Schedule of Events | Symposia

Creative Idea Generation in Hypnagogia

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Nia McClendon¹, Alissa Gomez¹, Mark Beeman²; ¹Northwestern University

Sleep is an essential component of human life, playing a key role in cognitive functions such as creativity. Sleep onset, particularly the first stage of non-REM sleep (hypnagogia), has been proposed as a “creative sweet spot,” facilitating insight-based problem-solving (Lacaux et al., 2021). The present study further investigates the relationship between hypnagogia and creative problem-solving using a diverse set of creativity tasks, including: matchstick puzzles, the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), and a tower-building task. Participants (n = 60) attempt all creativity tasks before and after an incubation period to assess changes in performance, and are randomly assigned to either a sleep incubation condition or a control condition. In the sleep condition, participants relax in a darkened room while wearing a Muse headband that monitors sleep stage activity. Serial awakenings are performed when the headband detects the participant has entered N1 sleep, the hypnagogic state. Participants in this condition hold a bottle containing a bell. When the bottle is dropped, the bell awakens participants, prompting them to report their last thought or visualization before re-entering the hypnagogic state. In the control condition, participants watch an unrelated video for the same duration of time, providing a neutral comparison to the sleep condition. After the incubation period, participants revisit unsolved puzzles and repeat the earlier creative tasks. Performance changes between the pre- and post-incubation attempts are analyzed to evaluate how hypnagogic sleep versus waking rest influences problem-solving ability and insight generation.

Topic Area: THINKING: Problem solving