So Easy You Can Do It In Your Sleep

The 10,000 hour rule is a cliché athletes, musicians, and performers alike have heard time and again. The hard and unyielding truth is that the only way to master any craft is the accumulation of hard earned hours. For those that aspire to be great in their respective fields, it can seem like there are simply not enough hours in the day. Thankfully for the aspiring perfectionist, there is now evidence to suggest one can practice a learned skill while sleeping! As an aspiring athlete myself, when Eric Gobel presented his team's findings supporting the hypothesis that cued memory reactivation during sleeping influences skill learning, it was music to my ears (pun intended).

Using an experimental set up that resembles something similar to a handheld guitar hero game called the Serial Interception Sequence Learning task, participants had to respond to a moving stimulus when it lined up with its corresponding, stationary target. Eight individuals practiced a high-pitch sequence, and eight practiced a low-pitch sequence. After practicing the melody several times, the participants took a nap during which one of the melodies was presented or no melody was presented. As predicted in accordance with the researcher’s hypothesis, subsequent task performance was improved when the sequence that was practiced was also cued during sleep relative to when the sequence was not cued. The mechanism by which this occurs consists of reactivating the neural representation of a learned sensorimotor skill, in this case the playing of a melody, with an auditory cue that is present in both the learning phase and during sleep. Therefore the memory is strengthened in sleep by essentially manipulating memory consolidation. In turn this facilitates retrieval, and ultimately manifests as improved performance on the sensorimotor skill.

In corroboration with this study, an article from ScienceDaily found similar results extending to areas of speech. 27 native German-speaking participants learned Dutch words followed by a three-hour nap. The researchers already knew that cueing the Dutch words during sleep would enhance their ability to later recall them, however they also wanted to see if they could refine this process further by cueing both the Dutch word and providing its German translation. Interestingly enough this did not significantly improve participants’ performances. It was asserted that providing the German translation immediately after the Dutch word interferes with the necessary neural processes required for memory stabilization. This was a significant finding because firstly, it speaks to the remarkable efficiency of the brain. Secondly, it demonstrates that providing the brain with more information than is necessary to cue a desired memory during sleep does not enhance the ability to recall pertinent information. So when it comes to the brain it would seem the old adage that less is more is actually true. Providing just enough information to cue a memory is all that is necessary in order to see an increase in performance and anything more might actually have negative effects.

Collaboratively, these studies together demonstrate that the stabilizing of a memory during sleep is beneficial for subsequent task performance across a wide range of faculties. The potential application of these findings is unfathomable. This mechanism could potentially have implications in the improvement of athletic and musical tasks, along with a multitude of other performance-based tasks. Memory reactivation during sleep might be the very first step in making the 10,000 hour rule that much more obtainable.

Works Cited

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). "Learning in your sleep, the right way." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 October 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151028084925.htm>.

Antony, James W., et al. "Cued memory reactivation during sleep influences skill learning." Nature Neuroscience, vol. 15, no. 8, 2012, pp. 1114-1116.