Creative People Sleep More, Later, and Less Well

The quality of a person’s sleep might be tied to their creativity, reports research from the University of Haifa.

Thirty undergraduate students from seven academic institutions participated in the study, half of whom were majoring only in art and half of whom were majoring only in the social sciences. During the study, the participants underwent overnight electrophysiological sleep recordings, wore a wrist activity monitor (a device that measures sleep objectively), and completed a sleep monitoring diary and a questionnaire on sleep habits in order to measure the pattern and quality of sleep. They also undertook visual and verbal creativity tests.

The findings show that among all the participants, the higher the level of visual creativity, the lower the quality of their sleep. This was manifested in such aspects as sleep disturbances and daytime dysfunction. The researchers also found that the higher the participants’ level of verbal creativity, the more hours they slept and the later they went to sleep and woke up. A comparison between the sleep patterns of art students and non-art students found that art students sleep more, but this in no way guarantees quality sleep: art students evaluated their sleep as of lower quality and reported more sleep disturbances and daytime dysfunction than the non-art students.

Get the whole story at www.sciencedaily.com