Learning During Deep Sleep and Hypnosis
A couple weeks back I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and I came across an interesting article about Learning New Vocabulary During Deep Sleep at:
If you’ve ever wondered whether you can learn something while sleeping, I have colleagues and clients that swear by it.
Honestly, I’ve been doubtful of these claims because I haven’t personally experienced it. Still, scientists are studying the phenomenon and it turns out – according to this information – there’s scientific proof it works!
You can read the article by following the link above and judge for yourself: But here’s the key thing I read:
“These investigators now showed for the first time that new foreign words and their translation words could be associated during a midday nap with associations stored into wakefulness. Following waking, participants could reactivate the sleep-formed associations to access word meanings when represented with the formerly sleep-played foreign words. The hippocampus, a brain structure essential for wake associative learning, also supported the retrieval of sleep-formed associations. The results of this experiment are published open access in the scientific journal “Current Biology”.
My personal takeaway:
When I hypnotize volunteers on stage – there’s a very distinct trance state I’m looking for… it’s that perfect point between being asleep and being awake where they’re completely open and receptive to the suggestions I give them – when I look at them I can see they’re hypnotized and they look like they’re napping… Napping almost like the participants who were reactivating the sleep-formed associations described in the article excerpt above.
I don’t know if napping is a coincidence, but I’d love to see these scientists expand their research into hypnosis and learning to see how hypnotic trance states and sleep-formed associations can be used to access new information.
Although… it would be a different line of research because there’s a very important difference between hypnotic trance states and sleep:
When sleeping – you’re resting.
During hypnosis – a person’s subconscious mind is open and receptive to suggestions that allow the subconscious to impress itself with information and suggestions – like during a hypnotherapy session. Or, when the subconscious is not being impressed upon – it’s being allowed to express itself – like during a stage hypnosis show where a person is performing.
In hypnosis you’re not resting like you are during sleep.
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