Daniel Nadler

Poetry

Daniel Nadler’s poetry has been widely published and anthologized, including in Best American Experimental Writing. Lacunae, Nadler's debut collection, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016 and was named by NPR as one of the Best Books of the Year.

While attending Harvard University Nadler studied with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham.

Sleep and Dream Research

In 2010 Nadler received funding from Harvard's "Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative" to study sleep-dependent learning, a field of research that examines how sleep consolidates and optimizes the layout of procedural memories, and how this process plays a critical part in learning new skills. Previously, researchers had found that the experience of dreaming itself—the successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations during the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep (the stage when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake, when muscle tone and EEG readings are low, and when rapid and random eye movement during sleep takes place)—might be related to the process of learning. Dreaming was seen as a way the brain “rehearses” its reactions to threatening scenarios, or difficult problems.

In 2012, Nadler, together with Doug Feigelson at MIT, adapted earlier research that showed that during rapid eye movement sleep, participants' memories of dreams could be altered by suggestive readings of spoken words, into technical software for mobile devices that could replicate these studies on a large scale. According to CNN, this technology could have implications for allowing people to "program studying and learning" into their dreams.