Abstract (may include machine translation)
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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 491-503 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Trends in Cognitive Sciences |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2018 |
Keywords
- consolidation
- creativity
- memory
- reactivation
- replay
- sleep