The German chemist Friedrich Kekule claimed to have intuited the chemical structure of the benzene ring after falling asleep in his chair and dreaming of an ouroboros (a serpent biting its own tail). He’s certainly not the only person to have discovered a flash insight after waking from a good sleep. In science alone, many breakthroughs were apparently borne of a decent snooze, including Mendeleyev’s creation of the Periodic Table and Loewi’s experiments on the transmission of nervous signals through chemical messengers.
Most of us have tried sleeping on a difficult problem before and using an elegant experiment, Denise Cai from the University of California in San Diego has shown that this old technique really does have merit to it. She found that our brains are better at integrating disparate pieces of information after a short bout of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – a deep, dream-rich slumber that involves a rapid fluttering of the eyes. Cai thinks that REM sleep catalyses the creative process by allowing the brain to form connections between unrelated ideas.
Cai is by no means the first person to link sleep or dreaming to creative revelations, but she is one of the few to test it directly through experiments. She asked 77 people to complete a task, where they were given a list of three words and had to find a fourth that was linked to all three. For example, ‘cookie’, ‘heart’ and ‘sixteen’ are all associated with ‘sweet’. In each example of this ‘Remote Associates Test‘ (RAT), the missing fourth word has a different relationship to each of the three targets.
For many animals, living with others has obvious benefits. Social animals can hunt in packs, gain safety in numbers or even learn from each other. In some cases, they can even solve problems more quickly as a group than as individuals. That’s even true for the humble house sparrow – Andras Liker and Veronika Bokony from the University of Pannonia, Hungary, found that groups of 6 sparrows are much faster at opening a tricky bird feeder than pairs of birds.
After ruling out several possible explanations, the duo put the speedy work of the bigger flock down to their greater odds of including boffin birds. Individual sparrows vary greatly in terms of their skills, experiences and personalities. Larger groups are more likely to include the sharpest bird brains, or several diverse individuals whose abilities complement each other.
Wild animals constantly encounter new, unfamiliar and challenging situations and the ability to adapt to them more quickly may give social species an edge over loners. The problem-solving advantages of groups have been demonstrated in humans. Three people, far from being a crowd, solve intellectual tasks faster than pairs or individuals, even if they were the smartest of the sample. There has been much less research on other animals, although scientists have certainly found that large groups of birds or fishes find food faster and more efficiently than smaller groups.
But Liker and Bokony’s sparrow experiments are the first to show that large animal groups outperform smaller ones at problem-solving tasks where they have to invent new techniques. House sparrows are a good choice for a study like this. They are very social birds that live in flocks of anywhere from a few individuals to a few hundred. They are opportunists that use their relatively large brains to find food in all sorts of new environments.