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Naps favour aha experiences

2.7.2025

Translation: machine translated

Sometimes a short nap helps to spark an idea. A certain phase of sleep seems to be particularly conducive to flashes of inspiration.

If you are faced with an almost unsolvable problem, you should perhaps take a short nap. This is because resting promotes the occurrence of mental flashes - especially if you enter a stable sleep stage during this time. This is suggested by a study by experts led by Nicolas Schuck from the University of Hamburg.

The team gave 90 people a computer task that could be solved more easily using a hidden trick. The test subjects were asked to react to moving, brightly coloured clouds of dots by pressing left or right. They were able to make the decision faster and more precisely once they had recognised that the direction of movement and the colours were related to each other.

After an initial training phase, the team had some test subjects take a 20-minute nap. The researchers used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to determine which sleep phase the test subjects entered. Although the other test participants took a break, they remained awake. Afterwards, they all had to return to the keys to solve the actual task. For those who had only entered the first sleep phase called N1 during their nap, the knot subsequently burst in around two thirds of cases. This was better than those who stayed awake, of whom just over half recognised the hidden pattern. However, the best results were achieved by those who had reached the so-called stable sleep stage, phase N2, during their nap. Only one in six of them had no intuition afterwards.

In an earlier study, Schuck & Co. had already examined how well people performed in the same test without a break. The success rate was slightly below 50 per cent. A short interruption could therefore help some people to solve a task - even without a nap. However, according to the study data, problem solving is particularly successful with a short, deep nap. The team wants to investigate why this is the case in further studies. In particular, they want to find out whether the "aha" experience can be predicted even better using certain parameters in the EEG.

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Originalartikel auf Spektrum.de

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