Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

It's like the movie Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, unless you imagine him. Researchers used carefully timed sound cues to nudge dream content, and in some cases, boost next-morning problem solving. Could dreamtime product placement come next? The team, based at Illinois' Northwestern University, used a technique …

[elsergiovolador]

Problem

The biggest problem I solve in my sleep is sleep deprivation.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Earn Big Money While You Sleep

Bottom of page - https://greatnewsforallreaders.substack.com/p/starlord-cover-date-26-august-1978

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Earn Big Money While You Sleep

Spot on (RENTABRAIN)! The 1970s were big on this with Garfield's 1974 'Creative Dreaming' book for example. Konkoly et al. do cite the Griffin and Foulkes (1977) study that debunked this book's thesis however.

But in another study (2021) they did get folks from the US, Germany, and the Netherlands to do LLM-level math for them, in their sleep (Figures 2, 3, and 5). French subjects on the other hand only reacted to mentions of football and chocolate, with a typical eyebrow lift, or smile (Figure 4).

One's kilometerage may vary in this I guess ... ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

By that time, I had worked on it for a few days.

Program only failed reading one log file. Program didn't fail every time. And program never failed while running it in the system simulator.

So when the idea came to me that it might be something to do with IO routines, I got out of bed and wrote it down. Decades later I'm not sure if I was dreaming or just laying in bed.

But it was a problem with triple buffering in the file read routine. The one problem log file had the EOF marker in it but it had many tracks of allocated trash data after the EOF. So the problem was that the file read routines (which on this mainframe was handled by IO processors that were independent of the CPU's after they got their instructions) were still active (more file tracks to read) after the buffers were free'ed. So every so often, you'd get a write into memory now being used for something new.

[Andy Non]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

I did something similar in my youth. Had a very difficult mathematical modelling problem to solve while on my college work placement. Struggled for days getting nowhere, then one night I awoke at something like 3 am with the solution. Got out of bed, scribbled a few notes and programmed it the following day (Fortran 77) and it worked! My subconscious mind solved what my conscious mind could not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

I have an unstable sleep and therefore oftentimes wake up and am aware of every thought my subconscious mind currently processes. Whenever I programmed for a long time or tried to learn Japanese, my brain built scenarios that had nothing to do with the initial issue but were training itself for the issue. I was semi-awake and trying to solve all sorts of complex issues, even saw the code running down in my mind; saw the text replacements or in case of Japanese heard and saw the sentences I was building until I got up and stayed for a while. I'm very confident that our brain learns the majority while we're sleeping, after initiating the process while we were awake. It makes me wonder, if we could manipulate our dreams through techniques such as lucid dreaming; would that help us learn or rather disrupt the natural process? Although there are different states we undergo while sleeping, perhaps it has no effect at all.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

おやすみなさい！

[brimstone]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

"...And it's "Good night" from him" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Ronnies for our left pond readers]

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

あなたのお尻は拭かれるのではなく、きれいにされますように！... ;)

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

This is why we have a friday post pub snooze while solving the difficult programming problems ... at least thats what we tell the boss.

On a more serious note, I do advise people to go have a smoke/coffee/vape/stare out of the window break if they get stuck on a problem. it seems to help when you put down a problem and do something else instead, dont ask me why , its just one of those things.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"I do advise people to go have a smoke"

Curiously nicotine does seem to focus the mind and render more concrete abstract ideas. Also seems to stave off mental and physical fatigue. No idea of the neuropharnacology behind these observations. Just that it is a rather unhealthy crutch.

I suspect putting a problem aside permits a broader focus to be applied (analogous to escaping from a local extremum during optimisation.)

Personally I find going for a stroll in the fresh air with the distractions of nature or even those of an urban evironment often works wonders.

[Timo]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

Took a nap during my freshman engineering FORTRAN final. Put my head down on the desk and woke up a few minutes later with the full solution, just had to write it down.

[_wojtek]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

Context switch.

Usually just going for a (longer-ish) walk can do wonders to problem solving :)

[elsergiovolador]

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

If this was a problem at work that you were solving in your sleep, make sure to note it down and pass to accounting as these are billable hours my friend!

[Zack Mollusc]

Lightspeed Briefs, for the discriminating crotch

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CJdF3zoL07g

[ComicalEngineer]

Max Headroom

What we really need is Blipverts.

For those of us old enough to remember.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Max Headroom

Someone should build an app that waits until you're not moving in bed, and then plays the Intel 4 note noise they put at the end of all their adverts. And see if we dream about Pentiums?

[Jason Bloomberg]

"Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

I thought everyone solved problems in their sleep, but maybe it's rarer for others than it is for me.

Not through dreaming but waking up with a sudden realisation of where an issue lies or what the solution actually is.

I reckon I would also have some pretty great screenplays if I could fully remember some of the more lucid dreams I have had. I learned a long time ago that falling asleep in front of the TV has some interesting results so 'audio prompting' for better results doesn't surprise me.

[HXO]

Re: "Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

> falling asleep in front of the TV has some interesting results

Oh man. Many years ago I fell asleep with the Beavis and Butthead movie on repeat. Not something to repeat.

[m4r35n357]

Re: "Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

I love that film. B&B are underrated by many who cannot understand sarcasm.

KoTH is also extremely sly.

So Judge makes Idiocracy, and still it is taken as unnecessary crudity, and the satire is missed (by the majority).

Pardon the rant, not aimed at you, I just like B&B ;)

BTW, just searched for one of my favourite lines of theirs, and got this utter shite a1: https://www.acibademhealthpoint.com/diarrhea-cha-cha-cha-causes-relief/

WTF is wrong with people?

[Persona]

Re: "Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

I too have had countless instances waking up and having the solution to a gnarly problem pop into my head. Solving problems in your sleep does seem to invoke lateral thinking but seemingly only when you fall asleep almost instantly without thinking about the problem as you go off to sleep.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: "Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

The problem ?

_{Forgetting Menelaus and his Achaean goons.}

[PRR]

Nikola Tesla claimed that he dreamed rotating EM fields and AC motors.

[Eclectic Man]

Sewing Machines too

Herr Singer was trying to develop a mechanical sewing device but was stumped, then one night he dreamt he was being chased by 'natives' whose spears had holes in their tips, and that was the breakthrough that he needed for the Singer Sewing Machine.

On a sad note, in my adolescence I used to have a lot of nightmares (growing up gay in the UK at the time of 'Section 28' and AIDS was not fun), I got so used to them that I figured out that if it was a bad nightmare and I needed to wake up I could do so by shaking my head in my dream. This was one action not prevented by sleep paralysis, and always worked. (I am a lot happier now, btw.)

[PRR]

Re: Sewing Machines too

> to wake up I could do so by shaking my head in my dream

Thanks!

[MrBanana]

Tesla also, and not in a dream, wanted to marry his favourite pigeon.

[DS999]

I once came up with a new strategy for a game during a dream

I was playing one of those Megatouch bartop games that existed before everyone got a smartphone, a card game where you had five spots to place cards and the goal is to get 21 or as close as possible to 21 without busting in each.

I had played it for a couple hours one evening when I was bored and that night I dreamt about it and in my dream played 2-9s into the five slots trying to make 11s. I tried that strategy next time I was at the bar it was MUCH better. I hadn't expended any mental effort while playing to figure out the best strategy since I was just killing time, but I guess I played it enough for it to be in my dream and my dream self decided it was worth finding the optimal strategy.

[sedregj]

Something is rather wrong here

"The team recruited people with prior lucid-dreaming experience because they are better able to control dream content and search for insight while asleep"

Well, that's complete and utter bollocks for starters.

We (probably all organisms more complicated than an amoeba and perhaps even so) all dream in some way - I think that is a given. As to what is a human "lucid-dreamer", let alone why they are able to "control dream content" whatever that means is open to some interpretation.

"Even without lucidity, one dreamer asked a dream character for help solving the puzzle we were cueing,"

The team are taking drugs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Something is rather wrong here

I disagree. Their Figure 1 cartoon gives a nice overview of their protocol (worth a gander), and Figure 2 examplifies the type of puzzle they tested. It's not like they were testing if androids dream of electric sheep, or if trees dream of flexible reeds and fluttering butterflies imho. It sounds more like hypnotic steering to me, and maybe it could help with some forms of therapy (eg. anxiety, addiction, ...).

Anyways, if that team was on drugs then, for sure, "I'll have what she's having!"! ;)

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Something is rather wrong here

sedregj,

Plenty of people can control their dreams, at least to some extent. Some people can go to sleep while deliberately thinking about an idea/story/setting and then dream about it afterwards. I'm guessing it's a self-training feedback loop - which only works for people who often remember their dreams. And I've read about research where they've got people to keep dream diaries and then try to influence their dreams to show it working. But this isn't true for everybody. Some people don't remember their dreams at all, while some people can wake themselves up at the end of a dream, in order to write down what happened, and others only remember the last dream they were having - if they're woken up in the middle of it.

I personally only remember a couple of dreams a year, and usually not clearly. And it's only when I wake up during them. So for me it tends to be when I've been lying in bed lazily dozing, after I should have got up, and then gone back to sleep thinking about something, and then my dream has riffed off of that. I can remember a sort of semi-lucid dream when I was living in Brussels, and waking up being quite annoyed because I could speak better french in my dream, than I could manage while awake. It's a common trope that if you're immersed in a language, or trying to learn it intensely, that you start to dream in it. And this was a first time for me. But I must have been half awake, because at one point I remember trying to say something I didn't know the word for, doing that thing you have to do in a foreign language where you try a roundabout route to say something you don't have the vocabulary for, only for my brain to produce the right word - that I didn't even know I knew. It wasn't a case of forgetting a word, but a topic I'd not thought about before, and so hadn't learned the words - but I must have overheard it, or read it somewhere. A very odd experience, at least for me who doesn't remember many dreams.

Didn't Paul McCartney dream the tune for Yesterday?

I did have a recurring nightmare as a child, of being in the bath when I touched the bubbles with the soap. Which destroys them. This made the remaining bubbles angry and they started shooting lightning bolts at me. So I jumped out of the bath, to get away, weirdly always fully clothed. But the bubbles started expanding and chasing me out of the bathroom and round the house, trying to electrocute me.

I'm not sure what Dr Freud would make of that...

[Czrly]

Sports-people Know!

Anyone who has ever trained in any sport – at any level where progress might be even a modicum measurable – knows without doubt that experience, knowledge and skill may well be ingested during practice but becomes useful or applicable *only* after one sleeps on it and internalises it.

If dreams play any role at all in human learning, one might reasonably speculate that this processing of the experience gained in practice occurs in dream, whether the sports-person recalls those dreams upon waking or not.

One might go further and speculate that this processing, itself, represents the solving of a singular problem: solving *how* the experience may be applied, practically.

I have trained in many sports. I know this categorically.

I am also a software developer and I can extend this to the kind of problem solving that development demands: every developer knows that, sometimes, despite hours and hours wasted in bashing one's head against a seemingly insoluble problem, simply stepping away and escaping for a night to dive and swim in the seas of slumber, gracing one's brain with a holiday trip to dreamland – be those reveries recalled or not – can reduce that problem to one so trivial that the solution pops into thought while sat upon the loo, in the morning, and implementing it becomes a mere matter of minutes at their keyboard, subsequently.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Sports-people Know!

Czrly,

Not on the loo. It's always in the shower for me. If I go to sleep on an engineering problem I've not solved, the answer will often come to me the morning after as I'm showering and possibly singing. It's funny to have the complete solution to a problem you've not thought about for hours (at least not consciously) just pop into your head in one go. It really does make me wonder what's going on in my subconscious.

If we really are thinking about sex every 7 seconds, then I predict that on my 83rd birthday I'll suddenly wake up with Kama Sutra II Erotic Boogaloo fully formed in my brain and have to race to get it down on paper before my great insights are lost to humanity, like tears in rain. On that day I will truly know myself. Here's hoping it's not too shocking a revelation...

[m4r35n357]

Yay!

168 hour working weeks are coming . . .

[Eclectic Man]

Re: Yay!

Does anyone need a better excuse for taking a pillow to work?

[Eclectic Man]

Aphantasia

I wonder whether this also works for people with aphantasia? (https://aphantasia.com/what-is-aphantasia )

"Think of a horse right now.

Can you see it in your mind? The color of its coat, the way its mane flows, maybe it's galloping across a field?

If you can see that horse clearly in your mind's eye, you experience the world like most people do. But if you're reading this because nothing appeared — no image, just darkness or maybe the concept of a horse — then you might have aphantasia."

The sample of only 20 people is also a bit small to announce an important result, although 'the helping experiment' (BYSTANDER INTERVENTION IN EMERGENCIES, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968, Vol. 8, No. 4, 377-383) conducted by Darley and Latane about what proportion of people would rush to someone's help in a crisis only had 15 subjects, and yet was referenced in Daniel Kahneman's famous book 'Thinking, fast and slow'.

Frankly I really do not understand this at all well, hence the 'PhD necessary' icon.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Aphantasia

I emailed a research project on aphantasia, after reading about it in the Guardian - and the article had a link to their site with a questionnaire, for anyone willing to be researched on. They didn't answer, so I guess I'm not interesting enough for them. Or, due to having a severe visual impairment it might be that my brain works perfectly normally, it's just that I haven't fully stocked my memory banks with images for my brain to work on. However I'd guess my brain won't process images normally, because it doesn't receive them normally.

I do regularly wake up with engineering problems solved in my head, but it's never like a visual diagram. It's always an idea of how to approach the problem, and which particular trade-offs to make to get a system that works and meets the desired criteria. My subconscious is quite good too, in that I've never not used the solution I woke up with. There's been no dud solutions, I guess it just keeps quiet if it doesn't have an answer, and takes all the glory if it does.

[Bebu sa Ware]

We might, one day, all be driving Waymos or Robotaxis in our dreams.

The hypothesis that the brain does some kinds of processing during dream sleep/REM sleep is fairly mainstream, I believe. I think processing and laying down long term memories is one type that has been attested experimentally and clinically.

I don't think this study could distinguish between problem solving per se as one of the processes happening during dreaming and a re·organisation of existing information or memories guided by a recalled problem definition that facilitates finding a solution after waking, Transforming between representations is a fairly common conscious strategy when dealing with abstract problems.

The idea of tagging the problem with an audio cue which can later be played during dreaming to direct whatever processing towards the problems is fairly plausible. If a subject cannot recall any dreaming at all (which I haven't since my teens) any improvement in problem solving must be subconscious.

I recall the "use 6 matchsticks to form 4 equilateral triangles" on Bryant and May Redhead matchboxes flumoxed me at the pub until it just jumped out at me when I was "distracted" dealing with my beer.

I vaguely recall an episode from The Prisoner where the Village People messed with Nº6's head in his dreams using some type audio signal.

[Captain Hogwash]

Re: hijacking of an internet-connected device

They don't need to hijack anything. These devices are owned by those who would do this. You just have a licence to use them. It might have already been happening for some time.

[An_Old_Dog]

It's Not Just Sound Data Which is Incoporated into Dreams

Once on a road trip, one of my companions was lying on top of a bed in one of our hotel rooms, and had fallen asleep with her mouth gaping open.

Her friend thought this was funny and took a flash photo.

When the sleeper woke up, she told us she'd dreamt of thunder and lightning.

I once dreamt the downstairs neighbor had built a gasoline-engine-powered device on a metal pole and was using it to shake his ceiling (and my floor).

When I awoke, we were in the midst of a minor earthquake.

[MonsieurTM]

Or program people to become psychotic murderers? Or leak secrets via a blink-code? Recall that GCHQ can turn on the speaker, microphone and camera on any phone remotely.

We are now bots.

Freedom? What freedom?

[MonsieurTM]

Oh, come on:

"... require the hijacking of an internet-connected device to play trigger sounds ..."

Never heard of a mobile phone? This is the frikkin' Register. Never heard of Conivore? Tempest? GCHQ hacking mobile phones to remotely turn on the speaker, microphone, camera? Come on.

Pathetic reporting.

[Ken G]

The sleep I get in meetings

is never as good as the sleep I get in a real bed.