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Tel Aviv: People can pick up new information with
the help of specific sounds and smells, even while asleep, says an
Israeli study.
For instance, if certain odours are presented after specific tones
during sleep, people will start sniffing when they hear the tones
alone -- even when odour is absent, both during sleep and later,
when awake, say researchers.
Sleep-learning experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct.
For one thing, one must be sure that the subjects are actually
asleep and stay that way during the "lessons," the journal Nature
Neuroscience reported.
Noam Sobel, professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute's
and research student Anat Arzi, along with colleagues from
Loewenstein Hospital and the Academic College of Tel Aviv -- Jaffa,
chose to experiment with a type of conditioning that involves
exposing subjects to a tone followed by an odour, so that they
soon exhibit a similar response to the tone as they would to the
odour.
"Now that we know that some kind of sleep learning is possible, we
want to find where the limits lie -- what information can be
learned during sleep and what information cannot," said Arzi,
according to a Wizemann statement.
The pairing of tones and odours presented several advantages:
Neither wakes the sleeper (in fact, certain odours can promote
sound sleep), yet the brain processes them and even reacts during
slumber.
Moreover, the sense of smell holds a unique non-verbal measure
that can be observed -- namely sniffing.
Researchers found that, in the case of smelling, the sleeping
brain acts much as it does when awake: We inhale deeply when we
smell a pleasant aroma but stop when assaulted by a bad smell.
This variation in sniffing could be recorded whether the subjects
were asleep or awake. Finally, this type of conditioning, while it
may appear to be quite simple, is associated with some higher
brain areas -- including the hippocampus, which is involved in
memory formation.
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