Sunday, December 19, 2021

Then, after months of deliberation, on December 9 the European Commission issued a directive intended to provide overall guidance on platform work. Thanks to widespread organizing efforts, several European countries have dealt with a flurry of cases on rights protections for gig workers. To establish some overall clarity for all European Union countries, the Commission took a head-on approach to the employment question. Its new Directive, intended to provide guidance for national legislation throughout Europe, comes out clearly on the side of presuming that those working for platforms are, in fact, employed by the platforms. In this, it mirrors the commonsense “ABC test” in many U.S. state-level laws.

Even better, the EU has taken on a critical 21st century challenge to decent work: platforms can no longer hide behind codes and algorithmic management. Worker organizations in Europe have been contesting for workers’ right to know what data is being collected about them, and how it is being used.

Under the Directive, platform companies will have to make accessible to workers and their representatives information on everything from client ratings to use of surveillance technologies and how that information is being used. Better yet, they will be obligated to make a real human being available in cases where a worker wishes to contest an algorithmically determined decision.

The requirement to put a “human in the loop” is critical. As a staggering new report from Worker Info Exchange shows, earlier claims using Europe’s existing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are simply not effective. As the report points out, gig workers have faced an “inordinate amount of unfair dismissals,” situations where the algorithmic black box simply terminates a worker from a platform with no explanation.

Without access to the codes — and the logic of decision-making — workers have had no recourse. As the report illustrates in case after case, individual workers seeking redress on a case-by-case basis are caught in surreal feedback loops, unable to access a real person to whom to explain their claims. In one typical case:

Pa Edrissa Manjang had been working with Uber for about a year when he was deactivated due to a selfie verification failure. . . . Pa was not given any warnings or notified of any issues until his dismissal; the Real Time ID verification system appeared to approve all of his photographs with a green check. Following his dismissal, Pa sent numerous messages to Uber to rectify the problem, specifically asking for a human to review his submissions. Each time Pa was told “we were not able to confirm that the provided photos were actually of you and because of continued mismatches, we have made the final decision on ending our partnership with you.” We obtained the selfies in question through a subject access request, which revealed that all of the photos Pa submitted were in fact of him.

In another typical case, the report describes a driver with a 4.95-star rating who had conducted more than 11,500 trips in over 5 years working for Uber. One day, his son picked up his second phone by mistake and thus he failed to respond to a single ID check that evening. The next day, Uber informed him that his account had been “flagged for suspicious application activity” and permanently closed his account and terminated his work.

Uber also reported the alleged “fraud” to the regulatory authority Transport for London, which immediately revoked the driver’s license. Uber was never compelled to provide any evidence to support the determination of fraud and the record from the actual phone device shows no record of activity in the evening in question.

Bama Athreya is host of The Gig Podcast and affiliated with the Just Jobs Network. She is also on the board of Worker Info Exchange.

UC Union Movement Grows

BY SETH SANDRONSKYFacebook

Progressive change happens in many ways. One way is through workers winning union recognition from an employer.

Consider University of California Graduate Student Researchers United (SRU) from all 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After voting yes, 10,622 out of 10,890, to authorize a recognition strike to form a labor union local with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in mid-November 2021, they won the right to bargain collectively with their employer on December 8. This was no overnight victory.

A supermajority of SRU/UAW had filed cards with the state Public Employment Relations Board to join the union on May 24. However, UC had a problem with some of the 17,000 SRU seeking to unionize. Did someone say divide-and-rule?

UC’s interpretation of the California Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act excluded about 6,000 SRU (some of whom did vote in the strike authorization ballot), called fellows and trainees, from becoming UAW members. Fellows and trainees receive their pay from non-UC funds like the National Institutes of Health.

On September 8, the PERB, a quasi-judicial administrative agency, disputed UC’s definition of the 6,000 SRU members as non-UC employees. This was a sticking point for UC until December 8, when it agreed to recognize SRU/UAW.

“It appears that the University sought to recognize only part of UAW’s petitioned-for unit,” reads the PERB missive of September 8. “This was not one of the choices available to the University. The University was required to either recognize the petitioned-for unit, or deny recognition based on the reasons enumerated under PERB Regulation 51080(d)(3). Because the University failed to recognize the petitioned-for unit, PERB must treat the University’s September 2, 2021 response as a denial of recognition pursuant to PERB Regulation 51080(d).”

Laura Beebe is a fifth year Ph.D. student in biological sciences. She represented UC San Diego on the SRU/UAW strike committee. It had two democratically elected members from each of the 10 UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“After relentless organizing and the collective efforts of thousands of student researchers,” according to Beebe, “we’re proud to say that UC finally did the right thing. The sheer size of our unit—17,000 workers—is historic: we are the largest academic student employee union ever formed in the U.S. UAW now represents 48,000 workers at UC, which is California’s largest employer. We hope to use our voice to make the university a more equitable place to work.”

Recent public school teacher strikes partly helped to lay the 2021 groundwork for labor militancy in the pandemic economy, according to author Kim Moody. “Workers learn from the victories of other workers and from the perception that their own conditions are shared by others across society,” he writes. “The education workers of 2018 and 2019 were, indeed, teaching others that when the conditions are right, the time to strike and win has come.”

Each one teaches one that progressive change can and does happen with class cooperation. Just ask the 17,000 members of SRU/UAW.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com

The Record-Breaking Failures of Nuclear Power

BY LINDA GUNTERFacebook

Photograph Source: Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor – CC BY 2.0

The Tennessee Valley Authority could likely rightfully claim a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it’s not an achievement for which the federally-owned electric utility corporation would welcome notoriety.

After taking a whopping 42 years to build and finally bring on line its Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor in Tennessee, TVA just broke its own record for longest nuclear plant construction time. However, this time, the company failed to deliver a completed nuclear plant.

Watts Bar 2 achieved criticality in May 2016, then promptly came off line due to a transformer fire three months later. It finally achieved full operational status on October 19, 2016, making it the first United States reactor to enter commercial operation since 1996.

Now, almost five years later, TVA has announced it has abandoned its unfinished two-reactor Bellefonte nuclear plant in Alabama, a breathtaking 47 years after construction began.

TVA was apparently happy to get out of the nuclear construction business, because, as the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported, the company “did not see the need for such a large and expensive capacity generation source.” No kidding!

Ironically, this is precisely the argument used to advance renewables, in an energy environment that cannot and will no longer support inflexible, large, thermo-electric generators that are completely impractical under the coming smart grids as well as climate change-induced conditions.

Accordingly, TVA was more than happy to accept overtures from a purchaser for Bellefonte — the Haney real estate company— whose director, Frank Haney, gained his own notoriety by lavishing $1 million on former President Trump and courting Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, possibly, suggested media reports, to curry regulatory favors for his new nuclear toy.

But when TVA announced last month that it had withdrawn its construction permit for Bellefonte, Haney got his down payment back — to the tune of $22.9 million plus interest. TVA had itself spent at least $5.8 billion on Bellefonte over the 47 years, which included long stoppages, before finally pulling the plug.

This kind of colossal waste of time and money on failed nuclear power projects is, of course, the more typical story than the myths spun in the press about the need for “low carbon” nuclear energy, a misleading representation used to argue for nuclear power’s inclusion in climate change mitigation.

In reality, the story of nuclear power development in the US over the last 50 years is beyond pitiful and would not pass muster under any “normal” business plan. How the nuclear industry gets away with it remains baffling.

As Beyond Nuclear’s Paul Gunter told the Chattanooga Times Free Press, “Bellefonte is just the most recent failure for this industry,” noting that “of the 30 reactors the industry planned to build 15 years ago with the so-called nuclear renaissance, only two are still being built. (Those two, at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, are years behind schedule with a budget that has more than doubled to $27 billion.)

As Gunter noted in the same article, “TVA has had major problems meeting projected costs and timetables for new nuclear plants, as the entire industry has had over the past 50 years. The inability to meet any budgets for these plants is what has repeatedly been the demise of nuclear energy.

“Nuclear energy is the most expensive way ever conceived to boil water and Bellefonte just shows once again how unreliable this technology really is in terms of projecting what it will cost and how long it will take to build these power plants,” Gunter told the newspaper.

That was certainly true for Westinghouse Electric Company and SCANA, still embroiled in the ever unraveling scandal around the failure to complete two new reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina. As executives of the bankrupt Westinghouse and SCANA, who retained them, continue to face criminal charges, Westinghouse has already had to shell out $2.168 billion in settlement payments related to the Summer debacle.

In August, news reports said Westinghouse would also be required to reimburse low-income ratepayers to the tune of $21.25 million. That’s because the new reactors got funded in part through electricity rates, even though they never delivered a single watt of electricity. The cost of the project itself eventually ballooned to more than $9 billion before collapsing.

Let’s look at the track record as a whole. According to Wikipedia’s article, List of cancelled nuclear reactors in the United States: “Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were cancelled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.”

Wikipedia’s stunning list on the same page details 157 reactors that were either canceled before or during construction.

The massive costs, of course, send most corporations running scared, the Haney family notwithstanding. Even when meaty subsidies have been dangled — as they were for the Calvert Cliffs 3 EPR project in Maryland — utility companies balk and bail. In the case of Calvert Cliffs, Constellation Energy was the US partner with the French government utility EDF. But even when offered a $7.5 billion loan guarantee by the Obama administration, Constellation viewed those terms as “too expensive and burdensome” and quit.

This left EDF, a foreign company, as sole owner, a violation of the Atomic Energy Act. The project duly collapsed, one of many referred to earlier by Paul Gunter as the fantasy of a nuclear renaissance that first sputtered, then went out.

President Obama, of course, was no friend to the anti-nuclear movement. So eager was he to boost new nuclear construction in the US that he called for the inclusion of $55 billion for nuclear loan guarantees in his $3.8 trillion 2011 budget. In his State of the Union address that year, Obama talked of “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Kool-Aid thoroughly drunk, then.

All of this should send an obvious message to the deaf ears of Ben Cardin (D-MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), the leading pro-nuclear evangelists in the U.S. Senate. Cardin’s power production credit bill actually has the gall to describe nuclear power as “zero-emission”, a lie that even Cardin’s own staffer was forced to concede in a recent meeting attended by Paul Gunter who called him out on it.

Not that any of this will stop the bill going forward and almost certainly passing. Like the three not-so-wise monkeys, those Senators and their colleagues will acknowledge no negatives about nuclear power, even as the industry’s appalling litany of financial fiascoes and failures stares them in the face. They will forge right ahead, thus dooming to its own failure the very progress on climate change they claim to champion.

Booth’s Party: the Plot to Kill Lincoln

BY ISHMAEL REED

THE CANADIAN CONNECTION
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Photograph Source: Heritage Auctions – Public Domain

My recent non-fiction books were published by Baraka Books of Montreal, headed by a Quebecer, Robin Philpot. This places me in a tradition that extends back to 1856, when Benjamin Drew edited an anthology entitled A North-Side View of Slavery. Included were the testimonies of fugitive slaves who could say in Canada what they were forbidden from speaking in the United States. The muting of Black opinion still occurs.

Even two top Black anchors for CNN and MSNBC confessed that they’re prohibited from making some points. This muting of Black voices is also happening in publishing. Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl, has a character complain about how White authors have a better chance of getting their proposals to write about Black subjects accepted than Black authors.

I haven’t experienced such restrictions from Baraka Books or the CBC network where I have been interviewed. Moreover, it’s because of my visiting Montreal and Toronto on a book tour that I learned facts about John Wilkes Booth that were not covered in my education.

American students are taught that John Wilkes Booth was the lone assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But then they are informed that four were hanged because of the murder, including an innkeeper, Mary Surratt, who might have been innocent. Most are willing to leave it at that. So was I until I traveled to Canada. In 2012, Philpot took me on a walking tour of Confederates’ Montreal and pointed out where the Montreal St. Lawrence Hall Hotel and the Ontario Bank once stood. When he was killed, a note from the bank was found among Booth’s possessions. Booth and the Confederate conspirators were lodged at the St. Lawrence. He signed a guest’s ledger in 1864.

Some Canadians were hospitable to their Confederate guests. They believed that a divided nation would distract from the plans for annexing Canada, also known as British North America, to the United States. Invasions launched by Americans began in 1775 when the Continental Army invaded and again in 1812. Both attacks ended badly for the Americans. An 1866 invasion launched by the Fenian Brotherhood from Buffalo was also repelled.

Such was the affection that British Canadians held for the Confederate cause that after the war, when Jefferson Davis attended a performance at Montreal’s Theatre Royal, owned by John Buckland and his wife, actress Kate Horn, who were friends of Booth, the audience applauded and sang a rousing rendition of “Dixie.” Not only was there a Confederate presence in Montreal, but when I visited Toronto, I found that there had been a Confederate presence there as well. Booth visited the city 10-12 days in 1864.

According to Montreal, City of Secrets by Barry Sheehy, the Confederate Secret Service encouraged Booth to kill Lincoln, abandoning the original plan of kidnapping the president and holding him hostage.

Though depicted as a deranged individual in popular culture, Booth is remembered by both Canadians and Americans as a charmer. Women loved him. He and his brothers followed their father into the acting business, and Booth earned $20,000 per year and sometimes $1,000 per week, a high income in those days. His specialty was Shakespeare. He really stepped into his character. He cast himself as Brutus against the tyrant Lincoln. He was method before Lee Strasberg.

Booth would feel right at home in today’s Republican Party. He left a letter with his brother-in-law John S. Clarke which gave his reasons for the assassination.

It contains some of the ideas you hear from today’s American Right. That slave masters were “merciful.” According to Booth, the cruelty meted out to Blacks by slave masters was no different from the punishment northern fathers gave to their sons. This opinion has been repeated in American school books, which show slaves having a grand time in the South, where the fiddler was always on hand. But one wonders whether a northern father stripped his son and gave him 25 lashes, which is how Robert E. Lee treated a runaway slave, a woman. After the beating, he had brine smeared into her wounds. Robert E. Lee was a character right out of Poe. He believed that slaves needed “painful discipline.”

Like some Republicans, Booth believed that the slavers did Blacks a big favor by importing them from their homelands, which doesn’t explain the hundreds of slave revolts on ships conducted by Africans who wanted to stay home. Hollywood gives us one. He believed in States Rights, an idea cooked up by slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson, who feared that the North might federalize the slaves. Like some of today’s Republicans, Booth denies that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery but for “noble” causes, even though the states that seceded gave slavery the reason for doing so.

But Booth’s reason for killing Lincoln was Lincoln’s floating the idea of granting the franchise to Black soldiers. Booth was in the audience when Lincoln made the comment on April 11, 1865. He told a companion that he was going to kill Lincoln.

Depriving Blacks of the right to vote is the leading obsession of today’s Republican party.

Like Booth, many of those who invaded the Capitol on January 6^th agree. They also believe that assassination is a way to protest a government with which you disagree. The insurgents also agree with Booth that the country should be White. Some of their leaders, however, a Black Cuban, a Hispanic, and a Vietnamese American, would have been considered mongrels in the 1980s when Robert Jay Matthews of The Order, a Neo-Nazi gang, shot it out with the FBI on Whidbey Island,state of Washington.. He was no blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan himself. Indian scientists who mapped the DNA of Indians found that the basis of Aryanism–that blonde, blue-eyed supermen invaded India–is a myth.

Another Person of Color passing for a white nationalist is Ron Watkins who has a Korean Mother,he promotes QAnon called,“ a discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against former President Donald Trump, who is battling them.With their silence, leaders of the Republican Party are giving their tacit approval to Booth’s ideas. No wonder Booth chic is occurring in the Republican Party. Until he was confronted by criticism, Senator Rand Paul was hanging out with a character called “The Southern Avenger.” He believed that Booth didn’t go far enough.

Booth’s act altered American history. The assassination paved the way for the Confederate Restoration; Lincoln was succeeded by Andrew Johnson, a slaver who believed that Blacks were barbaric and, unlike Lincoln, believed that Blacks should be denied the right to vote.

Northern crowds heckled Andrew Johnson with demands that Jefferson Davis be hanged. They also shouted “Remember New Orleans,” citing the massacre of Black men who had convened to protest the Black Codes, which denied them the franchise. Instead, Johnson let the rebels back in, and their ideas have survived in Congress to this day. However, his recommendation that Lee be punished “harshly” was challenged by General Grant. “on June 7, 1865, U.S. District Judge John C. Underwood in Norfolk, Virginia, handed down treason indictments against Lee, James Longstreet, Jubal Early, and others.” The judge and the grand jury wanted to send a message that no future insurrections in the United States would be allowed( emphasis added.) President Andrew Johnson and many Radical Republicans in the North wanted to see Lee punished for his crimes against the Union. This prompted Grant to meet with the President to discuss this problem, but there was no resolution until the general threatened to resign his commission. With Grant’s threat, President Andrew Johnson decided to have Judge John C. Underwood drop the charges because he realized that “the public would never support him over the far-more popular Grant.”

Reconstruction can be seen as a Northern attempt at Nation-building, and like the Afghan allies of the United States, the Black allies of the Union were abandoned, lynched and slaughtered by White nationalists mobs when the Union troops withdrew April 24, 1877. Some members of the mobs were probably foaming at the mouth like the Jan. 6 insurgents.

A shorter version of this article appeared on Ha’aretz.

Ishmael Reed is the author of The Complete Muhammad Ali.

MY FAVORITE MUMBO JUMBO

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M TOMB ROBBERY

1,900 year-old Roman 'battle spoils' recovered from robbers in Jerusalem

By Owen Jarus

published 1 day ago

Tomb robbers had dug up the cache in a tunnel complex.

Police in Jerusalem have seized a hoard of stolen antiquities in Jerusalem, including coins, incense burners and ceramics. (Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority)

Police in Jerusalem seized a hoard of stolen antiquities that date to a 1,900-year-old Jewish rebellion against the Romans. The cache had been dug up by tomb robbers from a tunnel complex.

The hoard included hundreds of coins, incense burners and a number of ceramics with decorations on them, including a jug that has a carving of a reclining figure holding a jug of wine. Researchers believe that during the Bar Kokhba revolt (A.D. 132-135), Jewish rebels captured the items from Roman soldiers and stored them in a tunnel complex where modern-day robbers found them, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement released on their Facebook page on Wednesday (Dec. 15).

Inspectors from the Robbery Prevention Unit examine the artifacts seized in Jerusalem. (Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority)

Here, a jug that would have held wine some 1,900 years ago. (Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority)

Police in Jerusalem have seized a hoard of stolen antiquities in Jerusalem, including coins, incense burners and ceramics. (Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority)

During the Bar Kokhba revolt, Shimon Ben Kosva (also called Simon Bar-Kokhba or just Bar-Kokhba) led the Jews in a revolt against Roman rule. The rebels initially captured a substantial amount of territory. However, the Romans counterattacked and gradually wiped out the rebels and killed many civilians. The ancient writer Cassius Dio claimed that more than 500,000 Jewish men were killed in the revolts. Archaeologists have found numerous hideouts that the Jews used to hide goods or people from the Roman army.

Despite stealing the goods, the Jewish rebels may not have used many of the artifacts, because they had images that may have gone against Jewish religious beliefs. "The Jewish fighters did not use them, since they are typical Roman cult artifacts and are decorated with figures and pagan symbols," the Israel Antiquities Authority said in the statement.

Police officers found the artifacts after they stopped a car that was "driving in the wrong direction up a one-way street," the statement said. Inside the car, they found the artifacts, which researchers think the robbers stole during illegal excavations of a tunnel complex. While the artifacts were seized in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem the precise location of the tunnel complex was not released.

Originally published on Live Science.

Billionaire hands over $70 million of stolen artifacts

By Ben Turner

The haul includes stone death masks and a chest for human remains

The Stag's Head Rhyton dates back to 400 BC and was looted from Milas, Turkey. (Image credit: New York District Attorneys Office)

A billionaire hedge-fund manager has surrendered 180 stolen artifacts worth $70 million and has received a lifetime ban on acquiring more relics as part of a deal struck with the Manhattan district attorney's office.

Manhattan District Attorney (DA) Cyrus Vance, Jr. said in a statement that Michael Steinhardt, the 81-year-old founder of Steinhardt Partners and former chairman of the board of WisdomTree Investments, "displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe."

The DA's office said it had found "compelling evidence" that Steinhardt's extensive collection — which includes stone death masks from Israel, a chest for human remains from Crete and a fresco ripped from the walls of an ancient Roman villa — came from 11 countries and that at least 171 relics passed through trafficking networks before he bought them.

"The seized pieces were looted and illegally smuggled out of 11 countries, trafficked by 12 criminal smuggling networks, and lacked verifiable provenance prior to appearing on the international art market, according to the Statement of Facts summarizing the investigation," the office said in the statement.

The deal marks the end of an international grand jury investigation, beginning in 2017, in which the DA's office collaborated with law-enforcement authorities in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan Greece, Bulgaria, Israel, Italy and Turkey.

The Larnax, a 1400-1200 BC chest for human remains taken from Crete. (Image credit: New York District Attorneys Office)

The DA began investigating Steinhardt in 2010, after he acquired a 2,300-year-old marble bull's head from Lebanon, which is believed to have been stolen from the country during its 15-year-long civil war, which ended in 1990.

"In the process of uncovering the Lebanese statues, the D.A.'s Office learned that Steinhardt possessed additional looted antiquities at his apartment and office, and, soon after, initiated a grand jury criminal investigation into his acquisition, possession, and sale of more than 1,000 antiquities since at least 1987," the office said.

As part of the agreement, Steinhardt will surrender a number of priceless artifacts, which he used to decorate his homes and offices and also lent to museums. These include the 400 B.C. Stag's Head Rhyton, a beautiful $3.5 million ceremonial vessel shaped into a stag's head that was looted from Milas, Turkey; three stone death masks dating to 6000 B.C.; a $1 million ornamental chest for human remains, called a larnax, taken from Crete that dates to between 1400 to 1200 B.C.; and the $1 million Ercolano Fresco, showing an infant Hercules strangling the snake that Hera sent to kill him, which was looted from Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town near Naples that was buried under ash and pumice by the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The Ercolano Fresco, looted from a Roman villa in Herculaneum, near Naples.

(Image credit: New York District Attorneys Office)

"His [Steinhardt's] pursuit of 'new' additions to showcase and sell knew no geographic or moral boundaries, as reflected in the sprawling underworld of antiquities traffickers, crime bosses, money launderers and tomb raiders he relied upon to expand his collection," Vance said in the statement, adding that the priceless relics would now be returned to their rightful owners.

In a statement, Steinhardt's lawyers said that he was "pleased that the district attorney's years-long investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries."

This is far from the first time that Steinhardt’s relic habit has landed him in trouble with the law. In 1997, a Federal judge ruled that a 4500 B.C. gold bowl — which Steinhardt had imported from Sicily for $1 million — had been acquired illegally and under false pretenses. In 2018, a raid by investigators on Steinhardt’s office and Manhattan home resulted in the seizure of several ancient artifacts that had been stolen from Greece and Italy.

And in 2019, The New York Times reported that several women who worked for non-profits he funded had accused Steinhardt of sexual harassment. Steinhardt denies the accusations.

Sleep technique used by Salvador Dalí really works

By Yasemin Saplakoglu

Some of the world's most creative minds, including Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison described using this sleep technique to bolster creativity.

Salvador Dalí used various napping techniques, including waking up in the N1 stage of sleep, in order to spark creativity.

(Image credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images)

A sleep technique described by surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and famous inventor Thomas Edison might actually work to inspire creativity, researchers have found.

To get the creativity boost, you essentially need to wake up just as a certain sleep stage sets in, where reality seems to blend into fantasy.

To use the technique, visionaries such as Dalí and Edison would hold an object, such as a spoon or a ball, while falling asleep in a chair. As they drifted off, the object would fall, make a noise and wake them up. Having spent a few moments on the brink of unconsciousness, they would be ready to start their work.

This early sleep stage, known as the hypnagogia state or N1, lasts only a few minutes before you drift off to deeper sleep, but it may be the "ideal cocktail for creativity," the researchers wrote in the study, published Dec. 8 in the journal Science Advances. Humans spend about 5% of a night's sleep in N1, but it's an extremely understudied sleep stage, said senior author Delphine Oudiette, a sleep researcher at the Paris Brain Institute.

In N1, you can imagine shapes, colors or even bits of dreams in front of your closed eyes, yet still hear stuff in your room, Oudiette said. "The pattern can be very different" depending on the person, Oudiette told Live Science.

Inspired by the great minds who employed the technique, Oudiette and her group set out to test whether the sleep method would actually work for everyday people. They recruited 103 healthy participants who had the ability to fall asleep easily and asked them to avoid stimulants and sleep a bit less than usual the night before the experiment.

They presented them with a math problem in which they had to guess the last digit in a sequence, and provided them with two rules that they could apply in a step-by-step manner to figure it out. But the researchers included a "hidden rule" that the eighth digit was always the second digit in the sequence. If anyone figured that out, it would significantly reduce the amount of time it took them to solve the problem.

"Contrarily to the popular view, creativity is not restricted to specific field such as arts," Oudiette said. Creativity involves two elements: originality and usefulness to the context.

In this case, participants who figure out the hidden rule are being creative because they weren't instructed to solve the problem in that way, so they've found a novel and useful strategy, Oudiette said.

In the first part of the experiment, the participants were asked to solve 10 math problems using the two rules.

They were then given a 20-minute break, in which they were told to relax or sleep in a comfortable position on a semireclined chair in a dark room, with their hands placed outside the armrests. They held a light drinking cup, so that if they fell asleep, the cup would fall, make a noise and wake them up. "The goal was to isolate the specific effect of N1 without any contamination of other sleep stages," Oudiette said.

As different stages of sleep are marked by different patterns of brain waves, the researchers were able to monitor, using an electroencephalogram (EEG), when the participants drifted from the N1 stage to the deeper N2 stage.

The hidden rule

Once the resting stage of the experiment was over, the researchers asked the participants to solve more math problems. They recorded whether the participants showed an increase in "insight," which meant they either started solving the math problems significantly quicker or they explicitly said that they figured out the hidden rule.

The researchers found that the participants who spent at least 15 seconds in the N1 stage had an 83% chance of discovering the hidden rule, compared with a 30% chance for those who remained awake.

"The only difference between the two groups is one minute," Oudiette said. That's "kind of a spectacular result." But if the participants drifted into N2 sleep, the effect disappeared. Therefore, the authors concluded that there was a "creative sweet spot" that could be hit only if people balanced falling asleep easily with falling asleep too deeply.

The research adds key evidence of the "importance of the mostly ignored hypnagogic [state]" said Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center for Sleep Control and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who was not involved in the study. They've shown that in a short amount of time, this sleep stage can "dramatically increase insight into a previously studied task."

But what was "most surprising" was that you had to wake up and return to the task without falling deeper into sleep to observe this enhanced insight, Stickgold told Live Science.
It's not clear why the N1 sleep stage boosts creativity, but because it's a semilucid state in which you lose control of some of your thoughts yet are still somewhat aware, it might create an "ideal state where you have this loose cognition and weird associations," Oudiette said. In this phase, you "also have the ability to catch it if you get a good idea."

The researchers also asked the participants who fell asleep what was going through their heads right before the fall of the object woke them up. One participant said "At one point, I saw a horse in the hospital. There was also a man who was doing the same experiment as me, who was much older and who had a kind of plastic helmet on his face," while another said "I had the feeling of being at the water's edge, no wind, there were airy sounds, as in a temperate forest in summer."

Other participants saw geometric shapes and colors. The researchers found that about one-third of the reported thoughts were linked to the task, but they didn't find a link between those reports and an increase in insight. "It doesn't mean that these experiences play no role though, further studies are needed on this point," Oudiette said.

Stickgold agrees."More dream-oriented studies will be needed to clarify any role that these dreams have," he said.

The researchers now hope to test the effect of N1 sleep on different types of creative tasks, perhaps some with more real-life application, Oudiette said. Another cool next step would be to figure out if there's a way to specifically target this creative sleep stage so that people can use the technique without having to hold an object.

If you're curious about the technique, you can try it out yourself. "We investigated the everyday person, not Dalí or Edison," Oudiette said. Better yet, "we used an object that costs three euros."

Originally published on Live Science.

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