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Arts & Culture
Peoples Daily, WEDNESDAY, august 6, 2014
Can you learn in your sleep?(I) T he mechanism by which a good night’s sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists Just before you climb under your duvet, you carefully prepare your room. You sprinkle a few drops of incense on your pillow, put on some headphones, and place a strange-looking band over your scalp. Then you go to sleep. The ritual takes just a few minutes, but you hope this could accelerate your learning of a diverse range of skills: whether you are trying to master the piano, tennis or fluent French. You won’t recall a single aspect of the night’s “training” – but that doesn’t matter: your performance the next morning should be better, all the same. The idea of learning as you sleep was once thought very unlikely, but there are several ways – both low- and hi-tech – to try to help you acquire new skills as you doze. While there is no method that will allow you to acquire a skill completely from scratch while you are unconscious, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t use sleep to boost your memory. During the night, our brain busily processes and consolidates our recollections from the day before, and there could be ways to enhance that process. Given that we spend a third of our lives in the land of nod, it is little wonder that sleep learning has long captured the imagination of artists and writers. In most incarnations, it involved the unconscious mind absorbing new information from a recording playing in the background. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for instance, a Polish boy learns English after having slept through a radio lecture by George Bernard Shaw; the authoritarian government soon uses the same technique to brainwash its subjects. More recently, in The Simpsons, Homer buys a tape to subliminally reduce his appetite as he sleeps, only to find that it is instead changing his vocabulary. When his wife, Marge, asks if his diet is working, the normally inarticulate Homer replies: “Lamentably, no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety”. Bad science In reality, this particular kind of sleep learning is almost certainly impossible. Although some early studies suggested that subjects could pick up some facts as they slept, the researchers couldn’t be sure that they hadn’t just awoken to listen to the recording. To test those suspicions, Charles Simon and William Emmons attached electrodes on the scalps of their subjects, allowing them to be sure that they only played the tapes once the subjects were dozing. As they had suspected, the subjects learnt nothing once they had dropped off. The results were published in the 1950s, but entrepreneurs over the years have still tried to cash-in on the attraction of effortless learning with various products – even though their methods had no
Sleep learning used to be a pipe dream. Now neuroscientists say they have found ways to enhance your memory with your eyes closed, says David Robson. scientific basis. Despite being blind and deaf to new information, however, the sleeping brain is far from idle: it mulls over the day’s experiences, sending memories from the hippocampus – where memories are first thought to form – to regions across the cortex, where they are held in long-term storage. “It helps stabilise the memories and integrate them into a network of long-term memory,” says Susanne Diekelmann at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Sleep also helps us to generalise what we’ve learnt, Sleep learning used to be a pipe dream. Now neuroscientists giving us the flexibility to apply say they have found ways to enhance your memory with your the skills to new situations. So eyes closed, says David Robson. although you can’t soak up new material, you might instead be like the same approach can also that the same setup helped Swiss able to cement the facts or skills trigger the sleeping brain to German speakers learning Dutch learned throughout the day. replay the learning of skills or vocabulary, allowing them to facts, reinforcing the memory in remember about 10% more. Smell enhancer the process. So far, at least four methods Diekelmann, for instance, Tech upgrade have shown promise. The asked In the near future, technology her volunteers to simplest strategy harks back to play a variation of the game may offer further ways of the research of a 19th Century Concentration, in which they upgrading the brain’s sleep cycles. French nobleman named the had to learn a specific pattern Memory consolidation is thought Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys. of objects in a grid before going to occur during specific, slow, As he explored ways to direct to sleep in her lab. Some of oscillations of electrical activity, so his dreams, the Marquis found the subjects were exposed to a the idea here is to subtly encourage that he could bring back certain subtle, artificial, odour as they those brain waves without waking memories with the relevant played, and Diekelmann then the subject. Jan Born, at the smells, tastes or sounds. In one wafted the same scent into their University of Tubingen, has been at experiment, he painted a scantily noses as they slept. Brain scans the forefront of these experiments. clad woman while chewing an showed that these subjects had In 2004, he found that he could orris root; when his servant then greater communication between help amplify those signals using placed the root in his mouth as he the hippocampus and several transcranial direct current slept, the tart flavour brought back cortical areas, compared to those stimulation (tDCS), which passes visions of the same beautiful lady without the cue – just the kind a small electric current across the in the foyer of a theatre. She was of activity that should lead to skull, successfully improving his wearing “a costume that would enhanced memory consolidation. subjects’ performance on a verbal have hardly been acceptable to Sure enough, those subjects memory test. the theatre committee”, he wrote remembered about 84% of the More recently, he has turned with delight in his book, Dreams object locations when they awoke, to an even less-invasive form of and How to Guide Them. Another while a control group remembered stimulation, which uses a skullcap time, he asked the conductor just 61%. of electrodes to measure neural of an orchestra to play certain It’s not just sweet smells activity, while headphones deliver waltzes whenever he danced that could boost learning; as the sounds that are in sync with the with two particularly attractive Marquis found with his night- brain waves. Born compares the women. He then rigged up a clock time waltzes, sounds might also auditory stimulation to the tiny to a music box, so that it played be able to trigger recall, provided push that you might give a child on the same tunes during the night, they do not wake you up in the a swing, so that it gently enhances which apparently brought their process. In one study, volunteers neural activity that is already handsome figures to his sleeping found it easier to master a present in the brain. “You deepen mind. musical game (a little like Guitar the slow wave sleep and make it The Marquis simply wanted Hero) if they heard soft strains of more intense,” says Born. “It’s a to seed his slumbers with the melody as they slept. Bjorn more natural way of getting the pleasant (and sometimes lustful) Rasch at the University of Zurich, system into a rhythm,” he says. experiences, but it now looks Switzerland, meanwhile, found Source: BBCNews.com
POEM OF THE WEEK The Old Man and I By Mtendere Alice Kishindo The wind blew hard, Cars swooshed past; Bicycles, people, swayed faster, And he stared. As we walked along, The old man with the bristly hair, Yellow but fair, He stared; At me…? In shock at first; Soon he realized, I was real, Just very dark, Darker than him, And so, he stared. We walked side by side, Slow, sometimes fast; Wrinkling the cold kissed skin, His neck motioned, Sideways, sideways, His eyes squinted open, The old man, He, Pretended not to see me. But together, we Snuck looks; One of wonder, The other of disbelief, Is he serious? Can he be mad? What is he looking at? I need to pull up my leggings? Damn, what is it, he wants? He just keeps looking… Once in a while; He gazes, Into the distance ahead, His patched coat from winters gone. Up, up, he climbs the steps faster; Only to stop, and look down, One long hard look, She backs away, irate! He sighs, unconvinced, Scoffs almost, Holding on to his plastic bag; Chow mien, He mumbles on… Past the high buildings, With all the lights beaming, Onto the muddy streets, We walked; His back, stooped, Stealing glances, In acquaintance now, Connected. He now understands a truth, He knows, he has seen, This person… Black but with hair; Just like his wife’s, She is not bad looking at all, In fact… But, just look… And so he stared One more time And to the crowd she was lost.
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It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.” - Alfred North Whitehead