Study Suggests You Can Learn New Things In Your Sleep 99
bbianca127 writes "Researchers studied classical conditioning in 55 study participants while sleeping or awake. According to the article, 'Classical conditioning teaches a person or animal to associate one stimulus with another.' The researchers paired tones with scents; when they played a tone, they would let out a particular scent while the participants were sleeping. They found that the participants would make the association between the tones and scents even while awake."
It's True (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an anecdote but it's a fairly convincing one:
I once had a roommate who was a sports fanatic who worked as a server in a sports bar/restaurant at the time. He would listened to sports radio while he slept - usually it was the west coast baseball games (we're in EST) - and he claimed that the broadcasters would basically narrate his dreams of baseball. He knew most the players so if he heard something like, "Bonds hits it to center field, he slides to first and is safe," it's something he could envision realistically.
It's easy to dismiss this as a wild claim he made, but the proof was in the pudding. He could, with confidence, talk about the games the next day before hearing/seeing anything about them. He knew the scores, the big plays, damn near everything as well as if he had watched it on TV. His customers ate it up - they'd love to put him to the test before the highlights would show up on the tube.
Re:Of course, dreaming is powerful (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess my "of course" only implies that I support the conclusion and that I learned something. Makes sense how my comment is confusing, I only mean the broader aspects of the subconscious "can't quite be quantified yet." Thanks for the info exchange.
I don't think dreaming really has as much to do with the subconscious as people think it does. When I was a kid I wanted to learn to ride my bike with no hands, but was too scared of crashing and getting hurt to actually try it. One night I was dreaming about riding my bike, realized I was dreaming, and decided to try it with no hands. The next day I got up, went out, and rode with no hands. I was simply visualizing what I wanted to do, just like an athlete preparing for a competition visualizes their actions ahead of time to prepare. The fact that I was asleep was basically not relevant, other than I was able to visualize the detail much more vividly.