It sounds like a great idea: take the 7 or 8 hours that you're sleeping and out for the count and make them productive by using them to learn while you sleep. But is it possible to learn while you sleep? Or is this just some wild imagination that's been dreamed up (sorry about the pun) to help empty your wallet?
Our bodies do a lot of things whilst we sleep. There are the regular, 24 hours a day, things such as breathing and pumping blood around your body. But there are also certain repairs and renewals that our bodies tend to perform better whilst we're sleeping. Partly because we're not moving as much and partly because our conscious mind is pretty much "parked" whilst we sleep.
But our mind is still working whilst we sleep. Dreams are evidence that we use the "down time" of sleeping to sort out things and put them in something approaching order. OK, dreams are often weird and wonderful and we don't always remember them but we dream several times every night as we go through our sleep cycle.
So, since our mind is working anyway, it was a fairly logical step for someone to suggest that we can use our sleeping hours to implant extra information in, direct to our subconscious mind, rather than do nothing with around a third of our life.
Because sleep learning aims to deal with our subconscious mind, it's not as easy to test as the stuff you learn at school or college or wherever.
It's unlikely that you'll be able to learn complicated mathematical models such as differential calculus at the same time as you're catching some z's.
But a lot of our learning isn't actually particularly conscious.
Young children learn to speak well before the formal education system teaches them to read.
And it's this process - almost a kind of learning by osmosis - that sleep learning aims to replicate.
The process that young children use to learn their native tongue is repetition. It works whether this language is something most Westerners understand such as English or something that sounds almost totally alien to us such as Mandarin Chinese or Russian.
Young children don't care about this.
And sleep learning aims to take advantage of this very same process of grasping something that is actually quite complicated.
Most systems that are produced to help you to learn whilst sleeping use a CD or an MP3 that's played on loop whilst you sleep.
If you listen to one of these programs while you're awake you'll notice that the 30 or 60 minutes of the main loop is usually made up of lots of smaller loops.
Some systems will play a background music or natural sounds track to distract any part of your mind that suddenly becomes a bit more conscious.
And they may well also use a binaural or monaural beat to help keep your mind in the right state for sleep learning.
It's certainly an intriguing subject and, whilst it's not easy to test, there are quite a few studies that point towards you being able to at least enhance the learning process whilst you're asleep.
Our bodies do a lot of things whilst we sleep. There are the regular, 24 hours a day, things such as breathing and pumping blood around your body. But there are also certain repairs and renewals that our bodies tend to perform better whilst we're sleeping. Partly because we're not moving as much and partly because our conscious mind is pretty much "parked" whilst we sleep.
But our mind is still working whilst we sleep. Dreams are evidence that we use the "down time" of sleeping to sort out things and put them in something approaching order. OK, dreams are often weird and wonderful and we don't always remember them but we dream several times every night as we go through our sleep cycle.
So, since our mind is working anyway, it was a fairly logical step for someone to suggest that we can use our sleeping hours to implant extra information in, direct to our subconscious mind, rather than do nothing with around a third of our life.
Because sleep learning aims to deal with our subconscious mind, it's not as easy to test as the stuff you learn at school or college or wherever.
It's unlikely that you'll be able to learn complicated mathematical models such as differential calculus at the same time as you're catching some z's.
But a lot of our learning isn't actually particularly conscious.
Young children learn to speak well before the formal education system teaches them to read.
And it's this process - almost a kind of learning by osmosis - that sleep learning aims to replicate.
The process that young children use to learn their native tongue is repetition. It works whether this language is something most Westerners understand such as English or something that sounds almost totally alien to us such as Mandarin Chinese or Russian.
Young children don't care about this.
And sleep learning aims to take advantage of this very same process of grasping something that is actually quite complicated.
Most systems that are produced to help you to learn whilst sleeping use a CD or an MP3 that's played on loop whilst you sleep.
If you listen to one of these programs while you're awake you'll notice that the 30 or 60 minutes of the main loop is usually made up of lots of smaller loops.
Some systems will play a background music or natural sounds track to distract any part of your mind that suddenly becomes a bit more conscious.
And they may well also use a binaural or monaural beat to help keep your mind in the right state for sleep learning.
It's certainly an intriguing subject and, whilst it's not easy to test, there are quite a few studies that point towards you being able to at least enhance the learning process whilst you're asleep.
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