Can people sleep and study?
A study published this week in nature communications, Formation and suppression of acoustic memories during human sleep, shows that new memories can be formed only during certain stages of sleep.
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep or mild non-rem sleep (NREM) sleep is beneficial for learning, while deep non-rem sleep has a inhibitory effect on the ability to learn new knowledge, the study found.
The above findings may help us better understand the functions of different stages of sleep.
The brain is stimulated by repetitive noise segments during sleep.
MEP indicates the potential of memory excitation, NREM2: [305, 405] ms;
NREM3: [130, 130] ms;
REM: [280, 390] ms.
The past researches to investigate whether we could study during sleep, the result is different: part of the answer is yes, and the other part cannot provide evidence that can form new memories during sleep.
French higher normal school, Thomas Andrillon and his colleagues think it's produced this inconsistency, because different sleep stages of brain activity type is different, this or may explain why people sometimes can learn, sometimes can't.
To test this hypothesis, the authors monitored the subjects' brain activity during sleep and showed them different sounds.
When they woke up, they were able to identify the sounds they had heard during sleep.
Hearing clips during REM sleep increased the performance of the subjects in the test, while during NREM sleep, it produced the opposite effect.
By analyzing the response to the sounds during the night, the authors can confirm the learning effects of REM sleep.
During NREM sleep, they observed a mild NREM sleep and depth NREM sleep exists obvious difference, in the former case, the study is possible, and in the latter case, learning is restrained.
The dynamic relationship between learning index and slow-wave power in NREM sleep.
In combination, the results not only show that people can learn during sleep, but also help to understand the general memory process and how they change during different stages of sleep.