Can you learn in your sleep?

Everyone likes a good night's kip in their metal beds at night - but have you ever thought about how you might put your sleeping time to better use? Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science conducted a study in which they played different tones to participants as they slept. The sounds were accompanied by a number of odours, both pleasant and unpleasant. Later in the night, the tones were played without the odours, and the reactions of the participants were gauged. This may seem like an unusual experiment, but it proved quite a fundamental principle: the human brain is capable of learning from experience even while asleep. The participants learned to associate certain tones with unpleasant smells and consequently took shallower breaths when they heard them, even when the odours weren't present. "This acquired behaviour persisted throughout the night and into ensuing wake, without later awareness of the learning process," said the report in the journal Nature Neuroscience. "Thus, humans learned new information during sleep." It also adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that sleep is a fundamental part of learning. A recent study at the University of California, Los Angeles recently found that those who stay up late to study actually perform worse in tests than those who studied less, but got a good night's sleep instead.