#ThinkfullyHabit: Enter the twilight zone
Creativity can appear mysterious. It's impossible to force ourselves to be creative and have ah-ha! moments because so much of what the brain does behind the scenes doesn't involve our direct attention or control. But, what if something as simple as briefly drifting into sleep could help? Understanding the transition between wakefulness and sleep starts to demystify things.
“You must resolve the problem of ‘sleeping without sleeping.’”
WHY?
At the transition point between wake and sleep, sometimes referred to as stage 1 sleep or the 'twilight zone', we travel through what's known as a state of hypnagogia. It's an in-between time of not really being awake, but also not really being asleep. We usually spend about 5% of a night's sleep in this stage. Neuroscientist, Adam Haar Horowitz, talks about the mind in this state as being “trippy, loose, flexible and divergent." It's a perfect state for liberating new insights.
Salvador Dali, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla have all been famous for trying to access this state by drifting off to sleep with a metal ball or item in hand. The idea being, that as they drifted into sleep, they dropped the metal object to the floor, waking them suddenly to capture the ideas generated while in this hypnagogic state.
A recent study found that, amazingly, a single minute in this state, supercharges your likelihood of solving a problem three-fold, compared to staying awake. They tasked people to solve math problems without telling them that there was a hidden pattern that would easily lead them to solve the problems. After an initial period of studying the problems, those who spent their break having up to one minute in stage 1 sleep, subsequently tripled their chances of discovering the hidden rule within the next half hour (83% vs 30% for those who remained awake during the break). This ah-ha! moment didn't happen immediately on re-awakening. Nor did it happen if people were allowed to reach deeper levels of sleep. This suggests that the dropping metal items trick, used by the likes of Edison, Dali and Tesla, could have helped by preventing them from reaching deeper levels of sleep rather than anything else. The brain wave patterns seen at the onset of sleep - that's the medium levels of Alpha brainwaves (those associated with relaxation) and low levels of Delta brainwaves (those associated with deeper sleep) - may be what's important. Interestingly, those people who stayed awake during the break, yet bucked the trend and still spotted the hidden pattern, were more likely to mirror the brain wave patterns of those who drifted into stage 1 sleep.
The take out is a simple one. If we study something and then let ourselves mind-wander or drift into the twilight zone, it can give us a short, sharp boost to insights and ah-ha! moments.
REFERENCES
C. Lacaux, T. Andrillon, C. Bastoul, Y. Idir, A. Fonteix-Galet, I. Arnulf, D. Oudiette, Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot, Science Advances, Volume 7, Issue 50, December 2021