Subjects were presented with a series of Dutch-to-German word pairs at 10 pm, then listened to an audio recording of these word pairs until 2 am. Learning while you sleep, or learning because you sleep?Ī study published last year by Swiss researchers suggested that sleep enhances our ability to learn foreign language words. The authors suggested that learning can occur subconsciously during sleep. Then a 2012 study by a US group reported that participants were more likely to correctly play a melody in a musical video game (similar to Guitar Hero) if the tune had been previously played to them during the slow-wave stage of a 90-minute nap. Subjects remembered 84% of the objects’ locations when their memories were paired with the odour during sleep. While studying, each subject was exposed to a subtle odour in the room, which was later re-introduced when subjects were in a sleep stage called slow-wave sleep. In 2010, Susan Diekelmann and colleagues in Germany published a study in which subjects examined specific patterns of objects on a grid before sleeping in the laboratory. More recent research has tied in Ivan Pavlov’s notion of classical conditioning – the idea that we respond to new information when it’s paired with a stimulus that elicits an innate response. The researchers concluded that sleep-learning was “impractical, and probably impossible”. The subjects were asked trivia questions after awakening, but there was no evidence that they’d retained any of the information that was played to them. While they slept, Simon and Emmons played a tape of a person listing 96 facts about history, science, sports, and other topics. Researchers Charles Simon and William Emmons attached electrodes to the scalps of participants to observe them as they went in and out of sleep states.
The idea that you can learn facts and figures while listening to a recording in a “hypnotic state”, like sleep, was debunked in a simple 1950s experiment. But is it actually based on any evidence? What the research says The big sell of “sleep learning” is seductive – how lovely it would be to be productive while we lie like lifeless lumps in bed.
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