Dubai: So you want to learn a new language but never found the time to do it. No problem: Learn it while you're sleeping.
That's what a new study suggests, which showed evidence that learning another language while dozing off helps you learn better.
The study, conducted by team of Swiss psychologists, shows that when you have learnt words in another language, "it may be worth listening to them gain in your sleep."
The research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and published in the peer-reviewed journal “Cerebral Cortex”, shows that this method reinforces memory.
"Our method is easy to use in daily life and can be adopted by anyone," says the study director.
The study, led by bio-psychologist Björn Rasch, explained how the technique helps "reactivate" memories in order to "consolidate" them.
"Here, we tested for the first time whether verbal cueing during sleep can improve vocabulary learning," the researchers wrote.
In the study, 60 German-speaking student volunteers were asked to learn a series of Dutch words for the first time at around 10pm. Under lab conditions, half were asked to then go to sleep, while the other half were forced to stay up. While the first group were sleeping (non-rapid eye movement), those same words they learnt at 10pm were played back to them.
The other group also had the words played back to them while they were awake.
The sleep-deprived group stayed up until the sleeping group were woken at 2am. Then everyone was tested on the same group of words.
The sleeping group turned out to better remember the German translation of the Dutch words played during their sleep compared to the group forced to stay awake.
Researchers were surprised about the flipside: the playback appeared to have had no effect on those that were up all night.
"Verbal cueing failed to improve memory during active and passive waking," the authors wrote.
Researchers concede that part of the reason of underperformance is sleep depravation.
To take this into account, the researchers also took EEG recordings -- they measured the electrical activity in the brain as the volunteers listened back to the recordings while they slept.
Here’s what they found: "(There was) a pronounced frontal negativity in event-related potentials, a higher frequency of frontal slow waves as well as a cueing-related increase in right frontal and left parietal oscillatory theta power".
Since the parietal lobe holds the key for integrating sensory information and language processing, researchers found an indication of correlation with the Theta oscillations (a type of EEG feedback) which is associated with memory encoding during a person’s waking hours.
It suggests the same thing happens when we're sleeping, or at least helps strengthen the original memory.
"Our method is easy to use in daily life and can be adopted by anyone," said Rasch.
Many people have tried to learn while they took a nap, pinning their hope on subliminal communication to boost IQ or change their behaviour. Now, there is increasing evidence to suggest this could be the case one-day.
A 2009, study conducted by Northwestern University in Illinois showed that when a group of volunteers were taught to associate memories with sounds, when those sounds were later played back to them during the night the memories were consolidated.
In 2012, neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute found that they actually teach people to associate smells with sounds by conditioning them while they slept.
The Swiss group’s study provides one more evidence that more than “consolidating” old memories, people can actually learn entirely new things as they take their forty winks.
Two online sources that wrote about the study:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/30/learn-languages-while-you-sleep
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140630093629.htm
