Study finds human brain can learn new things during sleep

Our brain never stops working, not even when we are sleeping. This has been proved through a new study that claims that we can learn new things even we are asleep.

According to a new study conducted by a team from University of Bern, turns out that the sleeping human brain is capable of learning and absorbing new information, such as vocabulary, during slumber.

For the study, sleeping participants were played recording of word pairings. One word such as ‘tofer’ was always made up, while second such as ‘house’ was always real. If the pairing was presented during a specific point of a particular kind of brainwave, the participants would be able to answer questions about the words after they woke up, reported Futurism.

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For example, the participants were asked to determine if a particular fake word would fit inside a shoebox. ‘Tofer’, which was paired with the word ‘house’, cannot fit inside a shoebox, however, the made-up word ‘aryl’, which was paired with ‘cork’, can.

“If you present ‘biktum’ and ‘bird’ to sleeping humans, their brains can make a new connection between the known concept ‘bird’ and the completely new and unknown word, ‘biktum,’” said Marc Züst, co-first-author of the paper.

“This sleep-formed memory trace endures into the following wakefulness and can influence how you react to ‘biktum’ even though you think you’ve never encountered that word before. It’s an implicit, unconscious form of memory – like a gut feeling,” he added.

Brain scans were taken during the tests and showed similar neural activity as someone who’s learned a new vocabulary word, reported the study published in the journal Current Biology. Researchers discovered that participants classified foreign words at an accuracy rate 10% higher than random chance.

“What we found in our study is that the sleeping brain can actually encode new information and store it for long term. Even more, the sleeping brain is able to make new associations,” said Züst.

Although this study does not mean that one can entirely learn a new language while sleeping, but sure adds up to the fact that the brain is able to function during slumber and help enhance our knowledge.