How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving

Publication date: June 2018
Source:Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 22, Issue 6
Author(s): Penelope A. Lewis, Günther Knoblich, Gina Poe
Creative thought relies on the reorganisation of existing knowledge. Sleep is known to be important for creative thinking, but there is a debate about which sleep stage is most relevant, and why. We address this issue by proposing that rapid eye movement sleep, or 'REM', and non-REM sleep facilitate creativity in different ways. Memory replay mechanisms in non-REM can abstract rules from corpuses of learned information, while replay in REM may promote novel associations. We propose that the iterative interleaving of REM and non-REM across a night boosts the formation of complex knowledge frameworks, and allows these frameworks to be restructured, thus facilitating creative thought. We outline a hypothetical computational model which will allow explicit testing of these hypotheses.



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