Dream engineering can help solve 'puzzling' questions: Study offers insights to optimizing sleep

[erronis]

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-puzzling-insights-optimizing.html
Northwestern University

We've all heard the best approach to solve a problem is to "sleep on it." It turns out there may be more truth to this adage than previously thought. While stories abound of eureka moments surfacing from dreams, scientific evidence has remained elusive, due to the challenge of systematically manipulating dreams.

A new study by neuroscientists at Northwestern University validates the possibility of influencing dreams and offers a crucial step to support the theory that dreams in REM sleep--the rapid eye movement phase of sleep in which lucid dreaming can occur--may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem.

The study has been published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.

By presenting sounds during sleep that reminded study participants of a prior experience of trying to solve a specific puzzle, a method known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), the scientists were able to encourage participants to have more dreams about randomly selected unsolved puzzles. Importantly, experimenters presented sounds only with concurrent electrophysiological verification that participants were asleep.

They found that 75% of their participants experienced dreams that included fragments or ideas from the unsolved puzzles. Further, puzzles incorporated into dreams were solved more often than puzzles that were not (42% vs. 17%).

. . .

Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep, Neuroscience of Consciousness (2026). DOI: 10.1093/nc/niaf067 doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf067

[Goonch]

1. ;-{)

[jfz9580m]

2. Well I don't know about tbe engineering part

But the brain standalone solves a lot of puzzles.

I have posted a bunch here in different headspaces and lately I feel better about it as it gets closer to a fast, simple, elegant explanation that I as a human fully back where it involves my own behaviors.

I had a very brain warping experience in the Fall of 2011 and most of what I posted about it here was upsetting because I didn’t really buy what I was writing up to this last December.

Just as I appreciate nature and animal life way more than these sad and lame LLMs, this made me appreciate the efficient elegance of a healthy human brain with a simple yes and no sans any maybe (I always found uncertainty of the types involving humans and human systems, adjusted for context, very stressful) that you can expect to be heeded.

I spend a lot of my time trying to minimize needless interactions with other humans, let alone these lousy machinic things ;-/.
It is not personal..I just feel way lonelier among people than I do alone. I mean I totally have solidarity etc. but how can you ever do anything you want to with these loathesome things around or some chattering humans.

The most fraudulent pitch I have heard is that these awful things will increase rather than decrease quality work output. Clearly they exist solely to enrich a dead-eyed marketing shill like Sundar Pichai. No Exit would only work for some kind of exhibitionist.

But over time my brain has become better at distinguishing between meum et tuum. It was too fantastic to comprehend at first because I came across these foul things 15 years ago when it was less obvious.

I don’t get how it works, but since it really is just garbage I don’t care to know beyond fumbling till I find the off switch and gear up to file complaints- that is also partly worldview. I like animals, plants, trees microscopes, oscilloscopes, hell even a damn lathe is cooler

I never found computers or phones at all interesting: they are largely personal use tech.
Okay someone like Turing, Yan Lecun or that professor Ryan Williams..With CS, the human almost seems to matter more than the natural sciences where bullshit is far easier to detect. Had Elizabeth Holmes chosen to shill musical LLMs or VR for mental health with ai or some such less easily detectable bs she would still be feted.

Most of contemporary CS honestly appears to be sales people and social engineers (Alex Pentland etc).

I really don’t mean it contemptuously or snidely etc.

But I mean come on..it is one thing to go around being like that. But it is too much to ask that a society overall just meekly adapt and adjust to sales or marketing guys’ priorities and resign oneself to horrible, snoopy, thieving bloatware.

That is asking too much and it makes me want to feed those Pichai types to the Kraken of whose existence I have been informed by various entirely unreliable internet forums on reddit and such.

These guys are selling insidious lies about human behavior and mental health with what I at least see as an eye towards commodification while forcing a monoculture plus a national security state perspective, where it is reflexive and meaningless behavior caused by the sense of a truly unsympathetic observer.

Anyway, I rarely find myself having much sympathy with any positions of many on or offline debates.
Maybe as a Green and part of a group dying out of this gene pool that is mostly enthusiastic shopaholics and factory farming and sweatshop/mass incarceration fans I don’t get it.

I never found computers cool. It’s just a bunch of hardware and scripts. I don’t get the Eliza effect.

But I do get Guildea’s parrot. If you start registering these creepy, brainless, uninteresting, zombie like things, it’s like the thing in Guildea, ie specifically a creep.

It is not normal human behavior to show up and nestle unwanted in someone else’s home, their devices. This is specifically the behavior of human creeps, snoops, telemarketers, scammers or best case lol..some kind of paranoid authoritarian fascist and those are the kinds of people building and deploying these stupid creepy things at scale.

And then they call you a crazy person and bring in a creepy coercive shrink. I protest all of that.

And that is totally the dynamic.

We don’t really know other humans (especially scientists doctors and the kinds of people whose thoughts are hardest to read).

I can’t even say Pichai’s internal world would be easy to pin down, though that it would suck as much as what spills out I am sure of.

At best you can look at what is easy to discern about humans and go “Okay based on all this, I have no wish to know what that person is about beyond wanting to avoid them (Pichai, Andreessen etc.) Or oh cool..someone with something useful to say (Yasha Levine, Chris Ketcham, Nathan Robinson, Troy Farah etc).’

I clutched at left media like a famished person to make sense of reality after this confusing job.

That job I mentioned at the outset was typical of Si Valley and its lousy social media giants, kayfabe etc. It forces and incites these blatantly phony conflicts by withholding simple information. I had nothing against the two labs I saw there -they were clearly decent people (though however cool you or your work are, a package deal with Google/Facebook/the US National Security State is just too unattractive to some people..)

It was baffling. There is something very tangible and solid normally about good science/scientists versus the totally bogus world most media, politicians, CS creeps, NSS and entertainment types inhabit.

That is why left media of the most honest type is such a relief to nerves ragged by the slippery, sleaziness of Si Valley with its histrionic myth building using a bunch of buggy bloatware and a bloated and stale entertainment industry to fill the public mind with as many misconceptions as our extremely credulous and fatuous tech press.

Adam Becker, who again is a nice solid person unlike that cult in Si Valley, is entirely too kind.


I am lucky my brain was essentially robustly healthy and snapped back to normal..damn waste of life. The ai winter cannot come soon enough. Unless it is Yan LeCun, I usually dismiss Ai entirely. Prof LeCun seems like a normal honest scientist. Ai certified by Dr. Lecun (or Timnit Gebru/Dair and Emily Bender) is the only ai I would allow. Those agents are even worse than LlMs. All so lame.
Give me a microscope with no ai or ANI any day….,,

[erronis]

3. I can't see the world through your eyes but I appreciate your perspective(s).

That's what is so wonderful about living beings with real wetware. We're not commodified thinking machines with identical wiring. As much ass no two snowflakes are the same, so do we differ.