Naps: Key to Creativity?

Continuing with my ongoing fascination about the human brain and the creative process, which we discussed here, a recent New York Times article explored scientific research between the connection of sleep and creativity:

“There is a cultural bias against sleep that sees it as akin to shutting down, or even to death,” explains Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Most people, Dr. Ellenbogen says, think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — it does nothing productive. Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha! moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

Steven Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, once defined creativity as “just connecting things.” Sleep assists the brain in flagging unrelated ideas and memories, forging connections among them that increase the odds that a creative idea or insight will surface.

Okay, so scientists think sleep is beneficial, but what about our kind of people, right-brain, artsy fartsy types? What do they have to say?

“It’s more that sleep brings a change of approach,” explains Mark Holmes, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios who worked on the film “Wall-E.” “You can get tunnel vision when you’re hammering away at a problem. You keep going down this same path, again and again, just tweaking, making incremental changes at best. ” He continues: “Sleep erases that. It resets you. You wake up and realize — wait a minute! — there is another way to do this.”

Sold! I'm off to take a nap!

UPDATE: In comments, Meg notes, "I would add that many see naps as akin to being LAZY." The NY Times article is framed precisely with that point:

“WASTE not life,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of American entrepreneurs. “In the grave will be sleeping enough.”

Centuries later, the attitude toward sleep in America — and in American business, in particular — has scarcely changed. Corporate culture reveres the e-mail message sent at 3 a.m., the executive who rushes directly into a meeting from a red-eye flight. Bumper stickers offer an updated version of Franklin’s dictum: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“There is a cultural bias against sleep that sees it as akin to shutting down, or even to death,” explains Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

I think it's fair to say that an inherent aspect of creativity is that often it happens in an asymmetrical fashion, not from directly pondering a problem, but off doing something else. Granted, most of the time writing involves a 'direct' attack, slogging into the story and hours of solid, hard thinking. However, we must make room for the mystery of the creative process and those "Aha!" moments. Some times those happen when we're hard at work. Other times, when we're at play - or taking a nap.