• Question: Can you really revise by listening to your notes in your sleep?

    Asked by lucasjacobs to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Do you know I don’t know if there is any scientific evidence for this? Maybe Tom will know? I did try this once – when I was studying for my Japanese exam I listened to my Japanese CD in my sleep. I honestly don’t know if it worked but I passed the exam!

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I wouldn’t count on it.

      But maybe it is worth a try. A very recent experiment showed that memory was enhanced by relevant sounds played during sleep. This is a long way from your idea, but it is not impossible that you would gain some benefit (provided you slept well, because sleep is almost certainly important for memory and learning).

      You might like to try this out first with your own made up test (which is not important). You will have to get someone else to set it up for you (so you don’t already know the stuff you’re trying to learn). It would be best to use something simple like words or spellings. Prepare the sound (mp3?) to be played, and try to arrange it to come on while you’re asleep. Test yourself in the morning. But you will need to do another test to check that any improvement was due to the sound (this time you hear an mp3 with irrelevant material). Ideally you would not know which night you had the “learning” mp3 and which you had the irrelevant one. And the tests need to be equally matched for difficulty.

      In real life we would do something like this (thought through a bit more carefully) but with lots of people (maybe 20-40).

      It might just work – you could be a millionaire!

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 19 Jun 2010:

      Got an exam coming up? This is obviously a crucial question!

      I think you can buy tapes or recording to play in your sleep to help modify your behaviour (e.g. to stop over-eating or things like that). I certainly believe you can hear things in your sleep. Whether you would really be able to learn new information I am more skeptical about. I think if it worked well, it would have been publicised widely.

      I sometimes fall asleep with the radio on but when I wake up I never remember anything that was said while I was asleep.

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