Solve Problems and Learn While You Sleep?

We spend a good part of our life sleeping and dreaming.   Getting adequate quality sleep is essential for brain health.  But we may be able to go farther than that and tune how we sleep to enhance cognitive performance. Lucid dreaming, subliminal learning and cognitive priming are three techniques that have been suggested for getting more out of our brains even while we sleep.   We will cover these topics as well as how sleep in general impacts peak cognitive performance on the Next Brain Blog.

Cognitive priming is my personal favorite. I have done it with good results for nearly two decades. I have never seen any scientific studies (until now) that back it up.

Cognitive priming to improve performance through sleep is simple to do. You intensely immerse yourself in the topic to learn or problem to solve near bedtime. When you sleep you want to have a dream about the problem or topic. Upon waking you should be able to make much better progress on the topic or problem than you could have if you did not dream about it.

I was happy to hear that such phenomenon was demonstrated under scientific conditions in a a recent study at the Beth Israel Medical Center. I was reported on in the New York Times as Learning While You Sleep. Volunteers  were given the task of learning to move through a complex maze. After a training period some of the group slept for 90 minutes and the others just rested.

Re-testing revealed that those that slept and dreamt about the maze  had  a 10 times improvement in score while those that slept but did not dream or just rested showed no improvement or even a a worse score.

What triggered some sleepers to dream? The researcher point out that the maze dreamers all scored very poorly before sleeping.

“It’s almost as if your brain is rummaging through everything that happened today and deciding that you’re not done with it,” Dr. Stickgold said. “The things that really grip you, the ones you decide at an emotional level are really important, those are the ones you dream about. The things you’re obsessed with are the ones that your brain forces you to continue to process.”

Of course this is a single study that requires far more investigation.  However, it does fit my personal experience very well. I nearly always make good progress on learning and problem solving tasks if I care enough to be working on them before I sleep and dream.

I am interested to hear from readers that have had similar experiences or know about other studies using cognitive priming to improve performance through sleep.