Your Brain Keeps Learning While You're Asleep, Study Shows

If you start a task before nodding off, your brain can continue to conduct it once you fall asleep, scientists have found.

During sleep people are far from being totally shut down from the environment. They can continue performing what they were doing before falling asleep and this can involve understanding the meaning of what is being said around them, said Dr Sid Kouider of the Ecole Normale Sup�rieure in Paris.

The study builds on previous work on subliminal processing by showing that speech processing and other complex tasks �can be done not only without being aware of what you perceive, but also without being aware at all.'

Researchers suspect that such unconscious processing isn't limited by the complexity of the task, but by whether it can be made automatic or not. Scientists recorded brain activity of volunteers while they were awake and asked to classify spoken words as either animals or objects by pressing a button, using the right hand for animals and the left hand for objects.

Once that process had become automatic, the researchers placed participants in a darkened room to recline comfortably with eyes closed and continue the word classification task as they drifted off to sleep. Once the participants were asleep, the testing continued but with an entirely new list of words to ensure that responses would require the extraction of word meaning rather than a simpler pairing between stimulus and response.

Brain activity showed that the participants continued to respond accurately, although more slowly, even as they lay completely motionless and unaware. The results of the study suggested any task that could become automated might be maintained during sleep but that tasks that can't be automated will stop as sleep takes over.

Further tests are on going to investigate the consequences of their findings for learning as we slumber. The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

Source: Medindia