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. 2023 Dec 1:17:1302836.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2023.1302836. eCollection 2023.

Overnight exposure to pink noise could jeopardize sleep-dependent insight and pattern detection

Beverly Vickrey  1 , Itamar Lerner  1
Affiliations

Overnight exposure to pink noise could jeopardize sleep-dependent insight and pattern detection

Beverly Vickrey et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Accumulated evidence from the past decades suggests that sleep plays a crucial role in memory consolidation and the facilitation of higher-level cognitive processes such as abstraction and gist extraction. In addition, recent studies show that applying pink noise during sleep can further enhance sleep-dependent memory consolidation, potentially by modulating sleep physiology through stochastic resonance. However, whether this enhancement extends to higher cognitive processes remains untested. In this study, we investigated how the application of open-loop pink noise during sleep influences the gain of insight into hidden patterns. Seventy-two participants were assigned to three groups: daytime-wake, silent sleep, and sleep with pink noise. Each group completed the number reduction task, an established insight paradigm known to be influenced by sleep, over two sessions with a 12-h interval. Sleep groups were monitored by the DREEM 3 headband in home settings. Contrary to our prediction, pink noise did not induce an increase in insight compared to silent sleep and was statistically more similar to the wake condition despite evidence for its typical influence on sleep physiology. Particularly, we found that pink noise limited the time spent in the initial cycle of N1 just after sleep onset, while time spent in N1 positively predicted insight. These results echo recent suggestions that the time in the initial cycle of N1 plays a critical role in insight formation. Overall, our results suggest that open-loop pink noise during sleep may be detrimental to insight formation and creativity due to the alterations it causes to normal sleep architecture.

Keywords: 1/f noise; extraction of regularities; insight; memory consolidation; number reduction task; pattern recognition; pink noise; sleep.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Illustration of the experimental task. (A) Timeline of the experimental procedure for the wake, silent sleep, and pink noise groups. (B) Example trial of the NRT including the same and different rules. On each trial, a string of eight digits is presented, composed of the digits 1, 4, and 9. For each input, participants must use the same and different rules to generate the next digit until reaching the final answer. The final response is always the same as the second one. Adapted from Wagner et al. (2004).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Comparison of reaction time differences between participants with insight and no insight. Values reflect the mean reaction time differences between the last block of Session 1 and the first block of Session 2 for each input type (1, 2–4, 5–7), grouped by insight. Means are reported on the Y-axis. Error bars reflect standard errors. *Significance at 0.05 level. †significance at the 0.09 level. (A) Silent and pink noise sleep groups using insight based on questionnaire responses. (B) Wake group using insight based on questionnaire responses (only non-insight included, no wake participants gained insight). (C,D) Reaction time differences per input for the sleep and wake groups from Wagner et al. (2004)’s NRT study, for comparison. “Solvers” indicates subjects with insight. Figures taken with permission from Wagner et al. (2004). (E) Silent sleep group using insight based on performance. (F) Pink noise sleep group using insight based on performance. (G) Wake group using insight based on performance.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Comparison of sleep variables between the silent sleep and pink noise groups. Means and standard errors of each examined sleep variable are displayed. (A) Basic sleep architecture variables. (B) Time spent in the initial cycle of N1. **Significance at 0.01 level, *significance at 0.05 level. †Significance at the 0.08 level.
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The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.