The right sounds may turn sleep into a problem-solving tool

What’s Happening

Alright so Lucid dreamers who heard puzzle-linked soundtracks while sleeping were more likely to solve those unsolved problems the next day.

News Neuroscience The right sounds may turn sleep into a problem-solving tool Sound cues during lucid dreams helped sleepers solve puzzles the next In a study of lucid dreamers, researchers replayed soundtracks linked to brain-teasing puzzles participants couldn’t solve, nudging sleepers to dream about them and boosting the odds of solving the puzzles the next day. Julia Dufossé By Bethany Brookshire at 11:00 am this: via email (Opens in new window) Email on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print When solving a puzzle, the answer could lie in your dreams. (it feels like chaos)

In a study of lucid dreamers, playing soundtracks linked with unsolved puzzles helped the sleepers solve the problems the next day , researchers report February 5 in Neuroscience of Consciousness .

The Details

Stories of brilliant insights after a nap or daydream abound, but scientists have struggled to successfully influence people’s dreams and rigorously test the idea. “This study provides one of the first experimentally grounded demonstrations of such a link,” says Giulio Bernardi, a cognitive neuroscientist at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, who was not involved with the work.

For our We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. Whether we remember our dreams or not, we have countless dreams in our sleep, according to Karen Konkoly, a cognitive neuroscientist who performed the study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Why This Matters

“Your dreams are such a big part of your inner life,” she says. And in the right circumstances, manipulating those dreams could help people think of problems in new ways. While some scientists have shown that sleeping on a problem increases the odds of solving it the next day, others have shown no benefit.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

While some scientists have shown that sleeping on a problem increases the odds of solving it the next day, others have shown no benefit. Of course, it might help only if you actually think about the problem in your sleep.

What do you think about all this?