Dream hacking helps people solve complex problems in their sleep

Your brain could be gently coaxed into working on complex problems while you sleep, so you’ll be better able to deal with them the next day.

Neuroscientists and psychologists are increasingly using sounds, touch, movement, and especially smells to influence the content of human dreams. This dream engineering has shown promise helps smokers quit smoking, treatment of chronic nightmares and even enhancing creativity.

Now, Karen Konkoly at Northwestern University in Illinois and her colleagues have shown that it can also help with problem solving. The team recruited 20 self-identified lucid dreamers—people who are aware that they are dreaming while dreaming and can control the narrative—who attempted a series of puzzles while fully awake during two sleep lab sessions. Each puzzle was paired with its own soundtrack, such as birdsong or steel drums.

The researchers monitored each participant’s brain and eye activity to determine when they entered the rapid eye movement (REM) phase, when dreams tend to be long and abstract. At this point, the team randomly selected some of the puzzles that the participants were unable to solve and played the associated audio tracks. Participants were told to indicate lucidity by making at least two rapid left-to-right eye movements. They also reported hearing the sound of the puzzle and worked to solve it by doing at least two quick sniffs.

The next morning, participants reported that they were more likely to have the puzzles in their dreams if they heard their soundtracks in their sleep. What’s more, it made them more likely to be able to solve them now: of those who dreamed about the puzzles, about 40 percent went on to solve them, compared with 17 percent of those who didn’t report having the puzzles in their dreams.

Although it’s not clear why this happened, pairing the sound stimuli with the learning task while they were awake may have activated memories of the puzzle when they heard the same noise during sleep. Known as targeted memory reactivation, it appears to trick the hippocampus—an area of ​​the brain that is important for memory—by inducing what appears to be spontaneous memory reactivation. This can then influence what the hippocampus plays during sleep, improving learning.

Although dreams can occur at any time during the four stages of sleep, Konkoly thinks that targeting REM may have increased the participants’ ability to solve problems. “REM dreams are hyperassociative and bizarre. They mix together new and old memories and even mix memories with fantastical imagination,” he says. “You have a brain that is active. [during this stage]but perhaps with less inhibitions, so you can reach further into the corners of your mind.’

Tony Cunningham at Harvard University, says the work shows that “people can intentionally focus on a specific unsolved problem while dreaming.”

But some say that dream engineering could disrupt other functions of sleep, such as clearing the brain of debris, or that it could one day be hijacked by companies that push ads for home devices, which particularly worries Cunningham. “Our senses are already bombarded with advertising, email and work stress from all directions while we’re awake, and sleep is currently one of the few breaks we get from it,” she says.

Konkoly now plans to investigate why hearing sound stimuli on different days can have different results for the same individual. “While doing this study, I stayed up all night, watching people’s brain waves and guiding them through REM sleep. Sometimes they responded to the signals, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they woke up and had the associated puzzle incorporated, sometimes just a sound and sometimes nothing. How is it that the same stimuli, presented in the same state of consciousness, can be processed so differently?”

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