Dispelling "Neuromyths": Learn while you sleep

The article we read about dispelling neuromyths said that the idea of learn something while you're sleeping was born during World War II. People imagined that spies would learn the dialects, accents, habits, etc while they were sleeping, but this statement is only a science fiction idea from Hugo Gernsback who wrote a book about it in 1911. This idea began to spread into the real world, after that people thought that they could actually do it.

Some experiments tried to confirm or refute this idea. One of them was made in Russia. This research was based on narrating a story for children to subjects sleeping normally. They checked that one of the twelve subjects was able to remember certain things about the narration.

Other experiment compared the memories from a person who had read a story and another who listened the narration while sleeping. Both of them seemed to remember the same quantity of details. Some researchers said that maybe there are “sensitive” subjects who are more prone to remember things they heard when they were sleeping. But anyway, there’s no scientific evidence that you could learn a foreign language or maths while you’re asleep. It takes a conscious effort.

If you ask me I would love to be this kind of “sensitive” person who is able to remember some stuff from sleeping. But in the other hand, could we really take some rest if we are studying all the time? If learn while we are sleeping is possible some day, I’m sure there will be consequences. Of course I’d use that capacity for exams and things like that, but other people could use it to other unknown purpose, don’t you think? So in that case I could be even dangerous.