Office Culture Reconsiders the Siesta

Posted by Ryan Hurd on September 30, 2008

The Pod People Strike Back

Our culture is a sleep-deprived culture. While that is obvious to many, it is helpful every once in a while to call out the larger dynamic, the water we swim in.

Workaholism, ambient electric lights, unregulated microwave radiation, houses constructed out of toxic wood, global economic uncertainty, irradiated salads, pharmaceuticals in the water, aluminum in our brains, vitamin D deficiencies, the loss of wilderness, and then there’s the nightmares….. it’s no wonder many of us are not sleeping like babies. Actually, babies don’t sleep very well either.

So, anyways, here’s a fun article by the New York Times about how the Fortune 500 is reconsidering the importance of naps. Sure, the naps are designed to increase worker efficiency, but I must admit those Pod Chairs look pretty cool.

I especially am pleased to see the connection between sleep and creativity discussed in the mainstream media:

Dr. Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.”

In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it.

This lack of awareness makes it hard to identify specific aha! insights that have been prompted by sleep.

“It’s more that sleep brings a change of approach,” explains Mark Holmes, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios who worked on the film “Wall-E.” “You can get tunnel vision when you”re hammering away at a problem. You keep going down this same path, again and again, just tweaking, making incremental changes at best. ” He continues: “Sleep erases that. It resets you. You wake up and realize ” wait a minute! ” there is another way to do this.”

Check out the Nap Pod article here.