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Figuring out why a nap might help people see things in new ways

6 July 2025 at 11:06

Dmitri Mendeleev famously saw the complete arrangement of the periodic table after falling asleep on his desk. He claimed in his dream he saw a table where all the elements fell into place, and he wrote it all down when he woke up. By having a eureka moment right after a nap, he joined a club full of rather talented people: Mary Shelley, Thomas Edison, and Salvador Dali.

To figure out if there’s a grain of truth to all these anecdotes, a team of German scientists at the Hamburg University, led by cognitive science researcher Anika T. LΓΆwe, conducted an experiment designed to trigger such nap-following strokes of geniusβ€”and catch them in the act with EEG brain monitoring gear. And they kind of succeeded.

Catching Edison’s cup

β€œThomas Edison had this technique where he held a cup or something like that when he was napping in his chair,” says Nicolas Schuck, a professor of cognitive science at the Hamburg University and senior author of the study. β€œWhen he fell asleep too deeply, the cup falling from his hand would wake him upβ€”he was convinced that was the way to trigger these eureka moments.” While dozing off in a chair with a book or a cup doesn’t seem particularly radical, a number of cognitive scientists got serious about re-creating Edison’s approach to insights and testing it in their experiments.

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