We Spaniards – and especially Andalusians – have been called lazy because we are used to taking naps, but in reality we have science on our side. Not only has napping been shown to have health benefits, but there are studies, They directly suggest that they are usually geniuses. You may think that snoozing is only used to recover after a bad night and get more energy, but scientists are studying it to improve creativity and learning.
Anyway, this app Very New It was actually applied by Salvador Dali with spoon nap. This Spaniard is known all over the world He used to take a nap with a spoon in his hand and a little plate under it. At the moment when the artist fell asleep, the spoon slipped through his fingers, hit the plate and the sound woke him up. Like he said, this Very short Naps boosted his creativity and got him to wake up with new ideas to work on. Now science has proven Daly right.
The Paris Institute of the Brain, affiliated to the Sorbonne University A study published in the journal Science advances who deduces it Creativity increases after a light sleep and before falling into a deep sleep. This point between wakefulness and immersion in the first stage of sleep is called hypnagogia and it is very likely that you have experienced it. In this period, hallucinations are common, which can be visions or sounds, but also the typical sensation of falling.
accurate awakening
If we look at our brain, when it is awake, mainly alpha and beta waves are produced, but when it reaches the first stage of sleep, alpha waves decrease by half and theta waves start to appear. the hypnotic hallucinations Alpha waves are produced during this descent Using Dali’s spoon and plate method is a good technique for getting to this state. In fact, other geniuses in history used similar methods, such as Thomas Edison, who used a steel ball instead of a spoon.
Sorbonne researchers copied this method to note its effectiveness. In their study, they gathered 103 people and asked them to solve a mathematical problem that had a hidden key to its solution. Of all of them, only 16 people managed to solve the problem in the first 10 minutes and The rest of the participants are invited to take a nap In Dali’s style: They had 20 minutes to rest with a bottle in hand and connected to a machine that monitored their brain waves.
[Guía práctica sobre cómo y cuándo dormir la siesta de manera efectiva: lo que dice la ciencia al respecto]
After this interval, three groups were distinguished: the first, who woke up with the fall of the bottle and recorded their thoughts; The second is composed of the people who woke up at that time. And the last of them, who fell asleep quickly. The researchers found that out 83% of people who took a Dali nap solved the problem when they woke upCompared to 31% of those in the wake group and 14% of those in a deep sleep.
Take advantage of
That is, those who practiced elf naps were three times more likely to find the hidden key than the other groups. This score is a test of creativity because it allows a problem to be solved in an alternative way that, in this case, could not be solved in another way. “These findings suggest that there is a great place for creativity in sleep. Where individuals are asleep enough to reach inaccessible items while awake, but not so asleep that they forget them upon awakening.” Jonathan Schuller explains, Psychologist at Santa Monica University Scientific American.
Hypnagogia’s ability to boost creativity has been noted by some research centers around the world, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In this enterprise they have developed a device called Dormio and it allows to use the advantages of this stage: It is located at about a wearable In the form of a glove that detects when we are in a frenzy And take advantage of that moment to change the subject of the dream.
When it detects hypnagogia, it “sends auditory signals based on psychic data at specific times in the sleep cycle to guide sleep. Upon awakening, the content of the guided person’s dreams can be used to complete tasks such as creative writing.” Explained on the MIT website. At this stage of sleep, people are still able to hear without complete awareness. Anyway, we don’t need fancy technology to pull off this genius trick: If you have a teaspoon and a plate, you can start the day to get more creative at naptime.
