Adam Haar Horowitz on the Hypnagogic State | Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Añadido: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Okay, so let's zoom in on the hypnagogic state, which is right when you're falling asleep. So, some people like Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali would actually use this, take advantage of this. So, tell us how they did that.

[00:00:15]>> Totally. So, pick your Edisons or your Dalis, but also you can read Proust and you can read Nabokov and you can read all these poets and playwrights and scientists playing in this little area of sleep onset. The Beatles, Einstein, and whatever.

[00:00:31]So, it's the moment when your brain is turning thoughts into images. It's the moment where your brain is turning the outside world into an internal world.

[00:00:40]You're awake, you're asleep, but it's not a switch.

[00:00:43]Sleep scientists think there are nine stages of the descent into sleep.

[00:00:46]They're called Hori stages.

[00:00:48]And they're quick. How do you spell it?

[00:00:50]H O R I. It's named after a guy named Todao Hori. There's a bunch of amazing Japanese dream researchers. I'll tell you about it in a bit. Um in those nine stages of sleep, you have these kind of different stereotype dreams, you have these very specific uh brainwave features, EEG features, and hypnagogia is the state of transition. The kind of cool thing about it is you're neither here nor there completely. So, for people listening, this is the state when you're falling asleep and you're like, "Yeah, I've got to go to the grocery store and I've got to pick my kid up from school and I've got to be in a bouncy castle with my grandma." And you're like, "Wait, no, wait, wait, wait." It's where your It's where your thought takes a left turn all of a sudden and it's quick and it's very, very, very strange. And if you want to play with it, you can extend hypnagogia and it will only get weirder the longer you stay in it. It is a crazy state of mind.

[00:01:48]>> Mm. How do you extend it? So, uh I extend hypnagogia with serial awakenings at sleep onset. So, very, very simply, um you can, for instance, without any sort of brain imaging, if you just snooze 10 times, especially over a nap, because naps are going to be very very REM-like during the day, As in hit your snooze button on your alarm?

[00:02:07]>> You just keep hitting that snooze, and those dreams will get weirder and weirder, but you will also get more control over those dreams. So, we haven't gone to talk about lucid dreaming yet, but lucid dreaming is this idea that you could in a dream know that you're dreaming, and then choose what to dream about. And so, this is something that's been documented for hundreds of years, but actually was researched again at Stanford most seriously by a guy named Stephen LaBerge about 50 years ago.

[00:02:34]And it's the idea that in this covert REM early sleep period, or in REM, you realize you're dreaming, you take control of the dream, you make a choice, but even crazier, if you are awake inside a dream, you're totally paralyzed, right? Of course, you can't move your body, or else you would wake up and start running around the bed and fighting ninjas.

[00:02:54]But your eyes are not paralyzed in REM sleep. They can move around.

[00:02:59]So, in that lucid dream, the experiments work like this.

[00:03:02]Somebody realizes it's a dream, and you've agreed before, "Hey, when you realize it's a dream, move your eyes left and right in the dream. Look at the giraffe, look at the elephant. Look at the giraffe, look at the elephant."

[00:03:12]Your real eyes of the person lying there will actually move left right left right four times. So, you can signal from inside the dream, "I know that I'm dreaming."

[00:03:22]>> times, you mean that was the pre-agreed upon number to do. How crazy is that?

[00:03:27]So, they are completely in a different world. They are asleep. We are on different planes of consciousness, but they're looking around in their dream 1 2 3 4, their actual eyes are moving 1 2 3 4. We register that on what's called their EOG, looking at their eye movements. It looks like little lines. That's right.

[00:03:43]Totally.

[00:03:45]And then you can go a little crazier.

[00:03:46]Okay, they know they're in a dream.

[00:03:49]I'm going to play a math problem on the loud speaker.

[00:03:53]What's 3 minus 1?

[00:03:56]In their dream, they'll be walking down the street and then they'll look at a house and it'll be house number 3 minus 1 and they'll say, "Oh, it's the math problem I knew I would get." And then they'll move their eyes, 1 2.

[00:04:08]And they'll answer correctly. This is a literal This is This is This is paper kind of Karen Konkoly and a bunch of folks led this is a few years ago.

[00:04:15]Replicated across four different labs.

[00:04:17]>> [snorts] >> They are asleep.

[00:04:19]They are in a different plane of consciousness. You are playing math problems over the loudspeaker. They're answering correctly with their eyes while they remain in REM. And this is like It's cool science, but it's also the first time humans have ever communicated across these planes of consciousness. So, as someone who's really interested in consciousness and phenomenology, like for you this is pretty weird. It's like we're we're talking across worlds. So, I really love it via the eyes. I love that. Okay, so that's lucid dreaming, but zooming back out now to this hypnagogic state right when you're falling asleep. So, you were about to tell us what Edison, Dali, and all the others actually do to take advantage of this.

[00:04:57]>> It's true. I got a little excited about dream research. I took a left turn, got into lucid dreaming. So, yeah, they were just doing really simple which they called the steel ball technique or sleeping with a key. But both involved sitting upright like you are, letting yourself take a nap during the day.

[00:05:12]Especially good is what's called the postprandial period which is a fancy way of saying after you eat lunch cuz you really get sleepy.

[00:05:20]And you fall asleep sitting up, but you're holding something heavy.

[00:05:25]When you start falling asleep in hypnagogia, all these things are happening in your brain, but also you're losing muscle tone. So, your grip will loosen.

[00:05:32]You'll drop that ball.

[00:05:33]It'll hit the ground and make a loud sound and it'll catch hypnagogia. Edison called it his genius gap because hypnagogia is super associative, super exploratory, super creative, super flexible cognition.

[00:05:48]And so, Edison would pick a problem he was working on, think about it as he was falling asleep, [music] and catch his hypnagogic thoughts around that topic to find his most creative thinking. And totally cool that Edison did it, interesting, it's been documented, but we just got real scientific evidence for it.

[00:06:06]Led by Celia Lacaux, a wonderful paper called uh sleep onset is a creative sweet spot.

[00:06:12]And what she found is that have people try to solve math problems, specific kind of math problem that needs a eureka moment, like solving puzzles.

[00:06:21][music] Have them do this exact technique, and they enter into N1, and they wake up, or have them sleep a little deeper and let them go into N2, a different stage of sleep.

[00:06:35]The people who just dipped into N1 have a 3x greater likelihood of solving that creative problem than the people who dipped into N2 and went deeper in.

[00:06:45]There is something sweet happening in N1. There is something strange and specific and flexible and creative, and I know you've written about creativity.

[00:06:53]There is something associative happening in that state of mind, but you got to catch it if you want it. So, that's what the steel ball was for, and that's actually what our our our work at MIT around Dormio, which was basically a wearable device, which would track the same thing, you losing muscle tone, and then would talk to you. It's really similar to the steel ball technique, except instead of waking up entirely, it would help incubate that dream of your problem you wanted to work on right at that moment. It would wake you up automatically and record a verbal report, and then it would say, "Great, you can snooze again." Cuz the ball, it's kind of hard to snooze again with a steel ball.