Creative Insomnia

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Moonlight 1896 Ilya Repin

“If the insomnia of a musician allows him to create beautiful pieces, it is a beautiful insomnia.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Common experience informs most of us that sleep is essential for insightful and creative thinking during waking hours. Beyond common knowledge, scientific studies confirm that, in particular, REM sleep enhances creative problem solving. A study conducted at the University of California - San Diego, illustrates that the four or five periods of REM sleep we experience at night (which typically total about 90 to 120 minutes), enhance our creative processing more than any other sleep or wake state.

The study, conducted by Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, shows that REM sleep appears to help achieve creative solutions by stimulating associative networks, “allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas.”

The study used a creativ…