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Study Suggests You Can Learn New Things In Your Sleep
bbianca127 writes "Researchers studied classical conditioning in 55 study participants while sleeping or awake. According to the article, 'Classical conditioning teaches a person or animal to associate one stimulus with another.' The researchers paired tones with scents; when they played a tone, they would let out a particular scent while the participants were sleeping. They found that the participants would make the association between the tones and scents even while awake."
My sleepy lectures weren't wasting time after all.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
And nobody wants to learn it.
in some lectures staying up does not help much anyways even more so for the ones that just reading from the book.
That isn't some New Age platitude but Carl Jung and others have given great insight into something that still can't quite be quantified yet. Why, just last night I had a dream reminding me about watering my plant that's dying. Thanks id.
...du fromage!
Marge: Homer, has the weight loss tape reduced your appetite?
Homer: Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satieties.
So... the logical conclusion:
Tape your eyes open and fall asleep under infographic posters.
It's a lot closer to Hypnosis or Brainwashing, in fact.
The funny thing about Hypnosis, is that it comes from Hypnos, meaning Sleep, meaning they proved you are far more suggestible when sleeping...
which we already knew.
First I thought this article was cool, but it's not, so i'm going to try to spice it up.
When I was 16 and taking drivers ed, i was in a position in my life where I either had to practice on a huge tank of a car (automatic) or drive my sisters VW Bug (stick). Well, my sister always stressed out and yelled at me, and the owner of the other car was always busy, so i didn't do too much practicing of my driving.
So, just before the test, i had a dream where I was driving a stick, and it was a stress free enviroment and I was seeing how it went. How it felt to let the clutch out, switch the gear, etc.
Anyways, after that, I didn't have a problem driving stick shifts anymore. Ya, of course, someone might point out that I learned how to drive the stick in RL, but got the necessary practice in my dreams. So fuck you, I beat ya to it.
Be seeing you...
My point: they discovered that, while asleep, the brain is able to reinforce and create relations between the things/experiences learned while awake? If so, how is this new?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
There's plenty of stuff that I've been taught, but simply didn't understand. But could understand it after a night of sleep, heck. I've been woken up by those flashes of "oh shit, I get it" moments as the brain is working through something very complex that my conscious mind couldn't grasp. I believe that would fall under the "learning while you're asleep."
Om, nomnomnom...
I remember back in the 70s that you could buy tapes, play 'em on a deck under your pillow and learn all sorts of things. Well, that's what we were told. The fact that we're not all multi-lingual Brain surgeons who work weekends in the local Rocket science shop gives me the impression it was all nonsense.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Don't go to work naked.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I'm a porn star.
Have gnu, will travel.
Have gnu, will travel.
I believe there was a pretty good statement of how this worked in Brave New World. There was enough information available then (1931) to say that this didn't work worth a damn.
People haven't changed much since 1931 and what didn't work then doesn't work now. However, the idea that this could be used to influence people (rather than to educate them) has not really been explored to any depth. Sure, it might work. There is some evidence that the "self confidence" tapes from long ago (1960s?) had some effect or at least people were buying them for "sleep improvement". However, this has the rather nasty implications of "programming" people and the unfortunate ways this could be utilized. Also explored by Brave New World as it was pretty obvious how this could be misused back then.
Somehow I learned what Python classes are in my sleep. When I was just getting started with the language I had a hard time coming to grips with the terminology. I didn't know the difference between a Class and a Function. I had a friend try to tell me but it bounced off my skull. One night I had one of those stupid dreams where you work, this time I was scripting. Suddenly it occurred to me what a Class actually is and why it's different from a Function. When I woke up somehow I retained the memory, not long after getting to work I was up and running and writing Classes. I had to make a conceptual leap to get it and that inspiration didn't come until sleepy sleepy time.
Well that's not exactly what the article was talking about, I just thought it was interesting that I was problem solving in my sleep cycle. It happens from time to time. The human brain never ceases to amaze me.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Similar situation. Was learning C at the ripe age of fourteen. Could not, for the life of me, wrap my head around the intricacies of pointers.
Until one night, when I have a very strange dream. When I woke up, I made many small children and aged, bearded developers cry in terror at the incomprehensible horrors I thusly enacted by abuse of pointers.
Lucid dreamers (and researchers) have known this for quite some time. Being conscious of the fact that you are dreaming allows you to learn things that fear might otherwise prevent you from doing.
I would read my notes from class into a casette recorder & played it while I slept near my bed (after I rewrote them, this is a good study habit for me too when I was a student, along with doing the assignments as well, of course)...
* It worked well enough... on concepts, but not on formulas where you HAD to do them, "by rote" & learn the concepts BEHIND them as to WHY they worked & for what...
APK
P.S.=> This only proves it for me all the moreso... apk
Just last night I learned that Popeye had banned me from climbing ladders. Then, for some odd reason, getting in the shower lifted me up to the roof so I got there without a ladder. I thought Popeye would be mad, but he had left the dream. Go figure . . . .
I've solved problems while sleeping... including one memorable time where I found a solution to one particular computer bug in some software I was writing that had been troubling me for a few days (the error in my dream, and in reality, turned out to be caused by a mistyped condition that was executed very infrequently, and which was simply missing a boolean negation). Of course, the reasonable explanation for this is that because I had seen the code so many times by that point, my eyes had already viewed the error, I had simply not previously recognized it as such. Somehow, this manifested in a dream where I was working on the program, and happened to catch the error. I don't know exactly why I recognized the error in my dream, but I know that the only reason I spotted the error in real life was because I remembered that dream and decided to look at the applicable place in the code. Nonethless, that was a really bizarre experience... one I'm sure I'll never forget.
But I can't really say I've ever *LEARNED* anything new while sleeping though... only at most, discovered new ways of thinking about things that I really did already know.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is an anecdote but it's a fairly convincing one:
I once had a roommate who was a sports fanatic who worked as a server in a sports bar/restaurant at the time. He would listened to sports radio while he slept - usually it was the west coast baseball games (we're in EST) - and he claimed that the broadcasters would basically narrate his dreams of baseball. He knew most the players so if he heard something like, "Bonds hits it to center field, he slides to first and is safe," it's something he could envision realistically.
It's easy to dismiss this as a wild claim he made, but the proof was in the pudding. He could, with confidence, talk about the games the next day before hearing/seeing anything about them. He knew the scores, the big plays, damn near everything as well as if he had watched it on TV. His customers ate it up - they'd love to put him to the test before the highlights would show up on the tube.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
This is not learning. This is Classical, aka Pavlovian, Conditioning. They're two completely separate things.
Ray: Listen! Do you smell something?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Recently I've been dreaming that I'm at work.
It really sucks when you wake up and realize you haven't actually done all that work yet, and wasted a perfectly good 8 hours of sleep on work related things.
When we were playing Q2 regularly, maybe 10 years ago, we noticed you completely knew a new map after "sleeping on it".
Works for math, too; just don't learn to do something wrong and go to sleep, lol.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Yeah they learned - to the extent that "learn" == "be classically conditioned".
I can vouch for this: I learned the moonwalk in my sleep back when I was about 12 or 13. Up to that point, I had no idea how to do it. Minor example, I know, but it's true.
Always wanted to learn Kung Fu this way a la The Matrix
So after this therapy, I might be listening to Beethoven 5th and all of the sudden start smelling rotten eggs.
I have been listening to cypress hill, in my sleep, lately - and I have sold more weed than ever this month!
So, that is why my girlfriend remembers everything I say to her while she is asleep - it's the fart smell association!
"Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my sub-consciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation."
http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/russell/russell.php?name=how.i.write
I am tellin' ya, it is the way I've learned everything! :-D
So happy this article is behind a paywall. When are you happy people in the West going to realize this shuts the research results off from more than half of the world? It's a sin and a disgrace and it's the academics who perpetuate it. Do you care about anything other than your 'impact'? Self-centered bastards, the lot of you!
When will the fruits of plebeian slumber ripen to rouse the famished! I've dreamt of many things -- of kingdoms and of hells, of riches and great struggles. But come the rising sun, its searing breath upon a weary head, behold, the cozy quietus posing as another wakeful day.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
it's how I learned French to the point where I aced my GCSE in French at 13.
At the suggestion of my teacher, I played French movies and language tapes (prerecorded during lessons) while I slept. Came to the oral exam, my responses were "natural, instant and almost accentless" according to the examiner.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
People have been listening to tapes at night for years and learning nothing. Somebody suddenly gets a Pavlovian response and the promise of a PhD while you snore leaps into some journalistic mind. Please, there are far more advances in anti-gravity and time travel that make more interesting reading.
The study of Dutch Ovens.
Back when I had huge applications to program for college, I'd be up until the early morning and my brain would be spun up into high gear so it'd be hard to fall asleep. Often times, I'd finally get to sleep and keep writing the software in my sleep. Then I'd wake up and be mad that I'd have to retype it all but retyping it as soon as I woke up proved that it actually was pretty good code :-D
Also, since there's a popular theory that dreams are merely simulations of situations that your brain can practice so it's more prepared if it ever happens in reality, it's not surprising that a person is capable of learning and remembering while asleep. That's sort of the point.
Just play some recording telling the children that they should wake up and use the restroom when they feel the need to go potty.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Ah yes. I can't help but think idiot every time I see someone using their clutch to hold position on a hill during a red light. I'm sure those people are proud of themselves for their ability to equalize the power going through the clutch with gravities pull on their car. I wonder if the pointless clutch wear even enters their consciousness.