When he was in want of inspiration, the inventor Thomas Edison used to take a nap in a chair whereas holding a steel ball in every hand. The second he dropped off, the balls would drop too and crash to the ground, jolting him awake. Edison claimed that this allowed him to seize inventive concepts that had fleetingly bubbled up into his semi-consciousness as he fell asleep.
The state Edison was chasing is called the sleep-onset interval (SOP), a little-studied section of the sleep-wake cycle. As soon as seen as merely a short interlude between wakefulness and slumber, it’s now being recognised as a definite and necessary stage in its personal proper. Not solely is it concerned in orchestrating the shutdown of consciousness, however it might additionally play a significant function in most of the features of sleep, together with memory-processing and, after all, creativity.
For some individuals, nonetheless, it may be disordered; insomnia and narcolepsy may very well be the results of it going awry. A greater understanding of the SOP might result in new therapies for these sleep circumstances, whereas additionally serving to anybody who desires to be extra alert or inventive – so “pretty much everybody”, says Delphine Oudiette, a cognitive neuroscientist at Sorbonne College in Paris, France.
All of us bear the transition from wakefulness to sleep, typically a number of instances each 24 hours, and many people know that it may be an…
