How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving
By Penelope A. Lewis, Günther Knoblich, G. Poe. 2018
175 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “REM sleep also facilitates creative problem solving (Lewis et al., 2018; Baird et al., 2012; Cai et al., 2009).”
- Learning Structures: Predictive Representations, Replay, and Generalization (2020, background): “Human and animal neural evidence supports a role for wake and sleep memory replay in generalization and community detection [59,60], inference [52,61] especially of unseen relations among states, problem solving, and memory consolidation [62,63].”