There may even be some value in this bit of work although it appears
that the fantasy of learning complex material while sleeping is as
elusive as ever. If we can produce therapies that resolve or
ameliorate brain cognition issues, then we may have a powerful and
effective tool. That appears to be the promise here.
Anger management is a huge issue for most folks that may be
addressable although it appears difficult. Yet the brain can learn
to develop alternative responses. Recall that anger is a learned
response that is typically grossly reinforced throughout childhood
through misapplied nurture. The victim needs to learn alternative
responses and to have them reinforced.
The mere fact that a wide range of anger responses are exhibited
proves my case.
How to learn in
your sleep
Subjects trained to
sniff pleasant smells while asleep retain the conditioning when they
wake up.
Mo Costandi
26 August 2012
Associations learned
while asleep can be retained after waking up.
It sounds like every
student's dream: research published today in Nature
Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information
while we snooze1.
Anat Arzi of the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and her colleagues
used a simple form of learning called classical conditioning to teach
55 healthy participants to associate odours with sounds as they
slept.
They repeatedly
exposed the sleeping participants to pleasant odours, such as
deodorant and shampoo, and unpleasant odours such as rotting fish and
meat, and played a specific sound to accompany each scent.
It is well known that
sleep has an important role in strengthening existing memories, and
this conditioning was already known to alter sniffing behaviour in
people who are awake. The subjects sniff strongly when they hear a
tone associated with a pleasant smell, but only weakly in response to
a tone associated with an unpleasant one.
But the latest
research shows that the sleep conditioning persists even after they
wake up, causing them to sniff strongly or weakly on hearing the
relevant tone — even if there was no odour. The participants were
completely unaware that they had learned the relationship between
smells and sounds. The effect was seen regardless of when the
conditioning was done during the sleep cycle. However, the sniffing
responses were slightly more pronounced in those participants who
learned the association during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage,
which typically occurs during the second half of a night's sleep.
Arzi thinks that we
could probably learn more complex information while we sleep. “This
does not imply that you can place your homework under the pillow and
know it in the morning,” she says. “There will be clear limits on
what we can learn in sleep, but I speculate that they will be beyond
what we have demonstrated.”
In 2009, Tristan
Bekinschtein, a neuroscientist at the UK Medical Research Council's
Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and his colleagues
reported2 that some patients who are minimally conscious or in a
vegetative state can be classically conditioned to blink in response
to air puffed into their eyes. Conditioned responses such as these
could eventually help clinicians to diagnose these neurological
conditions, and to predict which patients might subsequently recover.
“It remains to be seen if the neural networks involved in sleep
learning are similar to the ones recruited during wakefulness,”
says Bekinschtein.
The findings by Arzi
and her colleagues might also be useful for these purposes, and
could lead to 'sleep therapies' that help to alter behaviour in
conditions such as phobia.
“We are now
trying to implement helpful behavioural modification through
sleep-learning,” says Arzi. “We also want to investigate the
brain mechanisms involved, and the type of learning we use in other
states of altered consciousness, such as vegetative state and coma.”
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