Learn These 5 Things While You Sleep

This guest post by Ashley Halsey is somewhat different. It deals with things you can learn while you sleep. Personally I tried to research this area with mixed results. You need to sleep effectively for long-term memorization, and trying to learn something as you sleep may interfere with the things you are trying to learn awake. However,  there are sound claims that exposure to foreign languages and mild forms of hypnosis during sleep can be effective.  Falling asleep while reading may induce lucid dreams and you may actually experience the stuff you read about. While reading history this occasionally happens to me… See what works for you, and open up to new ideas.

 

For most of the population, sleep is an indulgence best saved for the weekend as sometimes our busy lives, careers, and family may deprive us of consistent regular sleep.

Rather than feeling guilty about lying in on weekends or grabbing extra shut-eye, research suggests that sleep may be the perfect time for learning new skills.

From a new language to remembering names, there are studies that have shown that a range of skills can be improved from the comfort of your bed.

Absorbing new complex information or picking up a skill from scratch by listening to an audio recording during sleep is almost certainly impossible. However, research shows that the sleeping brain is far from total rest and that some forms of learning are possible.

The concept of sleep learning has a long history. The first study to demonstrate a link between memory and learning benefit from sleep was published in 1914 by Rosa Heine who was a German psychologist. She demonstrated that learning new material in the evening before sleep results in better recall compared to learning during the daytime.

Thanks to studies done since then, we now know that sleep is crucial for forming long-term memories of what we have encountered during the day. The sleeping brain repeats the experiences of the day and retains them by moving them from the hippocampus, where they are initially formed, to regions across the brain.

One common approach to sleep learning was Psycho-phone, a popular invention in the 1930s. It played out motivational messages to sleepers supposedly helping the people absorb the ideas in their sleep and when they wake with radiant confidence.

At first, it seemed that research backed up the idea behind devices like Psycho-phone. Early studies found that people learned the material they encountered while asleep. However, those findings were debunked in the 1950s, when scientists began to use EEG to monitor sleep brain waves. Researchers managed to find that if any learning had occurred, it was only because the stimuli had woken the sleeping subjects. Poor research findings began the descent of sleep learning into the pit of pseudoscience.

Studies in recent years have begun to change the thinking regarding sleep learning and demonstrating that the brain is not completely idle when asleep. These findings suggest information and new memories are able to be absorbed and formed in the sleeping brain. The drawback to this type of learning is the complexity of what is possible – basic information is possible but anything more complex such as rocket science or brain surgery may not be possible. The findings are however positive and it has meant that this topic has been thrust back into the spotlight of scientific research.

“For decades the scientific literature was saying sleep learning was impossible. So, even seeing the most basic form of learning is interesting for a scientist,” said Thomas Andrillon, a neuroscientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “But people are not really interested in this basic form of learning.”

Take a look at some of the basic things which you can learn while you sleep!

 

1. Remember Names

It’s always awkward when you’ve met that new person a few times and you just can’t remember their name. Wouldn’t you like to fix that problem and simply remember their name? It would certainly make these situations less stressful and anxious.

A study recently showed that a quality night’s sleep can help you remember faces and names. Researchers at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston performed a controlled study of 14 subjects. Dr Jeanne Duffy, who led the study, said: ‘We know that many different kinds of memories are improved with sleep.

‘While a couple of studies have looked at how naps might affect our ability to learn new faces and names, no previous studies have looked at the impact of a full night of sleep in between learning and being tested.’

Participants were shown 20 photos of faces with corresponding names. Twelve hours later, they were then shown the photos again, with either the correct or incorrect name, and were asked whether or not the name was correct, and to rate their confidence on a scale of one to nine. The test was performed twice – once with an interval of sleep in between and once with a period of regular, everyday activities in between.

Results showed that when given the opportunity to sleep, participants correctly matched 12% more of the names and faces. These findings suggest that sleep post-learning a new activity may help improve memory and recall.

Dr. Duffy said: ‘Sleep is important for learning new information.

‘As people get older, they are more likely to develop sleep disruptions and sleep disorders, which may, in turn, cause memory issues.

‘By addressing issues with sleep, we may be able to affect people’s ability to learn things at all different ages.’

2. Learn a New Language

As mentioned earlier – complex information is hard to learn using these techniques, but simple, basic learning has definitely been shown to be possible.

Scientists recently performed research in which they had native German speakers start learning the Dutch language, beginning with some basic words. Following this, they were asked to go for asleep.

What the German subjects did not know is that whilst they were sleeping, the researchers played the sound of some of those basic words which they had been learning to one of the research groups. The control group did not have any sounds played to them so that they could see if there was a difference between the 2 techniques. Following their sleep, they were tested on the words, the group who’d listened to them overnight was better able to identify and translate them than the control group who had not been exposed to any sounds.

“To make sure the findings were specific and tied to sleep — and not simply the result of people hearing the words repetitively, they had another group listen to the words while they did something else while awake, like walking. The walkers didn’t recall the words, as well as the sleepers, did,” explains Adam Nilson, a science writer at Draftbeyond and LastMinuteWriting.

3. Musical skills and Instruments

Sleep learning extends not just to language but also simple musical skills, and this was shown in another study. Researchers taught a group of people to play guitar melodies using a technique taken from the popular video game Guitar Hero. As soon as they were finished learning the melody, the volunteers were asked to take forty winks and have a nap.

Just like the previous research with language, there was a test group and control group. One of the groups were played the melody whilst they slept and the other slept in silence – without them knowing. As before – this again resulted in the group which had been played the melody whilst they slept being able to repeat and perform the melody better than those who slept in silence.

4. Protect Special Memories

Wouldn’t we all like to protect special memories – we do this on our telephones and computers by backing up special memories but wouldn’t it be great if we could do this with our brains as memories can tend to fade as time passes. Well, now you may be able to.

“Scientists think our brains use a special grading system which helps to organize our memories into the most important and least important so that we protect the ones which are most valuable to us,” says Ethan Dallas, a tutor at Writinity and Researchpapersuk. Those the brain flags as “important” or special get sent directly to our long-term memory, while less-important memories are washed away by new ones in the short term. Think of this as deleting pointless photos or apps on your phone to free memory storage for more useful stuff.

In a recent study, researchers found that there may be a way in which we can live hack this system to use to our advantage. For better memory retention it was found that people who associated memory with a sound or music could better remember.

They had a group of volunteers place icons on a computer screen in a certain place. The computer was programmed to play a specific sound when each object was placed. Placing icons such as a cat that meowed and a bell that rang – in different places on the screen were a part of the activity. Then the subjects had asleep. As previous – when one group slept they were played the sounds, the other group wasn’t – and you guessed it – the group who were replayed sounds could recall better than the group who didn’t.

5. Quit Smoking

A study was performed which showed that the use of smell is key to learning during sleep, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science found that people can be helped to reduce or even quit smoking in their sleep.

Throughout the night the participants were exposed to paired smells – cigarettes and a rotten egg odor consecutively.  Although they did not recall smelling the odors the next day, the subjects reported smoking an average of 30% less over the course of the next week. In comparison, the participants who were exposed to the paired smells when they were awake did not smoke less afterward.

This research has shown some promising information for addiction research and particularly highlights that certain areas of the brain do not remain dormant while we sleep but actually could be more active.

Bio

Ashley Halsey is a professional writer at Luckyassignments.com and Gumessays.com who has been involved in many projects throughout the country. Mother of two children, she enjoys traveling, reading and attending business training courses.