Subconscious mind creativity - New Years tiredposting

[awoo]

Has this ever happened to you? I was taking a nap and as I was falling asleep in my mind I had somehow composed this amazing sounding piece of music playing in my head. Usually EDM with a clear theme but sometimes something else. It was like when you listen to your favorite music while drunk or high. When I woke up I tried to write it down but I couldn't really remember it. Sometimes I can figure out approaches to math or programming problems when trying to go to sleep but that is just problem solving thinking not creativity. Other times when I am falling asleep I imagine an enormously complex 3d world with way more detail than I can imagine while awake. Maybe the meme about only using 10% of the conscious brainpower is true. Or maybe I just feel like it's better than it really is.

 

[Arm Pit Cream]

That sounds like you have autism

 

[User names must be unique]

Yeah happens to me all the time I'll take a nap and see the most horrifying events and monsters, for a while after waking up I'll think that was horrifying that'd make a great horror story but when I try to recall the whiskey makes me forget.

 

[awoo]

Yeah happens to me all the time I'll take a nap and see the most horrifying events and monsters, for a while after waking up I'll think that was horrifying that'd make a great horror story but when I try to recall the whiskey makes me forget.

not exactly what I was going for but nice to hear your experience

 

[We Are The Witches]

Yes.

Since you mentioned that it happens when you're about to fall asleep, it's most likely related to what they call the Hypnagogic state, (or Hypnagogia), which is the transition between being awake to sleep.

During it, people can experience hallucinations, lucid thought, lucid dreaming, etc, depending on the individual, and as far as I'm aware, several artists have talked about it and how it can lead to creative insight.

 

[VIVIIXI]

Has this ever happened to you? I was taking a nap and as I was falling asleep in my mind I had somehow composed this amazing sounding piece of music playing in my head. Usually EDM with a clear theme but sometimes something else. It was like when you listen to your favorite music while drunk or high. When I woke up I tried to write it down but I couldn't really remember it. Sometimes I can figure out approaches to math or programming problems when trying to go to sleep but that is just problem solving thinking not creativity. Other times when I am falling asleep I imagine an enormously complex 3d world with way more detail than I can imagine while awake. Maybe the meme about only using 10% of the conscious brainpower is true. Or maybe I just feel like it's better than it really is.

Once I woke up and solved a math problem a teacher had posed about 10 years prior. I had solved it before, but used experimental thinking rather an an actual mathematical method. When I woke up, I understood the procedure to get the answer without experimenting. I then forgot it by the next day.

I've also dreamed of songs and poetry that promptly ran off into the wings once I had enough cognizance to actually write them down.

So yea... I've experienced something similar.

Edit: Hell, the Person from Porlock is pretty much a trope regarding this sort of thing.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Maybe the meme about only using 10% of the conscious brainpower is true

It's not. I had a dream about it and god told me it is a bullshit idea. Why would he evolve a brain and then not let you use it.

Okay seriously though.

The difference between mindstates is you don't evaluate things for quality when not awake. This is something cult leaders use. I studied quite a bit about brainwashing techniques. One of the methods used is to talk really really long. After you get more and more bored (and tired, in some cases), the critical part, the part that evaluates information to see if you agree, gets shut off a little (or completely). You become more suggestable. Everything, regardless of quality, becomes more acceptable.

As such people get indoctrinated into things like the moonies cult, scientology and other less fringe things people get brainwashed into.

Dreams, drugged states, but also various other ways where your mind is relaxed, less vigilant, you become open to ideas.

Openness to ideas is not inherently good or bad. It depends on context. It's probably not good while talking to a telemarketer, for example. If you're trying to write a new song it is essential. If you're the person judging which song is best, probably not so good. And so on.

That's what's going on. You experience these things just in a pure, almost childlike state. It sounds good.

But it only sounds good because you're not evaluating it critically and seeing that it is actually kind of gay.

I once woke up with a song in my head about how I wished I was an apple. Because as an apple I could score more goals.

This was a great song in my sleep.

 

[Penis Drager]

I remember hearing about one hypothesis about dreams in an introductory psychology class back in college that was essentially that the sensations/feelings/ideas are essentially random noise generated by the brain and that any sort of "narrative" is actually postscriptively generated by the waking mind. So your mind is just trying to put together quasi-random neuron firings into a story because it wants what it experiences to make sense even if it ostensibly doesn't. I can't remember what this was called but it was always the one that seemed most plausible to me (I thought it was "activation synthesis" but turns out that's a competing idea).

Anyway, this means that a lot of those insights that you just can't quite remember after waking up may simply have just never happened no matter how "certain" you are that they did. It very well may be that the experience you had was not the actual solution to whatever problem, but the concept of having solved said problem. Likewise with whatever music or art you think you experienced may have just been the idea of having experienced said thing.

 

[awoo]

To elaborate on what I said earlier, there are times I can solve math or programming problems before sleeping, but I don't think it's the same phenomenon because those are solved when I'm fully conscious and just have my eyes closed and in a very relaxed state. It also happens when I'm on a walk and I think about math/programming ideas and trying to twist them around and manipulate them into whatever my end goal is.

Off topic: a lot of times in math you can borrow general ideas from other places. For example one time I was about to sleep thinking about a problem in set theory and logic. It was about proving there exists certain an infinite set that have some property and a common way to do this is to start off with a small set and gradually add things in, making sure there are no contradictions along the way. This is sort of how Henkin's proof of completeness of FOL goes about. But also you may prove other kinds of results by assuming for contradiction there is some inconsistency, and it has to appear somewhere in the chain, and derive a contradiction from there. If you know math or CS you'll know this general idea as bottom-up induction which is generally the way you go about things when dealing with infinite structures since you can't reason top-down.

 

[Lemmingwise]

To elaborate on what I said earlier, there are times I can solve math or programming problems before sleeping, but I don't think it's the same phenomenon because those are solved when I'm fully conscious and just have my eyes closed and in a very relaxed state. It also happens when I'm on a walk and I think about math/programming ideas and trying to twist them around and manipulate them into whatever my end goal is.

Off topic: a lot of times in math you can borrow general ideas from other places. For example one time I was about to sleep thinking about a problem in set theory and logic. It was about proving there exists certain an infinite set that have some property and a common way to do this is to start off with a small set and gradually add things in, making sure there are no contradictions along the way. This is sort of how Henkin's proof of completeness of FOL goes about. But also you may prove by assuming for contradiction there is some inconsistency, and it has to appear somewhere in the chain, and derive a contradiction from there. If you know math or CS you'll know this general idea as bottom-up induction which is generally the way you go about things when dealing with infinite structures since you can't reason top-down.

I noticed with athletic training that often I would progress to a new plateau of capability after a rest. But that would not have happened without constant training before that rest.

Similarly many discoveries are made during rest. I don't think it's a coincidence that for example Isaac Newton improved his idea of gravity while taking a break from school (closed due to plague) and working on his dad's farm. His mind got a rest.

The subconscious continues to work things out.

 

[awoo]

I noticed with athletic training that often I would progress to a new plateau of capability after a rest. But that would not have happened without constant training before that rest.

Similarly many discoveries are made during rest. I don't think it's a coincidence that for example Isaac Newton improved his idea of gravity while taking a break from school (closed due to plague) and working on his dad's farm. His mind got a rest.

The subconscious continues to work things out.

yeah you know we understand a lot of basic human biology but we're still not exactly sure why we need sleep. we're only sure of the obvious fact that it's absolutely necessary for mammals and creatures with a brain. but I suppose you were talking about longer term rest.

 

[Penis Drager]

To elaborate on what I said earlier, there are times I can solve math or programming problems before sleeping, but I don't think it's the same phenomenon because those are solved when I'm fully conscious and just have my eyes closed and in a very relaxed state. It also happens when I'm on a walk and I think about math/programming ideas and trying to twist them around and manipulate them into whatever my end goal is.

Well first off, I don't think this has much to due with "subconscious" anything. It's more a difference between the relaxed state of mind and an aroused one. Like, imagine you're running through the woods from something and your jacket snags on a branch. You pull and tug until you're freed, being slowed down in the process. The better solution may often be to stop running, calmly unsnag your jacket, and then start running again. You're not thinking about that, though because you're under a lot of pressure to gtfo of there as fast as possible. This leads you to a direct approach which may be less efficient. Same goes with any problem solving. You're actively engaged in trying to solve it and your state of arousal leads you to bang your head against the same obstacle over and over. In a more relaxed state, you may find it's much easier to walk around it.

Secondly, problem solving and creativity are basically just two sides of the same coin. You have a "point b" you want to get to and you're trying to find a path there from "point a" regardless of whether it's a math solution or just making a nice beat. In fact, I may even go as far as to say a calm mind is typically better at problem solving precisely because it's more creative. The direct approach not being the most effective one is exactly what makes hard problems hard. And the cleverness of the art is exactly what makes a satisfying piece satisfying.

 

[Francesco Dellamorte]

I had somehow composed this amazing sounding piece of music playing in my head

I've also experienced this phenomena. Once it was like I was controlling an entire orchestra, other times it was generic pop songs, all specifically when I was not quite asleep.

...it's most likely related to what they call the Hypnagogic state, (or Hypnagogia), which is the transition between being awake to sleep.

During it, people can experience hallucinations, lucid thought, lucid dreaming, etc, depending on the individual, and as far as I'm aware, several artists have talked about it and how it can lead to creative insight.

I've been looking into this for a while. For anyone else interested, here's an interesting, but probably dated, overview of research into hypnagogia: The Hypnagogic State: A Critical Review of the Literature (see attachment)
A taster:

Definition of Terms and Discussion of Criteria
To what exactly do we refer when we invoke the phrase hypnagogic state? The literature to be reviewed shows that a variety of psychological phenomena have been labeled hypnagogic: spontaneously appearing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic images; qualitatively unusual thought processes and verbal constructions; tendencies toward extreme suggestibility; symbolic representation of ongoing mental and physiological processes; and so on.

 

[awoo]

It's not. I had a dream about it and god told me it is a bullshit idea. Why would he evolve a brain and then not let you use it.

Okay seriously though.

The difference between mindstates is you don't evaluate things for quality when not awake. This is something cult leaders use. I studied quite a bit about brainwashing techniques. One of the methods used is to talk really really long. After you get more and more bored (and tired, in some cases), the critical part, the part that evaluates information to see if you agree, gets shut off a little (or completely). You become more suggestable. Everything, regardless of quality, becomes more acceptable.

As such people get indoctrinated into things like the moonies cult, scientology and other less fringe things people get brainwashed into.

Dreams, drugged states, but also various other ways where your mind is relaxed, less vigilant, you become open to ideas.

Openness to ideas is not inherently good or bad. It depends on context. It's probably not good while talking to a telemarketer, for example. If you're trying to write a new song it is essential. If you're the person judging which song is best, probably not so good. And so on.

That's what's going on. You experience these things just in a pure, almost childlike state. It sounds good.

But it only sounds good because you're not evaluating it critically and seeing that it is actually kind of gay.

I once woke up with a song in my head about how I wished I was an apple. Because as an apple I could score more goals.

This was a great song in my sleep.

I thought of this thread again and there is an interesting connection to machine learning models called restricted Boltzmann machines. Basically there is a network with two layers: one visible and one hidden layer. The visible layer passes info to the hidden layer which is allowed to "dream" (that is the terminology of the creators including Geoffrey Hinton not mine. Hinton is a cognitive psychologist and one of the most influential machine learning researchers alive). It wanders around in its probability space. Then the hidden layer passed info back to the visible layer to be transformed into what is understandable in the visible world. Training is back and forth process of dreaming and then matching it to the training data and trying to improve the weights of everything.
Then Hinton and other researchers came up with the idea of stacking these nets to make deep belief networks, with effectively multiple layers of dreaming. It's insanity and if you get past all the marketing bullshit of machine learning there is some really fascinating ideas. Wait until you hear about generative adversarial networks.