Sleep and creativity

[citation needed] In a study on cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle, researchers discovered that when woken from REM sleep, participants had a 32% advantage on an anagram task (when compared with the number of correct responses after NREM awakenings).

Out of three groups of participants (those who slept, those who stayed awake during the day, and those who stayed awake during the night), participants who got eight hours of sleep were two times as likely during retesting to gain insight into a hidden rule built into the task.

[2] In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep.

The researchers also found that the higher the participants' level of verbal creativity, the more hours they slept and the later they went to sleep and woke up.

In one study, the participants were tested to see if sleep helped in this aspect (Ellenbogen et al., 2007, as cited in Walker, 2009).

The results of this study showed that sleep is a significant factor in integrating memories, or gaining the bigger picture.