Instant Genius - How dreaming affects our creativity

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Have you ever had a difficult decision to make and after much thought and deliberation decided that you should sleep on it and see how you feel in the morning? I’d venture most of us have at one point or another. But is there any science to back up this common habit? In this episode, the second of a two-part series, I speak to neurosurgeon and bestselling author Rahul Jandial about his new book This is Why You Dream: What your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. We talk about the strange phenomenon of sleep paralysis, how the dreaming brain can work alongside the waking brain to help us solve problems, and what we can learn from the weird and wonderful phenomenon of lucid dreaming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name Audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week, you'll hear wheel-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science. and technology today. I am Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, the BBC Science Focus.

Have you ever had a difficult decision to make and, after much thought and deliberation, decided that you should sleep on it and see how you feel in the morning? I'd venture most of us have at one point or another, but is there any science to back up this common habit? In this episode, the second of a two-part series, I speak to neurosurgeon and best-selling author Rahul Jandaiil about his new book, This is Why You Dream, While Your Sleeping Brain Reveal, about your waking life. We talk about the strange phenomena of sleep paralysis, how the dreaming brain can work alongside the waking brain to help us solve problems, and what we can learn from the weird and wonderful phenomena of lucid dreaming. So we're talking about your book,

This is Why You Dream, and in the book you look at some of the strange experiences that we can have when dreaming, especially in the period between sleeping and waking. So one of these is sleep paralysis. So I've had this a few times and it's absolutely horrible. What's going on in our brains when we experience this? Sleep paralysis was the original nightmare. There's some art by, I think his name is pronounced. Fisili, there's a woman lying asleep, and there's a goblin on her chest and a horse in the background.

And the term nightmare comes from sleep paralysis and reportedly as scary as a nightmare. So the way to understand sleep paralysis is it happens during the time of sleep exit. So back to our conceptual framework of waking brain and dreaming brain, the transition from waking to sleep does not occur like during a millisecond. There's a continuum, a blurry state, if you will, of 5, 10, 15 minutes called sleep entry and sleep entry. The technical norms or names are hypnagogic and hypnipompic, but I prefer to think of them as sleep entry and sleep exit because they're graspable.

As we go from waking to dreaming, there's a sleep entry phase. And that one, Salvador Dali comments about that one as sleep entry has some affiliations with creativity and maybe a space where ideas can be fed into your dreaming brain. They may not exit in a constructive way, but they seem to maybe to have a greater access during that time. On the other end, after sleep slash dreaming and you're waking up, again, there's a sleep exit process. And the dreaming brain is notably low in serotonin and adrenaline. There are some neurotransmitters that change during sleeping. And so when the body, which is typically paralyzed during the vivid dreams, reflexive movements are possible, eye movements are possible.

That's why it's called rapid eye movements because they're preserved. They're skittish and jumping. But back to sleep exit, that when your mind, when your brain wakes up, yet the body is still locked down through a chemical paralysis. There's a feeling of being trapped. There's a feeling of suffocation. And there's a feeling of violation, even, a lurking intruder. These are complex statements I've just made, yet people would sleep paralysis, which is not uncommon, I think.

As you've mentioned, when you give a talk or a lecture, you ask people to raise your hand, you know, it looks like 10, 20, 30%. And I like to give broad numbers because it's a question. really, right? But it's not uncommon. It's not, you know, a few people in the room, such as with night terrors. And so what happens with sleep paralysis is can we take those common features that have culturally been given names like succubis and incubus or in different cultures called a gin that to explain this feeling, let's start with suffocation. The chemical paralysis of the body during dreaming does not include the eye muscles and does not include the diaphragm, which is a, you know, a flat

muscle at the bottom of the base of the lungs that when we inhale it pulls the chest cavity apart drawing air into the lungs the other muscles used for deep breathing or breathing under stress or breathing while you're running up a hill or called accessory muscles and they're between the ribs and they're in our neck and when kids have labor breathing if they're struggling you see them the neck moving quite a bit and sucking in and out and they're breathing with accessory muscles that that shows that they're working really hard and laboring really hard. When you feel trapped and you have a feeling that there's a lurking intruder, it creates a sense of panic and you want to breathe as deeply as you can.

But because the accessory muscles are paralyzed, you can't really pull in as much breath as you want. So this is my hypothesis that you're not able to fill your lungs to your full intention. It gives you the feeling of suffocation explained through a hallucination of something sitting on your chest. So where does that hallucination come from? Well, serotonin, which is used for antidepressant modulation, such as with selective serotonin, reuptake inhibitors and depression, but also is modulated with psychedelics.

Neurotransmitters do a lot of different things. It's not just one thing in the context matters. Serotonin potentially is not coordinated with the release of paralysis on the body. So your waking mind has come to. Serotonin is not coming on in a coordinated fact. your body's locked down. Maybe those kind of things explain the goblin sitting on your chest and the feeling of supplication. So I've tried to do my best to bring these ideas in to explain something that's been

written about and described about for a very long time. That's my approach in this book also is to where possible to offer ideas, where possible to offer some measurements, and then to be forthright about what is my interpretation. what is my, what I call, I wonder or could it be. So you'll see that some sentences start with that because it's a hypothesis. We're having greater glimpse at the science of dreams and dreaming than ever. Unsurprisingly, there are still many gaps. But sufficient dots exist to where I've taken a genuine shot at trying to connect the dots.

So how about the link between dreams and creativity, as you touched on there? So personally, I find this really fascinating. And you have lots of anecdotes like Paul McCartney dreaming yesterday. One of my favorites is the guitarist Dwayne Allman. He dreamt that Jimmy Hendricks taught him one of his tunes in the bathroom. What a fantastic dream? What do we know about that link? Well, we're turning back to the waking brain and dreaming brain.

The dreaming brain does something very different called divergent ideation. Waking brain with the executive network is doing convergent ideation in general. general. It's trying to find the simplest way to connect the dots. It's designing an engine, if you will, whereas the dreaming brain, through divergent thinking is sort of designing a car's shape. It's a different approach. It's a different type of intelligence, if you will. It's divergent thinking, looking for looser associations. And if you think about your dreams, you know, the characters show up. The physical spaces change. The emotions change. They jump. You have flashbacks. So at its most provocative, it seems like maybe the way movies are made are similar

to the way the dreaming brain functions or dreams are experienced. Maybe that's guiding while we accept the jumps in movies from frame to frame because that's what we've all experienced in our dreams. So if it's a state of divergent ideation, divergent thinking, that seems to be at least one principle underlying creativity. Creativity, however, requires both the imagination network, which connects dots that are less close to each other, less immediate, less obvious, but it also requires executive function. And I'll give you some measurements that really shed insight on this. So designing book covers or poetry, there's been some fMRI studies that look at the changes in blood flow indicative They have different regions of the brain being more engaged, never on or off, but more engaged or less engaged.

That idea generation shows more engagement of the imagination network. But to tell if the idea is a good one, you need your executive network. You need to know the dots to figure out like it. Or otherwise it's just a wild idea that's useless. So creativity requires a toggling between executive network and imagination network. And that sure does fit with what our brain does in a 24-hour period. So if you ask me, does a dream brain contribute to creativity? I think it must because that six, seven hours of throbbing electricity, of tremendous burning of glucose, so much so that it mirrors what happens in the waking brain.

Those, even if we don't remember them, and I have some ideas about why we don't remember our dreams in general, the process is keeping us open. and minded, if you will. And the aha moments during the day aren't necessarily from just raw processing power looking at a problem and trying to tackle it. But idea generation must come, I think, from the divergent thinking that happens in the dreaming brain. That's the big conceptual answer. People, like Solver to Ali Edison, sometimes mentioned by Christopher Nolan in the movie Inception, look at sleep entry as a hybrid straight where there's a waking brain transitioning into the dreaming brain. and that some of the thoughts during this rare hybrid 15 minutes, 5, 10, 15 minutes, whatever it is for each individual, that this time can offer enough waking memory but enough creative ideation to pluck out some interesting ideas

and to potentially fall asleep and engage your dreaming brain by thinking about the visual, spatial, riddle or problem or creative challenge you have during that time. Not only can you maybe pluck out some ideas, but you're also in some ways incubating that concern to your dreaming brain that might lead to some solutions when you wake up or in the days ahead. It's a nebulous process, but if you look at the brain electricity during sleep entry, there is an overlap. So we're starting to see that these hybrid states do exist, sleep entry, sleep exit, and even lucid dreaming, which happens not in the time you enter sleep or exit sleep, but in the middle of sleep. there's some awareness that returns. I find it fascinating that these states exist. It makes intuitive sense that the transitions in our waking brain and dreaming brain are not sharp and crisp like that happened in a second or the, you know,

it's hair follicles with, that there's a flow, there's a shift. And creativity, I think, is our ultimate superpower. I mean, I think that's what is our adaptive genius is being able to approach problems. with a new perspective because there were other, you know, Neanderthals had larger brains. So it's not exactly about having more neurons. It's about putting them to use in a different way. And the way that are approximately 100 billion neurons, which are like microscopic jellyfish, brain chemicals and electricity each other, I think it's very romantic and likely accurate

that the dreaming brain is keeping our minds adaptive and open and not overfitted to the routine tasks of the day. So I think there's something fundamental about creativity. And then there's a, and then people will say, you know, there's surveys where creative people have more nightmares, creative people have more dreams, creative people have more lucid dreams, athletes who do more visual, spatial stuff, have more lucid dreams. So the story with the various glimpses I have mentioned in the last few minutes about creativity suggests to me that dreaming is a wildly creative process. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd, But too often, life gets busy, or the price holds you back.

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Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So lucid dreaming has come up a few times in our conversation. So as a sort of final topic, let's have a look at this because it seems to have an especially big appeal. You know, people just generally find it fascinating.

So what is it and what's going on? So this is a topic that completely floored me because when I was asked by the publisher, if I could write a book that looked at the modern neuroscience of dreaming and dreams, weave in their stories, so it's a fun read and then, or I tried to make it a fun read. and also sort of fill in the gaps with ideas and concepts where none exist and may never exist. And we've done that with nightmares, right? You've indulged me with, like, what do you think about nightmares? And so I thought the one that would have the least science would be lucid dreaming.

This one's got to be the most fringe or whatever the phrase is, right? I thought lucid come on. And I ended up devoting two chapters out of nine to lucid dreaming. The section I thought would have the least science ended up having the most science. And I love that. That's why I love about exploring something. Aristotle's talking about lucid dreaming. I open with that. Like, I'm not trained in the arts and literature and philosophy. I'm sort of backing into it through neuroscience. I'm reversing and trying to find, like, I have my neuroscience lens and I go backward and I look for stuff. And I'm like, oh, there's a neuroscience connection there. And so when you read something about Aristotle about, you know, awareness returning that you are in the dream while in the dream, use a different phrase. Like, what's something that Aristotle is talking about? You know, so it's been around for a while.

Okay. It's not something that we cooked up in last 20, 30 years with the internet or television. It's been around for a long time. And I said, okay, so I need a measurement for this. Is there a way we can actually prove it to me? Not everything that's real has to be proven, but I have to take, you know, as a surgeon, as a brain surgeon and as a neuroscientist, I'm looking for proof. I'm looking to set up an experiment.

I'm looking to have some insights. based on evidence, not only on evidence, but I need evidence to guide my opinions, my conclusion. And so, as we discussed earlier, the eyes remain able to move while we dream. And in fact, that's why they call it REM sleep or different stages of sleep. REM starts for rapid eye movement that under the eyelids, the eyeballs were skittish. So if that's your baseline with skittish eyeballs during sleep and dreaming and, you know, that during REM sleep, and you remember from earlier in our conversation, there's an electrical signature for sleep, so it can't be faked.

the first thing I was thinking is people are just waking up and saying, I'm lucid dreaming. They just woke up, right? So we have to be a bit skeptical. I don't think people are malicious when they do that. People want to prove things true, but they have to be tested. So there's an electrical signature for sleep. Then sleep laboratories reported, I think, in the 1970s, it rocked neuroscience that somebody behind a glass wall, there was an investigator, there was a person who fell sleep, electrodes were on the scalp, electrodes were around the eye, and that patient was asleep through the next six, seven hours, proven by the EEG. And they had rehearsed that when that person entered a lucidity while dreaming, that awareness had returned, that partial awareness

had a return, like, whoa, I'm actually in the dream. Usually you realize you're in a dream when the dream is over, like, ooh, that was just a dream or that was a dream. This is, oh, I'm dreaming. and inhabiting the dream, but also aware that you're in a dream. Some awareness has returned, conscious awareness is in turn, right? And when this person entered his lucid dream, they had reversed some eye signals to make left, right eye movements that are very deliberate and could be measured by the electrodes around the eye. And so you have this, like, paper where it's wild, rapid eye movement, skittish recordings,

and then deliberate movements of the eye that showed that he was, demonstrating I am in lucidity. And that has gone so far to now where people are set up codes and they're trying to communicate with the researcher while within lucid dream. That's the first obvious thing that said to me, okay, people are sending out Morse code signals during lucidity achieved within a dream. To send out a signal like that within a dream or while you're asleep means you've had lucidity. So let's just still unpack that a bit.

If you're asleep proven by the EEG and you start making it, deliberate eye movements, but you have not woken up. The only way to do that is if some awareness is returned while you're asleep. So that was a powerful, simple, graspable statement. Then those people, participants, they looked at different fMRI scans. Metabolic imaging, really, it's blood flow, but it's really metabolism too. And PET scans, there's a whole series of imaging that suggests that prefrontal cortex, the DLPFC, the part that's dampened in the dreaming brain, it comes back online, if you will, a bit. So then there was sort of imaging proof. Areas of the brain associated with awareness and executive function have returned a bit.

That was the evidence number two. Then there's a drug called galantamine, which works with acetylcholine. It's a neurotransmitter, not a popular one, but a very fundamental one. It's not dopamine or serotonin. And so people with dementia or cognitive decline are given this medicine, galantamine. And they report having more lucid dreaming. When you double the dose of this medicine, their lucid dreaming goes up again. The reports of lucid dreaming go up again. So I'm trying to pull from different sciences,

as you can see in the world of pharmacology, a dose-dependent escalation is as close we can get to causality. Like, that's linked. That points out that this is a chemical phenomenon in the brain. Lucid dreaming happens when you change the chemical milieu of the brain with a medicine. again pointing to it being real.

Third evidence. And then lucid dreaming is inducible. Using the technique from the first piece of evidence, these coordinated eye movements while asleep, in opposition to rapid eye movements, which are discoordinated, that different techniques to be better or learn to lucid dream have been around for a while,

but they've relied on questionnaires. Yes, I tried this and I had more lucid dreams last night. I believe you, but is there another level of proof? So this technique that people can look up of the different techniques, and it's mentioned in the book in Chapter 7, regardless of the technique, the technique was tested on participants. And then they were put in the sleep laboratory

and asked to demonstrate, show us your lucid dreaming. By proving with their left right, left right eye movement with the EEG showing sleep, they demonstrated more lucid dreaming, not just by questionnaire, but by that original proof done in the 1970s with their left right left right eye movements. So when you look at those four pieces of evidence that Aristotle did not have,

and to be able to write that chapter, I found myself so thrilled. Like, I'm not saying what's right or wrong. I'm not saying what's good or bad. I'm just pointing out different glimpses we have at some essential features of humanity, of dreams and dreaming. And my hope is that a bit of great. scientific understanding of the dreaming process leaves people even more fascinated because it's not completely mysterious and the science behind it is fascinating and thrilling and the gaps that remain

I think should create a sense of awe and wonder that the dreaming brain is not just something that happens when we sleep but if I may be bold that I think we sleep because we must dream that this brain forces us to sleep with sleep pressure because this collection of neurons must go into a dreaming state for it to function at its best and its most adaptive, at its most creative. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius,

brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Rahul Jandiel. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book. This is Why You Dream, what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. If you liked what you just heard, please consider subscribing to Instant Genius

on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download a copy on your app store of choice. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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