【推荐3】It was a method favoured by the inventor Thomas Edison and the artist Salvador Dali. Waking from a nap exactly at the point before deep sleep in an effort to inspire creativity.

Edison held a metal ball in his hand so that if he nodded off he would drop it and the sound would wake him. For Dali, it was a key landing on a plate. Now scientists have found that they might have been onto something.

Researchers at the Paris Brain Institute studied people’s ability to find a hidden rule in a maths puzzle. Identifying the trick would make solving the problem far simpler but to do so required thinking creatively. The scientists found that participants who had been woken just before falling into a deep sleep, using a technique like that used by Edison and Dali, were more likely to find the shortcut.

This “twilight zone” is known as non-rapid eye movement sleep stage 1, or N1. Scientists described it like an exaggerated form of mind-wandering, where dream-like thoughts fill the mind. It is thought that as people start to disengage (脱离) from their environment they can “freely watch their minds wander, while maintaining their ability to identify creative sparks (火花)”.

For the study 103 people were given a maths problem to solve. To reach the final answer they had to apply the rules step by step but, unknown to them, a “hidden rule” would allow them to bypass most of the steps and get to the solution much more quickly. The results showed that 83 percent of those in the N1 group had found the shortcut, compared with 31 percent in the group who were awake and 14 percent of those in a deep sleep.

Researchers conclude that the brain activity common to the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness set off creative sparks. “Although the neural mechanisms (神经机制) involved are not yet known, our findings suggest that there is a creative sweet spot within the twilight zone,” said Dr Thomas Andrillon, co-author of the study.

【推荐1】Face blindness, a mystifying condition that can trick us into believing we recognize people we’ve never met or make us fail to recognize those we have, has been previously estimated to affect between 2 and 2.5 percent of people in the world.Now, a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the VA Boston Healthcare System is providing fresh insights into the disorder, suggesting it may be more common than currently believed.

Published in February 2023 in Cortex, the study findings indicate that as many as one in 33 people may meet the criteria for face blindness, or prosopagnosia (面孔失认症).“This translates to more than 10 million Americans,” the research team said.

The study found similar face-matching performance between people diagnosed with prosopagnosia using stricter vs looser criteria, suggesting that diagnostic criteria should be expanded to be more inclusive. That could lead to new diagnoses among millions who may have the disorder but don’t realize it.

The study results are based on a web-based questionnaire and tests administered to 3,341 individuals.First, the researchers asked participants whether they experience difficulties recognizing faces in their everyday lives.Then they administered two objective tests to determine whether they had difficulties learning new faces or recognizing highly familiar famous faces.

The results showed that 31 individuals out of the 3,341 had major prosopagnosia, while 72 of the 3,341 had a milder form. The researchers also observed that there were no neatly divided separate groups of people with poor or good ability to recognize faces. Rather, the ability to recognize faces appeared to lie on a continuum (连续体).

Finally, the researchers compared face-matching scores among people with prosopagnosia diagnosed using different criteria and found that using stricter diagnostic cutoffs did not correspond with lower face-matching scores.

In the new study, the researchers provide diagnostic suggestions for identifying mild and major forms of prosopagnosia based on guidelines for major and mild neurocognitive disorders in the DSM5, the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

【推荐2】High in the Swiss Alps and the Arctic, scientists have discovered microbes (微生物) that can digest plastics — importantly, without the need to apply extra heat. Their findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, could one day improve plastic recycling.

It’s no secret that plastic pollution is still a big, global issue. Since its production exploded during and after World War II, humans have created more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic — and researchers estimate that less than one tenth of the resulting waste has been recycled. To make matters worse, the most common recycling option — when plastic is washed, processed and turned into new products — doesn’t actually reduce waste: The recycled materials are often of lower quality and might later end up in a landfill all the same.

So, researchers are looking for solutions to the plastics problem that go beyond conventional recycling — and one process they’ve experimented with is breaking down plastics using microbes. But the known plastic-digesting microbes can only do so at warm temperatures above 85 degrees Fahrenheit. When done at an industrial scale, the amount of energy needed to generate that much heat makes the process give off more carbon —and cost more money.

But the microbes found in the Arctic and Swiss Alps can function at cooler temperatures: They were able to break down biodegradable (可生物降解的) plastics at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. In the new study, co-author Joel Rüthi and his colleagues discovered that of the total 34 types of microbes examined,19 were successfully able to break down a form of plastic called polyester-polyurethane, and 17 could break down two types of biodegradable plastic mixtures.

Unfortunately, the plastics that the microbes partially degraded represent a “really small amount of plastics in circulation,” said Gavin Lear, an environmental microbiologist, who was not involved in the study. Lear acknowledged that using natural microbes can provide a head start when it comes to designing a strategy for bio-recycling. If we move away from the conventional non-biodegradable materials, “and we start to use more of these biodegradable plastics, then it’s good that we know how to degrade them more quickly so they’re less of an environmental problem,” he concluded.