Study Arata!
To learn while we’re sleeping.
What an interesting idea.
You hit play on a video class, a course or even an audiobook on your phone, next to your
bed, and then you go to sleep.
The day after, you have used the eight hours you have slept to learn new things.
This idea sounds amazing.
If you did that everyday, you would be able to absorb around two hundred and forty hours
of lessons per month.
But, does it really work?
Is your brain able to passively absorb information while you are sleeping?
In today’s talk we will see what part is true, and what is a myth about learning whilst
sleeping.
Science says it is possible to learn while we are sleeping.
But we can learn only so much.
The concept of learning while we’re asleep is quite old.
There are studies about sleep learning since 1914.
And, in short, although you can improve the quality of your sleep to strengthen what you
study… it is not possible to learn while you are sleeping.
You will not learn all the subjects from school, college or grad school by just listening to
the recordings of the lessons while you sleep.
The actual learning only happens when our brain is actively involved with what we are
studying.
It is difficult enough to involve our brain in the learning process when we are awake,
imagine how hard it would be when we’re sleeping!
But the idea of learning SOMETHING when we sleep should not be completely discarded.
Recent studies have shown that it is possible to at least increase the performance of your
memory during sleep.
This put sleep learning back into the scientists’ radar.
When you sleep, your brain processes and consolidates some of the thousand pieces of information
you have received during the day.
When using some specific techniques, which we will cover later on, it is possible to
improve this consolidation process and increase your learning performance a bit.
Notice that this is quite different from learning something new while you sleep.
This has been tested by science [source: https://arata.se/source-i7y4] and the conclusion was that you don’t learn
anything new if you are truly sleeping.
At most, you can hear something, but that happens when you are still awake and not yet
in deep sleep.
Forgive me if I have ruined your expectations, but we are just dealing with scientific evidence
here.
And science has discarded the possibility of learning something new while we are sleeping.
But it has been science too that has opened the door to new possibilities, which we can
and should explore.
Increase your brain’s performance while you sleep, consolidating the memories you
have learnt.
When you sleep, your brain processes the experiences you have had during the day.
This process basically consists in sending memories from your hippocampus, where all
your memories are first stored, to your cerebral cortex, where the memories are stored for
a longer time.
We have already talked about the three types of memory on episode 18 from the Study Arata
series [https://arata.se/study18].
Basically, you have your sensory memory, your short-term memory and your long-term memory.
Sensory memory captures everything you see, hear, smell, taste and touch.
This stays in your memory for a few seconds, as it would be inefficient for your brain
to remember everything.
When your brain detects more relevant information, your short-term memory, or working memory,
comes to action.
I would suggest that you don’t think about short-term memory from the point of view of
time, but from the amount of information you can handle at a given time, which is around
seven pieces of information.
Whatever is really important or shocking will be encoded in your brain as long-term memory.
These memories stay in your head for days or even years.
Encoding needs to be an active process, that is why we use intelligent memory hooks from
the Intelligence Arata Academy course.
In order to move something from your short-term memory to your long-term memory, your brain
needs to be actively involved with that information.
How can you do that?
For example, you could use mechanical repetition or pure memorisation.
You could use a mnemonic technique, create links or stories… any active memorisation
strategy will encode memories.
The sleep phase has a very important role in this process!
During sleep, this information is CONSOLIDATED in your brain.
Nonetheless… while you are deeply sleeping, it is impossible to actively use your brain
in a conscious process of encoding memories.
Actually, you can’t really involve your brain passively when you are truly sleeping.
At most, you can use that short period of time between the moment you go to bed and
the point you fall asleep to help you in the process of encoding information.
Use memory triggers to remember during the night what you learnt in the day.
You can use part of your night to strengthen what you learn during the day.
But how can we do that?
Some of the methods that have been tested by science have given positive results.
The first method is conditioning.
In practise, conditioning is the only method you can use without relying on apps and electronic
devices.
The idea of conditioning is to activate memory triggers in your sleepy brain so it remembers
what you have studied during the day, strengthening your memorisation.
Those triggers can be smells or sounds, that means, something that can be picked up by
your senses even when you are sleeping.
Science has already proven that the memory triggers actually work to consolidate memories
while you sleep.
In one of those experiments, two groups of people were told to play a memory game in
which they had to memorise the position of different items on a grid.
While one of the teams was playing, a specific smell was released into the room.
[source: https://arata.se/source-fu5l].
Later, both teams went to sleep with brain monitoring devices, and they received the
same smell in the room where they were sleeping.
The brain monitoring shows that the group who had received the smell during the game
had more brain activity in the hippocampus and other parts of the brain.
This is the type of activity that happens when consolidate memories.
When they woke up, the participants of the group who had received the smell remembered
eighty four percent of the items’ positions in the grid.
Meanwhile, the group who received no smell was only able to remember the sixty one percent.
A difference of twenty three percent, thanks to using a smell as a memory trigger.
In practice, you can do the same with music.
Let’s say you listen to a certain type of music when you study.
When you go to sleep, theory says that you should play the exact same music so it can
become a trigger for your brain to consolidate the things you have studied.
The idea of using music as a trigger was improved for a second method.
Specific sounds can activate brain waves that help you consolidate what you have studied.
Physically speaking, consolidating memories happens through electrical activity in your
brain that is specific, slow and fluctuating.
The second method to learn whilst sleeping tries to stimulate that electrical activity
during sleep.
To do that, scientists tried to put electrodes on volunteers’ heads to stimulate those
electrical currents and improve the consolidation of memories during sleep [source: https://arata.se/source-a5kh].
The results were positive, but it is difficult to actually convince someone to receive electric
shocks in their heads during the night just to obtain a small memory improvement.
The same scientist tried a less invasive method.
Measuring the brain activity of the volunteers, scientists gave them headphones that played
sounds that were synchronized with their brain waves.
In theory, this could help you consolidate what you learn even when you’re sleeping,
but to do this, we need to develop simple and accessible technology able to measure
brain activity and play sounds synchronized with our brain activity.
It is possible to learn a bit of new languages when you are sleeping.
Since they were able to activate triggers or consolidate memories, some scientists tried
to find out if we could learn a new language by listening to conversations in other languages
while we sleep.
A study [source: https://arata.se/source-s10k] from 2017 showed that, during sleep, some
people were able to learn complex sound patterns.
Another study [source: https://arata.se/source-vbip] from 2019 made volunteers listen to sets of
invented words that were associated with real words while they slept.
Those sounds were played during the less deep phases of sleep of each participant.
We are not usually dreaming during those phases.
Upon awakening, volunteers were able to connect the words, showing that there was some kind
of learning that happened during sleep.
The monitoring of their brains showed that their hippocampus and other areas of the brain
usually linked to language learning were active.
This shocked the scientists, as it disproves what they believed about the hippocampus,
which would have been able to learn only when conscious.
So far, scientists consider that it is possible to get familiar with the sounds, tone and
accent of a new language while sleeping.
Perhaps you could even learn the meaning of some words.
But most of the time those are implicit memories, and very few people are able to remember and
use them when needed.
Neurofeedback can accelerate your learning process during sleep.
Another technology gadget they tested with positive results involves neurofeedback.
In Israel, a device picks up and accelerates the activity of your brain when you are awake.
[source: https://arata.se/source-vcbg].
For example, when you are studying and the device picks up brain activity similar to
the nighttime process of consolidating memories, the device electrically stimulates your brain.
This instant neurofeedback stabilises your memories, as if you had already been asleep.
I know that, even today, this may sound like science fiction.
But there are even electronic headsets on the market, especially for high performance
activities, like those of professional gamers.
Be careful with these products’ marketing strategies, as so far there isn’t solid
scientific evidence that has tested that you can improve your cognitive functions by using
these devices, which, by the way, are quite expensive and still in their initial phases.
More than learning during sleep, you need a good night's sleep.
The idea of learning while you sleep and using another eight hours of your day to absorb
new information is very appealing.
But you’ve seen that, in practise, only so much can be done to obtain a small memory
improvement during sleep.
Instead of wanting to learn while you sleep, it may be better to focus on getting excellent
nights of sleep to improve your learning.
During sleep, your body rests, your organism repairs the damage it received during the
day, and your memories are consolidated in your brain.
If you go to sleep with the tv on, after a heavy meal or in an uncomfortable room with
plenty of light, your sleep nights can be widely improved.
This effort will make you achieve more results than wanting to learn whilst sleeping.
To improve your sleep, you can follow some tips.
First, make sure you have an appropriate set of mattress and pillows for your weight, your
age and your specific physical condition.
Then, you have to make sure to accommodate your room so it facilitates sleep.
This means absolute darkness, turning off all the electronic devices with light, and
setting the temperature to around 19 to 21 degrees Celsius.
Try to leave your phone in another room, put it into a drawer, with the screen looking
down.
Set up the don’t disturb option to work everyday during your sleep time.
Avoid drinking caffeine and other stimulants after lunch.
If you want to drink something, choose relaxing drinks like camomile tea or fruit juice.
When it’s getting close to bedtime, avoid activities that keep you awake.
The screen time should be limited, or at least use apps that reduce the white-blue light
prominence.
There is a lot you can do to improve the quality of your sleep.
These are practical actions that you can adopt today in order to sleep better and wake up
refreshed to study.
This will really help your learning, more than trying to find a silver bullet that does
all the work you weren’t able to do during the day, overnight.
Is it possible to learn while sleeping?
Actually, it’s not.
We still can’t learn new things while we are in deep sleep.
You have found out that the most you can do today, in practise, is to use memory triggers
like sounds or smells to help out a little during the process of consolidating memories.
The same smell that was present during your studying sessions can be used as a trigger
to activate your brain and help it strengthen your memories during the night.
Since the other options still depend on technologies that are not yet available, the best thing
you can do is to improve the quality of your sleep.
By sleeping better, you consolidate what you have learned in a more efficient way, and
you’ll wake up refreshed to study even more.
And if you want to know how to study more and better, I will invite you to watch right
now a lesson from the Intelligence Arata Academy course, which will show you how to exponentially
increase your intelligence levels using science-proven techniques.
To watch this special lesson, just access https://arata.se/intelligence