Scientists create a way to program your mind at night to learn new words

Scientists have found evidence that it is possible to improve your vocabulary and even learn a foreign language while you sleep.

Sleep has been proven to strengthen people's memory when they are awake, but researchers have now discovered that we can process information while asleep.

The team found that sleep improved and strengthened the storage of words and information in the brain, making them easier to memorize when they were awake.

Scroll for the video

Scientists have found evidence that it is possible to improve your vocabulary while you sleep. Although there have been studies on memory enhancement when people are awake, researchers have now taken a close look at the information processing during sleep

Remarkably, they discovered that foreign words and their translations could be taught during sleep and that participants could access the meaning of words more easily than those who did not know it.

The hippocampus, a brain structure essential to badociative awake learning, has helped people access newly learned words.

The researchers examined whether a sleeping person is able to form new badociations between foreign words and their translations during the active states of brain cells, called "higher states".

The inactive state is called "low state". The two states alternate every half second or so.

When we reach deep sleep stages, our brain cells progressively coordinate the activity of both.

During sleep, the brain cells are active for a short time before entering jointly into a brief state of inactivity.

The team, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, discovered that foreign words and their translations could be taught during sleep and memorized in the waking state. After waking up, participants could reactivate formed sleep badociations to access the meaning of words.

The links between the words of a dormant language and their German translations were stored only if the second word of a pair was played repeatedly during a state of Up. .

"When a sleeping person heard the pairs of words" tofer = key "and" guga = elephant ", she was then able to categorize with a better chance of accuracy if the foreign words played in sleep meant something big ("guga") or small ("Tofer"), writes the study.

"It was interesting to note that the linguistic regions of the brain and the hippocampus – the hub of brain memory – were activated during the recovery of the vocabulary learned during sleep, because these brain structures normally facilitate Learning new vocabulary, "said Dr. Marc Züst, first. -author of the paper.

"These brain structures seem to play a role in the formation of memory, regardless of the state of dominant consciousness – unconscious during deep sleep, conscious during waking."