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Listening to sounds while you’re asleep could improve your memory.

Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois taught 12 study participants to associate each of 50 images with a random location on a computer screen.

Forty-five minutes after a "learning session", the participants were asked to lie down in a quiet, darkened room to sleep. Electrodes attached to their scalp measured their brain activity. Sounds corresponding to some of the images that participants had seen earlier were then played to some of the vounteers but without waking them.

The team found that the group to which the sounds had been played then had a higher accuracy in dragging objects on screen to the position they had originally seen them than those participants who had not been played anything.

"The research strongly suggests that we don't shut down our minds during deep sleep," said John Rudoy, lead author of the study and a neuroscience PhD student at Northwestern. "Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories."

The team goes on to argue that sounds could be chosen to help sleepers ruminate over certain information. "While asleep, people might process anything that happened during the day – what they ate for breakfast, television shows they watched, anything," said Ken Paller, senior author of the study and professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. "But we decided which memories our volunteers would activate, guiding them to rehearse some of the locations they had learned an hour earlier."

For more evidence that our brain is very much awake while we snooze, visit this link for a piece on New Scientist today.


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