The experiment that tested Salvador Dalí's dream technique to be more creative and its fascinating result
Catalan artist Salvador Dalí tried hard to be eccentric … even at bedtime.
And he made sure the world found out.
That is why we know, for example, that “ his method of going to work is not that of an ordinary mortal “, as explained by the original caption of the image of 1942 that you see above.
“ He lays down on a scented couch in his study with a handful of pencils. Then perfume is dropped on her eyelids to influence the character of her dreams, because dreams are the stuff that surrealism is made of “.
Although sometimes it was not dreams but the interruption of sleep itself that was key for him.
In his book “50 magic secrets to paint ”from 1951, He recommended “micro-parties” as a starter for creativity .
His method, which he called “sleeping with a key”, consisted of 5 steps:
Sit upright in an armchair with armrests.
Hold a heavy metal wrench in your hand.
Place a metal plate upside down under the hand holding the key.
Allow yourself to go to sleep. When that happens, you will release the keys, which will hit the plate and produce a big CLANG!
Wake up and congratulate yourself on having achieved a micro-party.
It ensured that in this way the artist would feel revitalized physically and psychically.
The formula was not entirely original.
Without the arms of Morpheus
Aristotle was one of the first to extol the virtues of this type of nap, called hypnagogic, a word that describes that moment of transition between wakefulness and sleep .
He believed they had the power to awakening inspiration and genius because “ often, when one is already asleep, there is something in the conscience that declares that what then appears is nothing more than a dream ” .
“It is said that Thomas Edison sleeps only four hours per night ”, read the caption published with this photo in 1921. “That may be true, but now we know that he also sleeps during the day.”
For his part, Thomas Edison, who forever changed the way we sleep by inventing the electric light bulb, thought that sleep was the enemy of productivity, a waste of time and “a legacy of our cave days.”
However, he secretly took micro-parties, as several photos attest, and also pointed out that in that semi-lucid state his mind was flooded with images .
And several great thinkers have practiced the hypnagogic nap, among them Albert Einstein who, although slept at least hours at night, also took naps during the day.
Some were micro-parties and to make sure they were, several sources claim that he used the same trick that Dalí would later use, only instead of u na key, he was holding a pencil or spoon so that its falling noise would force him to abruptly leave Morpheus’s arms.
Now, since the point It is not so much to rest but to awaken the genius , the question is …
Do they work?
“The famous German physicist napping in his Berlin courtyard, despite the Nazi threat, in October 1933 ”was the comment that accompanied this photo.
That is what intrigued a team of researchers from the Brain Institute in Paris, so they designed an experiment to put to the micro-parties under test.
They recruited 103 healthy participants, able to fall asleep easily, and they asked to avoid stimulants and that they sleep a little less the night before the experiment.
That day, they were presented with 10 math problems: they were 8-digit strings but trendy the last digit was missing. To find out what it was, they were given two rules that they should apply step by step.
What they were not told was that there was a third hidden rule; if they discovered it they could solve problems much faster.
The secret was that that missing eighth digit was always the same as the result of the second step in the sequence.
As creativity implies originality and usefulness in the context, if they discovered that hidden rule they were being creative because without receiving instructions to solve the problem in that way, they would have found a strategy novel and useful.
But what really interested the researchers was what would happen after a break from 20 minutes in which they were asked to relax or even fall asleep.
They were seated in comfortable semi-reclined chairs, with their eyes closed, in a dark room.
To isolate the hypnago state gia or N1, which lasts just a few minutes before the person falls asleep more deeply, they were asked to hold a glass in their hand and if it did drop, to report aloud their stream of thoughts just before they were heard.
In addition, the researchers monitored brain waves to distinguish different stages of sleep based on patterns.
After recess
When participants returned from rest, they they expected more mathematical problems of the same type.
It was then that the scientists were able to check if there had been an increase in “perception”, which was manifested or in a noticeable increase in the speed of solving the problems with the two rules or in the discovery of the hidden rule.
It turns out that the participants who passed at least 13 seconds in stage N1 tripled the possibility to discover hidden rule (83% versus 30% when the participants stayed awake), and that this effect disappeared if the subjects fell into a deeper sleep.
If you fall asleep soundly, the effect evaporates, according to the study.
“We prove that there is a fleeting moment and propitious for insightful thoughts within the period of initiation of sleep,” says the study published in the journal Science Advances.
“We show that brain activity common to the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness (stage 1 or N1 of sleep with non-rapid eye movements) ignites creative sparks “.
Just the beginning
Although this research adds key evidence of the importance of a sleep stage that has not been well studied, there are still several questions to be resolved.
Among them, why does entering and exiting this semi-lucid state quickly unblock creative thoughts? increased perception?
Although the researchers collected the reports given by the participants about what went through their minds before they dropped the glass, they could not make connections, but that does not mean there are not.
It means that more studies and many more micro-parties are needed to get a good understanding of that vague world on the threshold of dreams .
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