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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.
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no sig for you. come back one year.
And nobody wants to learn it.
...du fromage!
Marge: Homer, has the weight loss tape reduced your appetite?
Homer: Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satieties.
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...
Definition Lecture were information passes from the Lecturer's notes to the student's notes without passing through the mind of either.
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.
Why, just last night I had a dream reminding me about watering my plant that's dying.
Hope you washed the sheets
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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."
I guess my "of course" only implies that I support the conclusion and that I learned something. Makes sense how my comment is confusing, I only mean the broader aspects of the subconscious "can't quite be quantified yet." Thanks for the info exchange.
I don't think dreaming really has as much to do with the subconscious as people think it does. When I was a kid I wanted to learn to ride my bike with no hands, but was too scared of crashing and getting hurt to actually try it. One night I was dreaming about riding my bike, realized I was dreaming, and decided to try it with no hands. The next day I got up, went out, and rode with no hands. I was simply visualizing what I wanted to do, just like an athlete preparing for a competition visualizes their actions ahead of time to prepare. The fact that I was asleep was basically not relevant, other than I was able to visualize the detail much more vividly.