Lacauxs team also experimented with different objects the participants should hold while napping: spoons, steel spheres, stress balls, etc.
It turned out Edison was right, and a cup was by far the best choice.
It also turned out that most participants recognized there was a hidden rule after the falling cup woke them up.
The nap was brief, only long enough to enter the light, non-REM N1 phase of sleep.Initially, Schucks team wanted to replicate the results of Lacauxs study.
They even bought the exact same make of cups, but the cups failed this time.
For us, it just didnt work.
People who fell asleep often didnt drop these cupsI dont know why, Schuck says.The bigger surprise, however, was that the N1 phase sleep didnt work either.Schucks team set up an experiment that involved asking 90 participants to track dots on a screen in a series of trials, with a 20-minute-long nap in between.
The dots were rather small, colored either purple or orange, placed in a circle, and they moved in one of two directions.
The task for the participants was to determine the direction the dots were moving.
That could range from easy to really hard, depending on the amount of jitter the team introduced.The insight the participants could discover was hidden in the color coding.
After a few trials where the dots direction was random, the team introduced a change that tied the movement to the color: orange dots always moved in one direction, and the purple dots moved in the other.
It was up to the participants to figure this out, either while awake or through a nap-induced insight.