No, you’re not going to be able to slide your textbook under your pillow and automagically assimilate every word in it by morning. This is not a superhero movie. There are, however, certain ways with which you can maximise your sleep by utilizing it as a tool for further learning.

Several studies have been successfully carried out to determine whether humans can actually further their learning while asleep. While the studies were carried out on different people with different methods, they had some things in common: sound and smell.

In a study, a group of native German speakers started learning Dutch with some basic vocabulary and, while they slept, the researchers played back the sounds of those words to one group, while the other group slept without the playback. The group that had the words played back to them in their sleep could when tested, recall the words better than the group that had no playback.

Another study involved the participants learning to play guitar music from a video game. While asleep, one group had the music played back to them while the other didn’t. When tested, the group that had the melody played back to them in their sleep were able to recreate it perfectly, unlike the other group.

Now how do you go about learning with sound when studying for a math quiz or something without audio recordings? Create one. Record your teacher in class and playback the audio while sleeping. Get audiobook versions of your textbooks. Record yourself reading the chapter and play it back while sleeping.

Other research has shown memory recall linked to smells. For example, if you were studying a certain subject next to a particular source of smell, placing the object emitting the scent next to your bed when sleeping may influence your brain to work more on restrengthening the memories of the subject.

“Why is this possible?” you may ask. According to neuroscientists, our we enter a special phase during sleep called slow-wave sleep in which our brain activity slows down in specific shifts overnight. It is the phase of sleep where our short-term memories transition into long-term memories. They also believe that exposing yourself to sound overnight, be it a recording of your math teacher in class or an audiobook version of your history textbook, will prolong the time spent in slow-wave sleep, increasing the amount of information migrated to long-term storage.

Source: Exercise Book, the BlueBic blog.

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