Figuring out why a nap might help people see things in new ways
Dmitri Mendeleev famously saw the complete arrangement of the periodic table after falling asleep on his desk. He claimed in his dream he saw a table where all the elements fell into place, and he wrote it all down when he woke up. By having a eureka moment right after a nap, he joined a club full of rather talented people: Mary Shelley, Thomas Edison, and Salvador Dali. To figure out if there’s a grain of truth to all these anecdotes, a team of German scientists at the Hamburg University, led