A Paris sleep study found that napping boosted problem-solving by three times compared to staying awake. Edison and Einstein both used the same trick: napping while holding a spoon that would clang and wake them in the hypnagogic state, the creative sweet spot between sleep and wakefulness.
There's this famous study that was called the Paris Sleep Study. They gave people a very complicated, um, like a math pattern, like a number pattern. 10% of people solved it right away. The rest of the people, they were all like stuck. So they split the group into two rooms. You guys go over here, hang out in the waiting room, do whatever you want. They took the other group, they said, hey, we'd like you to go ahead and take a nap. And then when they woke up, they all went back in the room. And the group that had napped basically had a 3 times higher rate of just solving the problem right when they got it. And there's a state called a hypogogic state where you actually are way more creative and you're in a, uh, you can get into a flow much more easily than if you were just in your normal pattern. Edison used to nap and Einstein used to nap. They would famously nap with like a spoon in their hand because they didn't want to sleep for a long time. They wanted to get into that state where you just start to fall asleep. And then when you fall asleep, you drop the spoon, it would clang, and then you'd wake up. That's super fascinating.
