It is known that schoolchildren and students on the eve of exams put notes under their pillows in order to better assimilate the material. And this is not superstition at all. Israeli neurophysiologists have found that our brain is able to memorize new information, not only while awake, but also during sleep - for example, to establish associations between certain smells and sounds.
A group of researchers led by Anat Arzi from the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot conducted a series of experiments with a team of 28 volunteers who were deeply asleep. When the subjects fell asleep, one of several sound signals was played to them, and then sticks with samples of certain odors were brought to their noses. Among the smells were both pleasant - say, the scent of shampoo or deodorant, and unpleasant - the extract of rotten fish and rotten meat.
Scientists monitored the brain work of their wards using an encephalograph. In those cases when the stimuli woke people up, they were "disqualified" - removed from the team, since there was no longer a question of the purity of the experiment.
It turned out that when exposed to stimuli, characteristic lines appeared on the monitors, indicating that the brain was processing the information received. In addition, if the subjects felt unpleasant odors, their depth of breathing decreased, and if they were pleasant, they began to "sniff".
The next day, the researchers only "played" the sounds that preceded the smells to the volunteers. The reaction was the same as in the case of smells: the brain remembered what was preceded by this or that sound signal, like the notorious Pavlov's dogs associated the beginning of feeding with the lighting of a light bulb.
According to Arzi and her colleagues, such memorization is possible only in the phase of the so-called slow wave sleep. If the experiments were carried out when people were in REM sleep, they did not have any associations between sounds and smells. According to scientists, this is due to the so-called "sleepy amnesia": we lose the memory of the dreams that visit us during a given period. It is possible to remember what we dreamed during REM sleep if we were suddenly awakened at that moment.
“Now, realizing that learning and assimilating new information during sleep is possible, we want to understand how far the limits of this ability extend, namely, what can be remembered during sleep and what not,” says Arzi.
By the way, at one time, the method of teaching foreign languages during sleep was practiced - people were simply turned on recording with the teacher's voice. It was believed that learning is effective due to the work of our subconscious. However, the majority of specialists were very skeptical about know-how.
Promotional video:
Obviously, information can be memorized during sleep, but this requires more than just putting the textbook under the pillow and falling asleep on it. It's just that if we read some material before the exam, then it fits in our head better overnight …
It is also not enough to play audio recordings to the sleeping person or ask someone to read out the text you want. That is, all this can be done, but it is necessary to monitor the phases of sleep and brain activity. It is possible that in the future there will be special technologies that will contribute to the real memorization of information in a dream.
IRINA SHLIONSKAYA