It is indeed possible to learn a foreign language while our brain is asleep. Explanations.
- The slow, implicit learning we do when we sleep differs greatly from the rapid, explicit learning during our waking hours.
- We spend nearly a third of our lives asleep, according to Inserm.
We knew that the brain is far from inactive during sleep but according to recent work carried out by the École Normale Supérieure (ENS)-Paris Science et Lettres (PSL), and the AP-HP Hôtel-Dieu, we learn that it is also capable of activating processes more complex learning processes, such as those involved in acquiring a foreign language.
Adults Learned Japanese While Sleeping
Scientists have designed a protocol for learning the meaning of Japanese words during sleep, the results of which have been published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. They chose the Japanese language for its relatively simple structure with a limited number of possible syllabic units, making it the ideal language for the experiment, explain the authors. For example, the word “neko”, which means “cat”, consists of two units: “ne” and “ko”.
They first presented the 22 healthy adults with pairs of sounds and images while they were awake, such as a dog barking. Then, while the subjects slept, they made them listen to the sound accompanied by the corresponding term in Japanese. The next morning, the volunteers were able to choose between two pictures to find the corresponding word in Japanese, say the study authors in The Conversation.
Awakened learning remains more effective
The experiment also revealed what happens in our brains during sleep using electrocardiography (ECG), a technique that records electrical activity on the surface of the brain. The researchers were able to predict which words would be memorized when the subjects woke up based on the study of brain waves, the electrical impulses that measure brain activity and that of slow waves, which appear when the brain is dormant. deep.
“Memorized words generated more slow waves than forgotten words. Our results, along with a recent publication showing that slow waves predicted when subjects memorized the relative size of objects presented in a study, support their important role in learning during sleep.”, explain the researchers.
However, this experiment showed its limits: by carrying out the same protocol in the waking state with ten times fewer repetitions than in the experiment during sleep, they found that awake subjects learned words five times more effectively than when ‘they were sleeping.