From Nature magazine.

It sounds like every student's dream: research published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information while we snooze.

Anat Arzi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and her colleagues used a simple form of learning called classical conditioning to teach 55 healthy participants to associate odours with sounds as they slept.

They repeatedly exposed the sleeping participants to pleasant odours, such as deodorant and shampoo, and unpleasant odours such as rotting fish and meat, and played a specific sound to accompany each scent.

It is well known that sleep has an important role in strengthening existing memories, and this conditioning was already known to alter sniffing behaviour in people who are awake. The subjects sniff strongly when they hear a tone associated with a pleasant smell, but only weakly in response to a tone associated with an unpleasant one.

But the latest research shows that the sleep conditioning persists even after they wake up, causing them to sniff strongly or weakly on hearing the relevant tone — even if there was no odour. The participants were completely unaware that they had learned the relationship between smells and sounds. The effect was seen regardless of when the conditioning was done during the sleep cycle. However, the sniffing responses were slightly more pronounced in those participants who learned the association during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, which typically occurs during the second half of a night's sleep.

Pillow power
Arzi thinks that we could probably learn more complex information while we sleep. “This does not imply that you can place your homework under the pillow and know it in the morning,” she says. “There will be clear limits on what we can learn in sleep, but I speculate that they will be beyond what we have demonstrated.”

In 2009, Tristan Bekinschtein, a neuroscientist at the UK Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and his colleagues reported that some patients who are minimally conscious or in a vegetative state can be classically conditioned to blink in response to air puffed into their eyes. Conditioned responses such as these could eventually help clinicians to diagnose these neurological conditions, and to predict which patients might subsequently recover. “It remains to be seen if the neural networks involved in sleep learning are similar to the ones recruited during wakefulness,” says Bekinschtein.

The findings by Arzi and her colleagues might also be useful for these purposes, and could lead to 'sleep therapies' that help to alter behaviour in conditions such as phobia.

“We are now trying to implement helpful behavioural modification through sleep-learning,” says Arzi. “We also want to investigate the brain mechanisms involved, and the type of learning we use in other states of altered consciousness, such as vegetative state and coma.”

This article is reprinted with permission from Nature magazine. It was first published on August 26, 2012.
 

13 Comments

1. 1. Raoul 09:35 PM 8/26/12

   Far from the students' dream, yet.

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2. 2. ThePeakOilPoet 10:18 PM 8/26/12

   conditioning and learning are two different things
   
   the "hook" was therefore misleading and a bit dishonest
   
   as well, conditioning is subject to trauma induced de-conditioning
   
   so, even if you could learn that maths you need to pass your exam, the exam fear you experience as you enter the examination room would wipe out your conditioning
   
   well, for most people anyway - Pavlov i think laid the groundwork for this
   
   p

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3. 3. wingsonroots 04:41 AM 8/27/12

   Reminds me of Hypnopædia from Brave New World.. although not quite there yet.

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4. 4. Heyjo 10:44 AM 8/27/12

   The Nahual Art of Dreaming
   
   The Ancient peoples of Mexico believed that to consciously create anything in your life, you must learn to navigate the dreaming world of the Nahual. This wisdom has been passed from master to student for over 1,460 years in the Tol lineage, teaching techniques of how to enter into a state of lucid dreaming to shift or cancel your dreams. Sergio Ocelocoyotl will teach dream interpretation and exercises which give you the energy you need to dream. Also you will learn how to plant dreams in your tonal (awake aspect) and navigate the dreaming world to connect to your Nahual (shadow or sleeping aspect) manifesting a reality that is balanced and peaceful.
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5. 5. AntonioJimenezCeniceros 02:11 PM 8/27/12

   You won't learn by putting knowledge under the pillow, dummy! it must be over your head, so it diffuses downwards your brain.

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6. 6. adiseker in reply to AntonioJimenezCeniceros 02:35 PM 8/27/12

   I tried that with the Oxford English Dictionary, woke up with a splitting headache...

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7. 7. AntonioJimenezCeniceros in reply to adiseker 03:23 PM 8/27/12

   No wonder! Too much information increased pressure inside your skull. Try something with less information. But you may win now every spelling bee contest.

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8. 8. nicholem 04:45 PM 8/27/12

   week two response:
   
   I believe that just because you change the smell and the sound in a room of course its gonna help you learn the difference between a smell and sound. But as far as going to sleep and trying to put a book or paper under you pillow isnt gonna do anything but get ink on it. Just like they say if you don't study then when you go to bed you lose most of your learning from that day.
   
   
   

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9. 9. nicholem 04:49 PM 8/27/12

   week 2 : response to antonio I don't really believe that works no affense.If a 7th grader put a childs dictionary he or she would know all the words I think if they study and then maybe put the book under their pillow will give them confidence in remembering what they've learned.

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10. 10. nicholem 05:11 PM 8/27/12

    week 2 :
    response to antonio:
    
    I don't really believe that works no affense.If a 7th grader put a childs dictionary he or she would know all the words I think if they study and then maybe put the book under their pillow will give them confidence in remembering what they've learned.

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11. 11. AntonioJimenezCeniceros in reply to nicholem 07:13 PM 8/27/12

    ;)

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12. 12. fabrizio 05:32 PM 8/30/12

    It is indeed well known that we can adapt to very strong noises during sleep, provided they are repeated (such as the rings of a bell tower, or the noise of a TV, or music). It is probably a capacity we have developed to be able to sleep also in noisy conditions - and which has this "learning" application as a side effect.

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13. 13. fabrizio 11:34 AM 9/3/12

    Thinking of our ability to "learn" during sleep to get used to repetitive noises (e.g. rings of a bell, people talking, TV, music, etc.), I'd be tempted to say that this "sleepwalking learning" capacity is something we have developed to be able to sleep under noisy conditions (or even in persence of physical stimuli). Does this make any sense?

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