It is believed that of the day Learning in your sleep is consolidated. But you can learn in your sleep also New? Researchers at the University of Bern in the affirmative to this question: you have a study participants during the midday sleep, and learn. As you were awake, you could remember a large part of the words.
It sounds almost too good to be true: learn New things while you sleep. This can work, researchers from Switzerland demonstrated for the first time, and on premises with the idea that the time we spend asleep, is unproductive.
In deep sleep there are different stages that alternate in quick succession. About every half second all the brain cells for a short period of time are active together, and just then is it possible to learn while sleeping new words. The prerequisite for this is that the words in this Phase will be repeated several times. In the awake state, study participants were able to assign these words then more likely to be true than if they had just guessed.
"It was interesting to see that essential language areas of the brain in the waking state have been activated during the Recall of learned vocabulary. These brain structures appear to mediate memory formation, regardless of the state of consciousness in deep sleep unconsciously in the waking state bewusst", Marc Züst, lead author of the study says.
The discovery is contrary to current theories about sleep and memory: The notion of sleep as a mental state in which we detach ourselves from the physical environment, the Swiss researchers believe that is no longer tenable.
ZOU