As a student, I want to make the most efficient use of my time. What does my time consist of, you ask? School, work, commute, personal care (like feeding myself, showering, makeup), a whole bunch of studying, and most importantly, sleep. It looks like a really long list, but it’s nothing uncommon of the average college student. The hardest but most important part of my day is getting my studying in. I try to get to bed by 12:30 each night and always get 7-8 hours of sleep; otherwise, a minute less and I wind up with the obnoxious physical symptoms of a cold. It gets to a point where studying and getting the right amount of sleep seems to be conflicting, if only I could find a wait to do them both at the same time.
Recently I attended a seminar led by Iliana Vargas on memory reactivation during sleep. She discussed Rudoy and colleagues’ (2009) study Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep. Off the bat, this sounds like something I need for my tougher biology courses, it might save me time in the long run! The experiment consists of a group of people being taught to associate a sound with a visual object on a specific space on a grid. I’ll refer to these as object-location-sound associations. Participants took a nap, a random half receiving the sound periodically during their slumber. A posttest was taken when everyone woke up, and you wouldn’t even believe who did better! Those who received the auditory stimulation during sleep performed with a change in error of 4x less the error of those who didn’t receive the stimulation. Rudoy and colleagues also measured that before the nap, all of the participants had around the same number of errors. So, this tells us that cramming the night before a test isn’t going to help much because our change in error rate simply from sleep, however; this is object-location-sound locations, not concepts, facts, or equations you need to know for a test.
Leslie Jellen discusses a similar study where participants associated a tone to the scent of either shampoo or rotten fish. During sleep half were exposed to the tone. Those who received the auditory stimulation were more likely to somehow imagine the odor was elicited as the sound was produced. This article ends with a variety of questions on associativity, sleep, and applications to life. Jellen suggests we listen to foreign languages in our sleep, for it may increase our chances of familiarizing ourselves with it.
I’m definitely going to adopt Jellen’s language acquisition strategy, but I also have an idea of my own. As a student, it’d be nice to save some time working on memorization of certain things. Perhaps teachers can begin to incorporate musical interventions into their daily classroom instruction. Music is known to increase arousal and in turn can drive improvements in performance. It would be a good addition to the classroom because of the associativity effects it has. While sleeping, auditory stimulation of tunes associated with say, a history event, may increase likelihood of remembering said event.
It’s safe to say I’ll be trying out this whole “learn while you sleep” thing. Maybe I can record my lectures and listen to them through the night? Maybe it doesn’t work that way… either way; it looks like our brain is very receptive to sensory information even when we are sleeping, we shouldn’t waste time not learning if we can always do something to stimulate our brain.
Rudoy, J.D., Voss, J.L., Westerberg, C.E., & Paller, K.A. (2009). Strengthening individual memories by reactivating them during sleep. Science, 326, 1079. doi: 10.1126/science.1179013
http://brainpages.org/research-shows-you-can-learn-while-youre-sleeping/
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