine. The rat
(28:06):
We'll just say the RAT is a common battery used
to test people's creative potential using word association. Have you
ever done a test like this, Robert, I haven't, But
I have to say that sentence that you just said
about the rat, that that feels like the most cut
up machine statement I've heard heard in recent In recent times,
it's the opening of a william Us Burrows and the
(28:28):
rat is a common battery used to test creative potential.
So here's how the rat works. I'm gonna give you
three words, and you tell me a fourth word that
is related to all three of the original words. In
my experience, these are funny because they can seem really
difficult for a moment until you see the answer, either
by figuring it out or by or by just cheating
(28:51):
and looking at it, at which point then it immediately
feels embarrassingly obvious and you don't know why you couldn't
figure it out for a minute. So a couple of examples. Robert,
what's the fourth word associated with these three room, blood salts?
I'm gonna go with slug slug, room, slug blood. It's
(29:14):
just what came to mind. That's how this works, right,
So supposed to be whatever pops into my head? Or
am I trying to determine a path? No, you're trying
to solve it. Okay, well that's different. Um let's say room,
blood salts, room blood salts, room, blood salts, I don't know.
I'm still going with slugs, show I don't know, bath
(29:34):
bath bath, bathroom blood bath, bath salts. Okay, yeah, so
they all relate to that word. Okay, now I see
how that how this is working. Okay, So, yeah, you
had your training session. Are you ready to be subjected
to more? Yes, let's go. Okay, these three words, what's
the fourth word? See home stomach, see home stomach? I
(29:56):
mean slug would work with all of these again, uh
if I were pressed. Uh, but let's see sick. Oh exactly,
there you go see sick, homesick, sick to your stomach. Okay,
I got a third third one for you. Car swimming
q Oh, that's pool, right, exactly, car pool swimming, pool
(30:17):
pool que Okay. Alright. So that's how this test works,
and it's a pretty good concise way of trying to
test for creative potential thinking, right, because you're you're trying
to get people to think laterally, right, there's no direct
way to solve this. You have to kind of think
by sideways association. And so anyway, the participants were given
questions of this sort, and then after they were initially
(30:40):
given the questions they were there was a delay, and
the delay either included sleep or included no sleep, or
there was no delay, and participants then tried again to
solve rat problems that they couldn't solve on their first attempt,
and the group that had slept in between attempts solved
a greater number of problems rated quote difficult than other groups,
(31:02):
but there was no difference between groups for the problems
that were rated easy, So it looks like sleep did
play some role in aiding creative problem solving, especially on
harder than average problems that required this kind of sideways
associative thinking. And I think that matches up with with
our experience, you know. I think we've all been in
a situation where we've been studying for something, or studying
(31:25):
up on something, and we reached kind of a breaking point.
We go to bed, we hopefully get a full night's sleep,
and then the next day everything is a little clear,
everything's a little more assembled, as if the pieces did
some sort of partial assembly on their own in the night. Yeah, totally.
And there's another study I want to mention that is
kind of similar in nature. So this one is called
sleep promotes analogical transfer and problem solving. This was from Cognition,
(31:51):
has a couple of the same authors from the previous
study and then some different authors, and they wanted to
study of sleep actually had any effect on quote analogical
problem solving, and this means using a known solution from
one problem to solve a different but related problem, So basically,
to solve a similar type of problem. So what would
be an example of analogical problem solving. Well, I've got
(32:13):
one here, I'm gonna start to do two questions. Here's
the first question. This is the sample question. How can
a gardener plant four trees so that the trees are
equi distant from one another? If you want to pause
it and try to figure that out for a second,
be my guest, but you'll you'll immediately run into problems
if you're trying to map it out on a piece
(32:33):
of paper, right, Because if you put them, say, in
a square in a square pattern, the ones at the
corners are going to be farther away from each other
than they are from the ones that are one side
away from them, right, So how can you put four
trees equidistant from from one another? The answer is you
put one of them on a hill. So, if you're
trying to picture this, three of the trees are in
(32:53):
an equilateral triangle at the bottom of the hill, and
then the fourth tree is at the middle of a
hill in between them, at such a height that it's
the same distance from all of the trees below, all
three of the trees below, So you've essentially made a
triangular pyramid of trees, right, yes, okay, or some sort
of you know, an ancient pagan temple. I like that.
(33:14):
That's good. Yeah, the one tree at the top of
the hill. It conjures to mind like the sacred priest
keeper of the tree, or who you have to slay
in order to become the new the new priest. That's
slay with an a y, not Einstein sligh. But so
once you've seen the solution to that problem, you're given
another problem. Here's the analogical problem. Can you assemble six
(33:34):
matches to form four equilateral triangles, each side of which
is equal to the length of one match? Again, if
you want to try to pause and solve this for yourself,
be our guests r under your nearest restaurant, UH that
has a complimentary matches UH, start assembling them on the table.
You're gonna want to order a drink just or some
appetizer just so that you can have a seat to
(33:56):
do this and then report back. So, given that we've
just primed you with the past example, it might not
take you very long because the solution is very similar. Right,
think not in two day, but in three d exactly.
So the answer follows a similar logical leap. If you
keep lying the matches flat on the table, you're just
never going to be able to make four equilateral triangles
with a side length of one match. The answer is
(34:18):
to build into three dimensions. Like you say, M make
a tetrahedron, you make a triangular pyramid, and then you've
solved this the Sprain teaser. So in the first experiment
of the study, participants were shown a set of source
problems to demonstrate general styles of solutions like the trees
and the hill example we gave. Then there was a
twelve hour period which involved either sleeping or not sleeping.
(34:42):
Then participants tried to solve problems related to the source
problems they had been exposed to, but with different features,
sort of like the second example with the matches. Then
a second experiment controlled for time of day effects on
results by testing in both the morning and the evening,
and the authors found when controlling for other variables like
drowsiness and time of day, sleep did still appear to
(35:03):
somewhat improve analogical transfer. Participants who slept were better at
applying types of outside the box reasoning that they had
seen used before two new problems, And again, I feel
like this lines up with our experiences. Yeah, though in
in the wild sort of when you've had this experience
of sleeping on a problem and then coming to a solution,
(35:26):
you might wonder, like, which variables are at play? Right?
You might just think, think, okay, I got some rest.
Maybe getting some rest is the thing that did it.
That's true. If you really wanted to, you could just
cut dreams out of it entirely and go with one
of those dream interpretations that relegates dreams to just mere
steam from the machine ep epiphenomenal dreams. Yeah, um, but no,
(35:46):
that the what we're trying to look for here is
a test showing that dreams specifically or not necessarily dreams specifically,
but sleep specifically, is doing something to help you solve
the problem. And it's not just that, say, some time
has passed in between and you've gotten some rest. You know,
one thing we haven't mentioned in all of this is
the the idea of book absorption. You know, the idea
(36:08):
that certain this is completely nonsense, but you see it
come occasionally, the idea of someone could lay their head
upon a book and sleep and in doing so absorb
the data from the book. I did not know that
anybody thought that would actually happen. Do people think that
actually happens. I think there may be like one account
(36:29):
of someone claiming to have had that ability, but uh,
it's it's not like they passed the Randy test with
it or anything. Uh. The only way I could see
that making a difference is if you've already read the
book and then maybe by sleeping with your head on it,
you would continually notice that you're uncomfortable as you're trying
to go to sleep, and this would continually bring your
(36:50):
mind back to the contents of the book. Yeah, yeah,
that that would make sense. Or you're so wrapped up
in the idea of dream absorption of the book that
you dream of the book maybe and you know you're
not drawing new information out of a book you have
not read, but perhaps your brain kind of puts things
together like it reminds me of the situation I've I've
(37:10):
mentioned this on the podcast before, and I imagine lots
of you have experienced this. You're falling asleep and you're reading,
and you begin to read words and sentences and even
the whole pages that are not there, and then you realize, oh,
I just need to go to sleep because I'm I'm
experiencing hallucination. I'm dream reading. Yeah, now there's a bunch
more research on this type of subject. For example, I
(37:33):
was just looking at one study in PS one in
which uh students who were trying to solve a puzzle
video game level did better after they'd had a nap
as opposed to just waiting for an equivalent amount of
time and not sleeping. Uh So, but that was a
small study. Another interesting one is the cognitive neuroscientist Aaron Wamsley,
who has apparently performed research training people on solving a
(37:55):
virtual maze. So there's you get trained on a virtual maze,
and then there's a rest period involving no sleep, non
rem sleep, or full rim sleep, and only the participants
who underwent rim sleep showed improved performance on the maze. Now,
if you know anything about sleep, you know that Wait
a minute, Okay, the rim sleep is where the dreams happen.
(38:19):
So this should bring us back to the question of Okay,
we're showing like the sleep does appear to help people
in solving problems one way or another, But do the
dreams play any role? Is that what matters? You know?
In the video games are an interesting example because I
think of my own use of video games. Video games
are not something I play first thing in the morning,
(38:39):
when I'm fresh. These are things that I play, um
towards the end of the day or perhaps even late
at night, when my brain is spent for the evening.
So if I'm if I gain advantage over a puzzle
within a video game the next day, it seems more
likely that it is due to something that's happening in
my dreams rather than just being fresh, because again, I'm
(38:59):
probably mentally exhausted if I'm playing a video game. That's
true and also strikes me as a good use of
your time. I mean, you don't want to be squandering
your best creative energy on video games. I don't. I
mean not to say that some some of some of
those games are great and you don't kind of want
to be fresh for, but that's just not how I
currently live my life. No, I mean, my my opinion
on video games is they are a great recreational relaxation activity,
(39:23):
not something that that I think of in terms of
achievement in right, unless you're being paid to participate in
a study and then you can, you know, do whatever.
But okay, we got to bring it back to dreams. Okay,
So so do the dreams specifically play a role in
creative problem solving? Now, I think we should look at
the work of a psychologist named Deirdre Barrett. We mentioned
(39:46):
her earlier in the episode, but she's a psychologist who
at various points you've been on faculty at Suffolk University
at Harvard Medical School. I believe she runs a private
clinical practice in Cambridge and a lot of her work
has been on study of dreams. So let's talk a
little bit about Barrett's ideas. So Barrett has a ted
talk from where she kind of summarizes some of her
(40:07):
thinking about dreams and dream research. So she mentions three
big questions. First, why is there any content to our
nighttime sleep? Second, why is that content so different from
our waking thinking? Why is it bizarre? You know, why
is dream like even a thing? And then finally, do
dreams have a function and if so, what? And Barrett
(40:29):
seems to believe that dreams are basically just thinking in
a different biochemical state. Quote the demands of our bodies
during sleep and makes certain areas of our brains less active.
So you can imagine that certain areas of the brain
are getting different kinds of energy or oxygen or blood flow.
But we keep thinking about the same kinds of concerns
(40:49):
that preoccupy us when we're awake, and in this altered
biochemical state, the sleeping brain approaches these concerns using very
different systems and modes than we would use while are awake.
So despite how bizarre these modes of thinking can feel
in the moment in the dream, it is very odd.
Barrett thinks these different perspectives provided by the dreaming mind
(41:09):
can be helpful to problem solving. So under this model,
by dreaming about the problems that concern us while we're awake,
it's almost like we're having two different people working in
tandem on solving the problem. Right, and what are these
two people like? What are the different strengths they bring.
So human sleep occurs in ninety minutes cycles, each one
containing a period of what's known as rapid eye movement
(41:32):
sleep or rims sleep, which we've mentioned, and each of
these RIM periods contains dreaming. We don't tend to remember
all of our dream cycles in the morning, but if
you wake people up after each RIM period, they'll be
able to describe five dreams in a night, and pet
scans show that parts of the brain associated with visual imagery, movement,
(41:52):
and emotion are active, often even more active than when
we're awake. Meanwhile, frontal areas associated with abstract thinking, planning,
and especially like UH, limitations on behavior and self censorship,
these areas of the brain are suppressed. So you've got
two different people working on the problem. The waking brain
(42:13):
can work on it in a more controlled, focused, abstract,
and planned way, while the dreaming brain can sort of
play with the problem in an experimental, unfocused, visual, uncensored,
associative way. And one of the ways this is often
expressed is how do you solve problem? Hard problems? You
often have to solve them by approaching them in a
(42:34):
way that seems wrong at first, right, But the prefrontal
part of the brain that's suppressed during rim sleep is
the part of the brain that tells you no, no, no,
don't think like that, that's wrong, Like the part of
your your brain it says, well, if they're fighting over
this baby, I'll just cut it in half, which is
a well, no, the prefrontal part would tell you that's
not an option, so you'd have to suppress that part
(42:56):
of the brain. King Solomon, there is using dream logic. Yeah,
but and it ends up solving the problem spoiler for
the Old Testament. But the two mothers stopped fighting over
the child because the one who who cares the most
about the child says, wait, don't cut the kid in half.
It's sort of a social brain teaser. R. How do
you get these people fighting over who who's the real
(43:18):
mother of the baby to reveal their identities? And yeah,
So so that that's a way of outside the box
thinking that you might say is could be helped by
rem sleep and dreaming. So you've got this one team
member this very organized and logical, and the other team
member is weird and creative and visual, and they sort
of hand the problem off back and forth. That's an
(43:39):
interesting possibility. So it looked at paper by Barrett, The
Committee of Sleep, a Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving. Now,
she would later go on to write a book called
The Committee of Sleep, but yeah, this was an earlier
piece of research that she did. Right. So she points
out that most accounts of solving problems or producing crea
(44:00):
of products during sleep are of realm like dreams or
hypnogogic imagery. Again, that's the nether world between wakefulness and sleep. Now,
I wanted to mention that she brings up she sort
of reviews briefly some existing literature at the time of
the research on on the connection between dreams and problem solving.
(44:21):
So just to mention a few of the papers that
go into the background of her research here. One is
Cartwright in nineteen seventy four, who gave subjects three types
of problems, crossword puzzles, word association tests maybe kind of
like the rat UH, and story completion, and subjects either
got a sleep period with at least one rim cycle
or an equal amount of waking time. And in this
(44:43):
study there was no difference found between sleepers and non
sleepers in terms of problems solved correctly in the crossword
puzzles or the word association tests. So that's that's a
kind of different result, right, We're getting some contradiction there
no difference there. Also, sleepers apparently wrote story completions with
more negative ending. I don't know what that's about. Nobody
tried to figure out whether the story completions were were
(45:05):
better in one group than another. A big one in
the field is Dement in nineteen seventy four, which took
five hundred undergraduate students and they got three brain teasers,
and they were asked to read the brain teasers before
going to bed. Then they were asked to record whether
solutions to the brain teasers appeared in dreams. And this
is from Barrett's summary quote of one thousand, one forty
(45:28):
eight attempts at solving problems. Eight seven dreams address the
problem without finding a solution. Seven students reported dreams which
solved the problem, and a few others had dreams which
seemed to hint at a solution, without the waking subject
catching the hint. That's interesting, how would that work? Well,
she gives an example. It would be in the problem
quote H I J K L M n oh. What
(45:52):
one word does this sequence represent? The subject reported I
had several dreams, all of which had water somewhere, and
described the water in each stream. However, his guess at
the solution to the problem was alphabet rather than water,
which is H two oh sotion to the brain teaser.
It's the alphabet H two oh. And I was also
(46:12):
thinking the next letter is P. And if you think
about water too much, you will be in the bed.
In the bed. It all makes sense I don't know
if there's any science behind. Uh. Now, of course that
could be easily be a coincidence, but you do have
to wonder. That's kind of interesting. Um but yeah, anyway,
So so that's some of the background leading into the
research that she performed in this study. Yeah, particularly, she
(46:36):
connected an experiment she got to seventy six college students
together that it consisted of forty seven women, twenty nine men,
everybody ages nineteen through twenty four, so the modal age
was twenty one. They were asked to incubate dreams addressing
problems as a homework assignment in a class on dreams.
So they were instructed to select a problem of personal
(46:58):
relevance with a recognizable solution, so no wicked problems, you know,
like something something that can be tackled. Come up with
a solution to the nuclear standoff. So they were asked
to write out their problem in a simple fashion, and
immediately prior to the first night of dream incubation, they
had to attend a lecture summarizing the literature on problem
(47:20):
solving in dreams. So they're getting, you know, a nice
and primed on a number of the concepts that we've
talked about already. They did this nightly for one week
or until they had a dream which they felt solved
the problem. They recorded all of their dreams during this time,
and they they noted which ones were a on topic
(47:40):
on the topic of the problem, including addressing any aspect
of the problem or any attempted solution of it, and
then also be of these ones they believed contained a
satisfactory solution to the problem. And then these were judged
by I think two judges. Now, approximately half of the
subjects recalled a dream which they felt was related to
(48:01):
the problem. And uh, and it's worth pointing out that
se these believe their dream contained a solution to the problem. Now,
most of the individuals here selected a personal problem, something
related to relationship dilemmas, or educational vocational desires. And again
we have to remember that these are a bunch of
twenty one year olds for the most part. Well, I mean,
that's not surprising to me, because dreams very often. I mean,
(48:24):
one thing, you see when you look at did your
dream address the solution to this brain teaser you've been
trying to solve? I don't think people dream about stuff
like that very often. People tend more often to dream
about stuff of strong personal importance, which tends to have
to do with like work, life and relationships with people
(48:44):
and family and friends. Yeah, and I mean arguably too
if it's something seemingly more fantastic, like I was being
chased by the hounds of Hell. All those hounds of
hell just represent all the other crap in your life
that is not literally a hound of hell. Yeah, so
this might actually be a better approach than seeing did
your dream literally address the contents of a brain teaser?
(49:05):
Because we might just not be primed to dream about
things like brain teasers if our dreams are somehow adaptive.
If they do address problems, you'd think those problems would
be the kinds of problems humans normally face, not like
written abstract puzzles. And indeed, in this experiment, personal problems
were much more likely to be viewed as solved by
the dreamer than once of an academic nature, because again,
(49:27):
most of the individuals in the study chose personal problems
and a few chose academic I want to give one
example of the type of problem that that was given
in the study. So this is a quote from a
supposedly solved problem. Quote I recently moved from one apartment
to a smaller one. Every way I try to arrange
my bedroom furniture in the new room looks crowded. I've
(49:48):
been trying to decide if there is a better way,
or if I have to get rid of something dream.
I come home and all the boxes are unpacked and
the pictures hung. Everything looks real nice. The little chest
of drawer is in the living room, up against a
wall like a sideboard, and it blends right in there.
I'm puzzled because I didn't remember doing this. I can't
figure out if I move the chest and unpacked or
(50:10):
if someone else has but I like it awake. The
chest actually fit their real well when I tried it,
so I left it there. I'm glad someone else has
dreams as boring as mine. I mean, that's boring, but
that does actually represent a solution. I mean it sounds
like the kind of thing that if you were to
imagine that your your dreams are kind of like thinking
(50:30):
about things that are on your mind, how to arrange
the stuff in your apartment might well be one of
those problems. So this is Barrett's conclusion from the paper quote.
Perhaps the Committee of Sleep may have workers outside of rim,
and the spokesperson roll of the dream may be more
than a metaphor even more likely, given what is known
about the cortical activation, the problem may get solved by
(50:52):
some part of the waking mind and communicated to consciousness
only in the dream state. In summary, there remain many
questions about the mechanism of problem solving and dreams, and
about the quality of these solutions compared with waking ones.
It is clear, however, the dream interested persons incubating problems
can often dream what they feel to be solutions of
(51:13):
which they are not consciously aware, and it's such dreams
can provide them considerable personal satisfaction. All right, we're gonna
take one more break. When we come back, we'll continue
to discuss uh problem solving during dreams. Alright, we're back. Now.
We've been talking about how a sleep apparently aids in
creative problem solving, and apparently how dreams themselves could play
(51:36):
some role in that. But what if dreams in rem
sleep play a role in problem solving even if they
don't necessarily consciously provide you with solutions to problems. This
is something I was often thinking about when looking at
this research, like people were looking for examples of where
you were able to solve a brain teaser because you
had a dream about the brain teaser and the content
(51:59):
of the dreams specifically told you what to do. I
think a lot of times it might be very different,
like a dream might help you solve problems, not because
it shows you the solution to the problem, because but
because it unconsciously primes you to solve the problem later
when you're awake. Yeah, it just kind of turns everything
the thing on its head potentially, and then you have
(52:21):
that sort of mirror vision of everything still knocking around
your memory when you tackle the problem and it. Yeah,
so I think that's a possibility to consider as well.
There's an interesting research paper that just came out this year,
just in eighteen and appeared in Trends in Cognitive Sciences
by the Cardiff University neuroscientists penelop Lewis, the cognitive scientists
(52:43):
gun Through Noblitch, and the u c l A neuroscientist
Gina Poe, and they have an interesting new hypothesis about
why the brain might be aided in problem solving by
sleep and dreaming, and they point out that many lines
of evidence of course, as we've been talking about, show
that's leap is important for creativity. But the question is
which part of sleep is that the rim sleep, is
(53:05):
it the non rim sleep? How do sleep encourage creative
approaches to behavior? And is one stage of sleep more
important than another stage of sleep? So I'll just try
to give you the very basics of their theory. Their
new theory is that studies seem to show that the
brain replays memories from the day in non rim sleep,
and that through this process the brain creates just information.
(53:29):
Essentially by replaying memories of what happened, it pulls out
sort of overarching rules that quote, define a set of
related memories. So this is this might be how your
brain sort of forms categories of things and themes of memories.
That when you're sleeping before you go into your dream state,
when you're in this non rim sleep state often known
(53:51):
as slow wave sleep, you are experiencing replaying of memories
and the brain is making rules based on those memories.
Then in the following periods of rem sleep, the brain
essentially plays with this existing cortically coded knowledge. Uh, and
that the that you've got these high levels of excitation
and the uncensored, unbridled capability for connections between things, and
(54:16):
this quote provides an ideal setting for the formation of
novel unexpected connections. They write, quote, the synergistic interleaving of
rim and non rim sleep may promote complex analogical problem solving.
So again, this is kind of like the idea of
you have two consultants, yes, weighing in on the problem. Yeah,
exactly so. In in summary, the slow wave sleep, the
(54:39):
non rim sleep forms concepts and rules out of our
daily memories, and then rim sleep, the dreaming part of sleep,
plays around by trying to get connections between them, sort
of trying out different weird things in an uncensored, uncontrolled way.
And this cycle repeatedly happens throughout the night in roughly
ninety minute periods as we mentioned earlier. So the implication
(55:02):
is that if you get more sleep, your brain has
more opportunities to form connections and solve problems in strange
and unexpected ways in your waking life. Of course, this
can translate into creativity and out of the box thinking. Now,
Penelope Lewis agrees that the model she and her co
authors have constructed here is probably not exactly correct yet
but thinks it's sort of in the right direction of
(55:24):
forming a final explanation of how sleep aids and creativity. Uh.
And there was a good article I read in The
Atlantic by Ed Young that discussed this new research and
quoted at least one of the researcher in the field
who who agrees it might not be totally there yet,
but it's a step in the right direction. Now, as
we begin our final approach here towards the closing out
the episode, I thought we should maybe get into a
(55:45):
little futurism and sci fi. All right, man, let's do it.
In a previous episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, uh,
titled Conjoined Dreamers, we discussed this really interesting work of
a futurism that came out. It was it was commissioned
by Travel Lodge. Yeah, in two thousand and eleven they
got noted futurist Dr Ian Pearson to weigh in on
(56:07):
where hotel technology is going and indeed what the experience
of checking into a hotel might consist of in the
year five more vivid hotel nightmares. Wait, Robert, do you
get hotel nightmares? I have certainly experienced this before, because
this is a known situation like the first night you
spend in a new location, such as a hotel, you're
(56:28):
going to have trouble sleeping. You're gonna have a lot more.
I believe it's the default mode network that is more active. Yeah,
it's not just that huge surplus of pillows that that
makes you dream bad. It's it's being in an unfamiliar place.
Oh man, all those cool pillows. It's it's an attractive idea.
But there's too too many pillows on hotel beds. Wouldn't
you agree, Why didn't that many pillows? Yes, there are,
(56:49):
there are way too many, but they go on the floor.
So when you have that that nightmare the first night,
you fall out onto pillow. So, following a six month study,
A Pierson laid out his vision of the future, and
it's it's pretty tremendous. You can you can look this,
uh this travel Edge study up. It's available online. But
you know, he said that any surface or fabric in
the hotel room might be electronically enhanced to make you
(57:12):
see your stay better. Uh, they may admit a particular
nostalgic cent serve as a virtual display. It's just this
sci fi vision really of what a hotel room could be,
but what do we do in the hotel room will
obviously we sleep and we dream. So Pearson's predictions play
a great deal with the idea of not only virtual
reality and even virtual sex, but technologically augmented dream states.
(57:35):
He wrote, quote, the benefits of sleep time learning will
be more widely known in we will be able to
use the dream management system as our own external coach,
delivering training programs or giving sleepers the opportunity to learn
and practice useful life skills whilst to sleep. Sleepers will
be able to learn a new language whilst following asleep,
(57:58):
or study towards a qualification or learning new skill. Ye okay,
I mean I I'm not sure I am confident that
all of that is true, but that's it's interesting to
entertain as a possibility. Now. Another interesting treatment of this
comes from a nine novel by sci fi author Peter Watts.
(58:18):
Oh yeah, and this is the novel Starfish that I've
I've already referenced on the show before. And Watts really
loads his books with a lot of of scientific material.
Uh yeah, what What's I think? Has some of the
best most interesting reads on the implications of future technology
and sort of transhuman consciousness states of pretty much anybody. Yeah,
(58:42):
and again he puts a lot of ideas into his books.
So that's why the book has come up yet again.
But I'm just gonna read a quick paragraph from it
to give you a taste of how he uses kind
of this kind of dream augmentation technology In the novel quote,
a lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night,
they'd get of him an injection to help him learn,
Scanlon said. Afterwards, a machine beside his bed would feed
(59:06):
him dreams. He could never exactly remember them, but something
must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the
console with his tutor, a real person though not a program,
and all the text and diagrams she showed him would
be strangely familiar, like he'd known it all years ago
and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything. I love
(59:26):
how Watts calibrates this. So you have the you have
the dream technology. We also have a pharmaceutical component and
a waking world a tutoring component, all seeming to work
in tandem just to like rapidly educate you on a topic. Now,
I wonder, in in contradistinction, to these two visions we've
been talking about about the possibility of learning in your sleep,
(59:50):
whether if that were possible, it would interfere with sleep's
importance in strengthening and consolidating what you've learned while you
were awake. Ah. I like that, and you know, we
on one one hand, I like it in the sci
fi sense because I don't like the idea of staying
at a hotel in the hotel is keeping me from um,
you know, from from actively processing my memories of the day.
(01:00:13):
But it does fit into a very sci fi context,
like this company is training you to do some sort
of hazardous job. They don't really care if you're able
to work through your daily anxiety and social stress. They
just want you to know how to you know, tend
some sort of you know, underwater power station. Right. So,
I think this is a valid point to what extent
would you be interfering with the purpose of dreams. Now
(01:00:35):
here's a weird thing. This actually just occurred to me.
But I wonder, in a kind of sci fi sense,
if directed disruption of memory consolidation during sleep phaces could
actually be used in a pinpointed way to disrupt the
consolidation of negative memory. You've got somebody who's had a
traumatic experience during the day, the next time they go
(01:00:58):
to sleep. I wonder if you know, Okay, so, is
that night's sleep going to begin consolidating negative memories that
are going to form the basis of a post traumatic
stress disorder? And would it be possible to say, Okay,
with tonight's sleep, we've got a way to to target
the consolidation of that memory and disrupt it, to prevent
it from taking hold in such a strongly emotional way
(01:01:19):
as it might on its own. I can't help but
feel like these possibilities are inevitable, because, like we say,
we're still figuring out the mysteries of sleep. We're still
figuring out exactly what sleep and dream is really all about.
But once we do, if and when we get there,
it seems inevitable that we will find new ways to
manipulate it. Yeah, I think that's probably true. I mean,
(01:01:41):
I think sleep still holds many mysteries. Even with all
the research we've been talking about today, We've just been
talking about one avenue. You know, the role of sleep
and dreams and creative problem solving. There's all this memory
consolidation stuff, we didn't really get into in any depth.
And then there are other questions as well. I think
that there are are deep, deep unsolved mysteries about the
(01:02:02):
role of sleep, and it's a lot of fertile ground
for scientific exploration. Yeah, like one idea we didn't even
get into here that I think we discussed in our
past episode. And lucid dreaming is like the question, well,
when you lucid dream, are you interfering in the true
purpose of dreaming? If you were taking control of the wheel,
then is that just does that make a difference? What
(01:02:24):
if dreaming is not recreational or epiphenomenal, what if it's
doing something important? Yeah, what if you buy a machine
or get a prescription in the future that keeps you
from having nightmares? Well I can't help but feel in
a very kind of like black mirror sci fi way,
that there have to be ramifications for that. Or maybe
I'm thinking more mythically. Surely there's the gods take something away,
(01:02:47):
They're going to inflict something else on you in return.
It's the curse of Zeus. Yeah, it gives you that
eternal life, but not eternal youth, but eventually eternal sleep.
So it all works out, and then it takes away
your nightmares, but takes a way your soul, all right.
So there you have it, um sleep, dreaming, learning while
(01:03:07):
we dream of. Obviously, this is a topic that everyone
is going to be able to relate to, so we
would love to hear from everyone. I know. Sometimes people say, oh,
I don't want to hear about anyone's dreams. Dreams are
only interesting the person who dreamt them. I have never
agreed with that. Tell me all about your dreams, even
the boring ones. If they're just as boring as mine,
then at least I'll feel content all right in the
(01:03:27):
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(01:03:50):
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(01:04:12):
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