Do you sleep listening to the radio? There are many people who do it and report having dreamed about politics, travel, adventures, history and a series of other topics that they had heard on podcasts during the dream phase.
This leads us to ask ourselves if you can learn while you sleep, is it possible to learn a language? Prepare a syllabus for an exam? Science has an explanation for all this.
Is it possible to learn while sleeping? science answers
It is a question that we have all asked ourselves at some point: can you learn while you sleep? It would be wonderful to listen to audios with languages, exam syllabi or another podcast series at night and, in the morning, be able to extract that knowledge from our memory. You go to bed speaking Spanish and wake up speaking Chinese or being an expert in protohistory.
Well, the reality is that it is not that simple. It does not work this way, it is not possible to fall asleep listening to an audio in Chinese and wake up speaking Mandarin, but science confirms that the brain does continue to learn during the sleep stage. Several studies confirm this:
A study led suggests that the brain can continue to learn and process information while we sleep.
This study focused its research on the electrical activity of the brains of 20 people. Activity was measured before and during sleep, and during sleep they were instructed to discriminate a series of acoustic patterns. All participants were able to recognize the auditory patterns they heard during the sleep stage.
This suggests to Andrillon and his team that the sleeping brain is still processing information that occurs outside.
Another study conducted a curious experiment with 41 German-speaking people and tested whether they could learn a language while they slept. Instead of using a known language, since anyone could have had previous contact with it, an invented language was used. While they slept, a series https://forum.eastmans.com/members/erachlaes.155736/about of word associations were thrown at them, that is, the invented word with its meaning. They heard about 36 pairs of different words in 146 repetitions. Upon awakening, most were able to associate those words with their meaning.
For example, if they heard the word “biktum” associated with the word bird while sleeping, many participants were able to make this connection again while awake.
With this experiment, a team from the University of Bern found out is that the sleeping brain can indeed encode new information and also store it in long-term memory.
Do we need to be awake to store memories?
Scientists have long thought that we need consciousness to store memories because memories are formed during our waking time, when we can control our minds.
However, more recent strmyyt.nhely.hu studies suggest that sleep helps the brain cleanse itself of unnecessary memories and so that it can process and organize all those memories that we are generating while awake.
In short, the brain never rests. Neurons involved in long-term memory storage are reactivated, and those involved in short-term memory are deleted in order to store new memories.
In this tcup.pl way, these aforementioned studies and many others suggest that the brain is still active, learning and processing information while we sleep. And, although the brain learns mainly in a waking state, when we force it to do so consciously and we intend to store certain knowledge, it can also do so involuntarily and without being forced to do so while we sleep.
Is it possible to learn a language while you sleep?
The hippocampus and the region of the brain associated with language learning are active during sleep. Therefore, this finding contradicts what was previously known about the hippocampus, since it was thought that it http://www.bluelightbride.com/member.php?action=profile&uid=503560 was only activated during the conscious phase.
As for the idea of ​​learning a language, with all grammar in its entirety, it is somewhat controversial . It is not something so simple, although people can identify single words that are learned during the sleep phase, a vocabulary is based on much more than a series of single words. Learning a language is based on knowing it, making the intention to memorize and set complete grammatical rules. And furthermore, scientists do not agree on whether the learning that takes place while sleeping is consolidated into memories that we can access during the day.
It would be amazing to be able to learn a whole language or an entire syllabus for an exam while we sleep, but not a task that can be done so easily.
If it were possible to put on audios at night to learn any subject, no one would go to school or university and the educational systems would be in question. It would be enough to take a nap or take advantage of the nights to introduce new knowledge into our brain. We could be very cultured without making practically any effort.
Conclusion
The brain is still active during the sleep phase, processing, fixing and storing the memories or information that we learn during the day. Therefore, we can use the sleep phase to, through audio, be able to improve that learning that we have previously done, in order to recover it.
In short, what can be done is to improve what you have already learned while you are awake or you can also improve your memory . It is about carrying out a process of consolidating what you have learned during the day, reproducing that knowledge again and strengthening the neural connections that were activated during the information learning phase.
But no, you cannot learn a complete language while you sleep, nor learn the periodic table, if you have not previously made the effort to realize that knowledge in the waking phase.
