Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Rising Stars | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

Creativity and the Hypnagogic State

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Alissa Gomez¹ (alissagomez@u.northwestern.edu), Nia McClendon¹, Mark Beeman¹; ¹Northwestern University

Prior research has suggested that N1 sleep, also known as the hypnagogic state, facilitates creative insight (Lacaux et al., 2021). We sought to expand on this research by examining whether hypnagogia could enhance performance across a broad range of creativity tasks. Participants (n = 65) first attempted an Alternative Uses Tasks (AUT), a set of matchstick puzzles, and a tower-building task. Participants were then randomly assigned to a 30-minute incubation period where they were instructed to either take a nap or watch a video (control). In the nap condition, participants were fitted with a Muse EEG headband to monitor their sleep stage activity. Whenever participants fell into the hypnagogic state, they were awakened to prevent them from falling into deeper sleep. After their respective incubation period, participants revisited their previously unsolved matchstick puzzles and repeated the AUT and tower-building tasks. Performance changes between the pre- and post-incubation attempts were analyzed to evaluate how the two incubation periods influenced creativity and problem-solving across the three tasks. Creativity, solution rates, and tower height were analyzed for the AUT, matchstick, and tower-building tasks, respectively. Participants in both incubation groups performed similarly well across the three tasks. Further analyses will investigate whether post-incubation performance was affected by the length and frequency of hypnagogic episodes in the nap condition, the rate of mind wandering in the control condition, and the type of thoughts reported during either incubation condition.

Topic Area: THINKING: Problem solving