> Half the students were allowed to go to sleep while the words were played back to them. The other half stayed awake while listening to the words. ... Researchers found that those who had listened to the words while sleeping retained much more than those who didn’t sleep.
Did they compare to a group who slept without listening to the words? I'm curious whether the playback actually had any effect or whether it was just sleeping right after learning that did it.
I’m 33, when I was ~17 I took a discrete math course. During class teacher posed a challenge- to find algorithm for minimal number of cross beams to make an n by m lattice rigid, so it can’t flex like a parallelogram because triangles are fixing angles. I was asleep, realized I was dreaming, and decided to “work” on the problem. I found a solution, woke up and wrote it down. I think it was helpful to be dreaming because usually I cannot visualize more than simple shape, but while dreaming, I could try things out without using paper and pencil.
During my maths degree I would often try to solve problems last thing at night. If I could not solve a problem. I’d Go to sleep. I would have no recollection of solving the problem but in the morning I would often be able to immediately solve the problem.
This could have been down to a fresh brain but the speed at which I would solve the problem in the morning and pretty much just know the solution I’m convinced I was solving the problem in my sleep and then basically just writing it down when I woke.
In the programming fields, we call this putting in 'on the back burner'... don't spend too long on a single problem. Just put in the back of your brain and come back to it.
I wrote the story about Rust where the programming concepts were hard to grasp and most just give up the first time trying to learn Rust. Normally months or years later, it clicked the 2nd time around for whatever reason.
It's an effective method of learning. Expose your brain to the concept, then walk away, come back the next day it later on, repeat. Continue to do this and you'll eventually understand. Repetition is the key to mastery, after all.
This happens to me constantly with CS problems. I work on a problem at night, go to sleep and the answer suddenly comes to me when I'm driving to work.
I have the issue where if I'm stuck on a problem and try to sleep on it, I wake up as tired as if I had stayed up working. My brain seems to never completely shutdown and rest. Have you ever experienced that? Any suggestions?
I guess I don't try to "sleep on it". I just tell myself I'll tackle it another time and go to bed. I have amazing sleep hygiene and I tend to use one dream from a set of dreams to fall asleep. Somehow I still wake up and have the solution the next day even though it was never my intent.
You nailed it. Most of the time, we don't even know why we just did a particular action. Our subconscious expresses an urge, and we usually just do it. Afterwards, our conscious mind rationalizes the decision with some sort of logic which people will defend to the death.
It is possible to communicate with the subconscious. In fact, it is always communicating with us. Our society is so focused on the conscious mind that we tend to not notice. This is what anxiety is. The subconscious is trying to express an unmet need. The medical field tries to suppress and numb the symptoms instead of listening to your body.
Source: Nobody told me this. I discovered this while dealing with massive personal problems over many years. Operating under this assumption is how I overcame serious addiction, anxiety and depression. Meditation is a good way to calm to conscious mind so you can "hear" your subconscious and body.
This is the first time I had heard of this rigid lattice problem and I thought it sounded very interesting; if anyone else is interested, here's a link to some details: http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12014/index.html
Fascinating. I don't know how the two can relate (might be worth some weekend googling/research) but this reminds me of the lattices in the 7th row problem!
I used to be able to do the same thing when I was younger; I'm 30 now. I wouldn't ever study growing up, wasting my waking time consuming content --stuff you can't dream up since it's made by others. I would essentially practice what I did know in my sleep (using 'lucid dreaming') being conscious while asleep, as you were. Needless to say this isn't healthy, as now I'm not able to be as conscious while asleep, or seemingly not dream at all, and I'm now a narcoleptic, as I was diagnosed years ago... Essentially asleep while awake, ironically. Something that's not in my favor when I need to get work done. The extra thinking time while your body rests was really nice, though.
If you are 30 now, maybe you just experienced the typical narcolepsy onset pattern in your early 20s.
I have narcolepsy. The daytime drowsiness started when I was 19 and got progressively worse during the later years of my university study. I pretty much abandoned attending class by my 3rd year.
What you describe as 'lucid dreaming' sounds similar to what I used to call my 'party trick': I would sleep soundly through the compulsory PhD seminars or a few years later my MBA classes, then wake up as the speaker asked for questions. Straight away I would ask a relevant and insightful question! People around me would look stunned: "How could you do that? You were asleep!"
So somehow while sleeping, my subconscious mind was still absorbing the talk. When I woke up, I had no idea what the talk was about, but bizarrely I usually knew what question to ask. Even today, 20-25 years later, my MBA and uni friends remark on it.
I also did a lot of lucid dreaming and seemingly had it very adversely affect my ability to sleep normally and have 'normal' dreams. It does seem that at least some non-lucid dreams may be a requirement for normal functioning. I have gently suggested to a few friends interested in lucid dreaming that they not get into it too much, for that reason.
In my case, I've learned to stop at all controlling the dreams, despite being aware of whether or not I am dreaming, and that seems to have helped.
However, both of us are simply relating anecdotes; we may both have had significant sleep issues arise even without the lucid dreaming (albeit in a slightly different form).
I'm not clear -- you believe your narcolepsy was caused by overdoing (so to say) lucid dreaming in your youth? I've not heard of this but I am very curious.
I’ve sort of experienced the same thing—never quite to the same extent, but close. I wish there were some way to trigger this productive lucid dreaming, because it does feel very cool to wake up with a solution to something you were stumped on while awake.
If you reduce the problem to "some way to trigger lucid dreaming" there is a lot of information to be found on that subject. If you read a bunch of different guides you start to see a few common techniques.
I can't say I've gotten anywhere near the state of attaining lucid dreaming on a regular basis by applying them but there's been some interesting moments in my on-and-off attempts.
There's a community of people online who employ dietary supplements to stimulate lucid dreaming.
I accidentally discovered it when taking Methylcobalamin B12 supplements. For the first week or so I'd lucid dream every morning for a few hours before fully waking up. It was quite interesting, but would cease happening if I continued taking the MB12. Only after stopping for a few weeks would they recur upon reintroducing the MB12.
There are more reliable supplements for stimulating lucid dreaming in particular, I'm pretty sure my MB12 experience is just a minor side effect. I've read it affects melatonin production, and I did find myself growing sleepy earlier and more consistently when taking it. I don't know if that's related to the lucid dreaming though.
I learned this when taking Vitamin E for an injury. I would have dreams that I remembered when I woke and that is unusual for me. I tried to buy vitamin E for the purpose, recently, and failed to reproduce the result.
Discrete math at 17? But can't visualize more than a simple shape? Quite the opposite from myself. Vivid spatial imagination, but abstract ideas take lots of mental effort to assimilate. In calc 1 at 30; after spending three decades hating math I found an interest in it, had just never been 'taught' the right way. It took an acid trip to see the beauty of mathematics.
I had a similar problem when I was 19 and working on a statistics problem. It was finals week and was very tired. Frustrated, I decided to take a nap, except my mind was "awake" during the nap if that makes any sense. Solved the problem in this state quite readily.
Unfortunately, I was unable to replicate that "mind awake, body asleep" effect since then. I suspect it is because I was never as tired as I was back then.
This is something people with aphantasia like me will never be able to do. But I would love to have this kind of visual thinking once in my life, just for the experience. This seems to offer a lot for problem solving skills :)
I also have aphantasia, but a significant subset of my dreams do include visuals (and some don't), so don't count yourself out on learning-while-sleeping.
> Dreaming actually means you are not sleeping well...
I'm fairly sure you're the one misinformed. Do you have any source on that? I recently read Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep and why it didn't feel comprehensive, the book did NOT mention anything about dreaming while sleeping being a negative.
Thomas Edison would sleep on a chair holding two steel balls that would drop as he was about to enter REM sleep and wake him up so that he can immediately write down ideas he learned of while sleeping.
When I'm studying a subject intensely, the subject matter tends to invade my dreams, often when I'm confused by some detail I need to resolve for myself before proceeding further.
I still have this happen quite frequently when I'm mentally working through a tough programming problem, especially if that problem involves a lot of moving parts. It's like my mind is organizing its understanding of the problem during a dream, so I get bits and pieces of it.
Sometimes this leads to useful insights, but much more often I think I've solved some problem in my dream, only to wake up and immediately realize that the solution makes no sense at all. Once I do wake up though, I find that if I give myself a moment to rest and then come at the problem again, I can re-contextualize much more quickly and make quick work of the issue.
I'm exact same way, hit the gym for half a decade 6 days a week right before bed. No issue sleeping, but put me in front of a intense video game before bed time and I'm up for hours.
Many people can exercise directly before bed to good effect (as sibling comments note). Many people can't. The best "sleep hygiene" recommendation is to try it both ways and see which works best for you.
At least 3 hours before bedtime is usually a good practice, as others noticed though it may be possible for one to exercise just before and have a good nights sleep.
Exercising in the evening is optimal for muscle growth as power is maximal[0] and it's better for recovery, though there are other factors such as daily schedule and I've often heard people saying that working out at morning has a good psychological effect.
You hit on it with the last point. The best program is one you will stick to. Mine is 20 minutes of gym time every morning at whatever intensity I can muster, and 20 mins of walk during my commute. Every day. If I’m hungover or feeling down, I dual down the workout. But I do it every day so it’s part of my lifestyle and sustainable.
This applies to diets too. The best one is the one you can stick to.
I tried min maxing working out, but I found that it was much better to just do the schedule that would work best for me instead of the one that would work best for my body. I now exercise first thing in the morning.
If you are learning Chinese and want to try, I created a file a while ago. I downloaded a youtube video (sorry, can't give creds, don't have the link anymore), extracted the audio and added a long silence at the beginning, so that I actually can start sleeping. Have not tried it yet but will tonight.
> Because all DMCA notifications must be based on a work for which the copyright is registered with the Copyright Office (or for which registration has been applied for), and because a high percentage of DMCA takedown notices are not valid, it will speed our investigation of your DMCA notice if you attach to it a copy of your copyright registration, or registration application, for the work.
> DMCA notifications based on unregistered works are not valid.
Heh, would only be cheekier if their DMCA <form> had file upload inputs for copyright_docs and registration_docs.
Outline seems exclusively used as a paywall bypass system in the wild. Can't be good for their longterm viability.
Is that true, since USA signed up to the Berne Convention (18XX) copyright in USA has been an unregistered right (as was already common across the World).
If DMCA only applies to registered works that's interesting to me -- seems it is, eg https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7f07e1c0-5264..., in fact it appears as in other areas of USA law you have to buy your right (from the government in form of a registration in this case) which seems contrary to Berne, I'm suprised it doesn't put USA in breech of their duties as it effectively reverses the "automatic" aspect of copyright for ordinary citizens.
It's surely just in its bootstrapped growth stage.
If it wasn't for its annotation system, I'd put it in the realm of rather straightforward side projects. There are really good "readability mode" transformer libraries out there. And you can imagine buying a subscription to each of the major publications to bypass their paywall.
Paywall bypassing is something I would've expected from archiving services too but I noticed this is perhaps false. For example, http://archive.is/ycfsk archived the paywall.
Delusion as a policy is pretty common, e.g. "Pinterest respects the intellectual property rights of others and we expect people on Pinterest to do the same."
What about the opposite? I recently (past few years) have no problem thinking and solving problems while I sleep. Surely this is something a younger me strived for.
How can I turn back to fantastic dreams, adventures and generally things of pleasure?
Sometimes when I'm working on a problem I'll put my head down and relax, breath deep, and try to get myself to nap. At the same time I think about the problem. I often find a solution that way, something about the semi-conscious brain storming works well that way. And when it doesn't, at least I had a relaxing nap :)
I remember listening Rogan's podcast on the subject of sleep with Matthew Walker, who is a professor of Neuroscience at Berkley. Hopefully I'm not making stuff up as it's been a while, but he talked about a study where each subject was given a task to learn while their brain activity was being recorded. The study found that the same areas of the brain that flared up during the learning and memorization processes were also very active during sleep, as if the brain was replaying the same activity over and over again.
Often, too often, I forget to set the sleep timer and fall asleep with the TV on. Often enough to notice, what's on TV shows up in my dreams (in some form).
I'm not sure if I could learn but I bet I could prime my brain with basics (e.g., vocabulary words in my non-native language).
I remember once having a dream where I was fighting off bad guys like a ninja, with Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life" playing as soundtrack (which had been in the Daredevil movie). When I woke up, I realized I'd fallen asleep with the song playing on a loop.
Coincidentally, the words "wake me up" and "I can't wake up" are said a total of 18 times in the song; I wonder what effect that had on me.
I've certainly had songs I've overheard appear in dreams.
Weirdly enough, despite it being lucid dreaming and I'm fully aware that I'm dreaming, I have no recognition of where the music is coming from until I wake up.
I feel headlines like this can be answered using simple logic. Most people want to learn many things, but are lazy. Learning while you sleep would solve this. It would be an absolutely enormous industry.
Want to know French, but too lazy ("busy") to learn it? Listen to this magical audio file before/during sleep and in just x weeks you can amaze your friends and neighbors with your positively paralyzing parlezing without any of the work! Order now, just $xxx!
So the answer is going to range between a plain "no" and a "kind of sort of in a way that can, at best, work as an extremely modest supplement to conscious learning, under best conditions." And you need not worry about missing out on some cutting edge breakthrough. If and when such things happens this would be really really big news - not something restricted to a random classically clickbaited headline with the actual article hidden behind a paywall.
I just mention this because I think our inclination is to let our curiosity get the best of us, and of course - what if there's something we've missed out on? But in the process of this, we greatly incentivize this form of faux journalism. And the nice thing is is that the above logic can be applied to absolutely huge swaths of the entire media.
When I was in college, I took a Psychology class called "Altered states of conscienceness". The whole class was about how we learn and function under hypnosis, under the influence of drugs, when sleeping, etc. The overall theme of the class was that your body is always processing inputs from your senses, and different states of mind help you process differently by filtering certain things out while amplifying other things. But the same state of mind would have different outcomes for different people.
So the answer to this question is: Depends on the person, but there is nothing in the way the body works that would prevent you from learning while sleeping.
I've been trying this for about 18 months now and I rarely get it, but when I do, it's really magical. I am yet to be able to "learn" anything though. I try to search my mind for what I was supposed to do when I reach a lucid dreaming state, and that waakes me up.
A common thing that happens to me is: Stuck on a moderately complex problem, usually in a field that I'm not intimately familiar with (ie. A complex mail server config). Work on it, feeling frustrated late into evening. Go to sleep and sort of "dream about the problem" in a loosely chaotic way.
Come morning, its not that I suddenly have a solution, but more often than not I've developed a good strategy for how to test the problem. By using this new method I'm able then to trial-and-error the problem in a systemic way, leading to a solution.
TLDR: Sleeping often gives me successful 'approaches' to problems
I do all the time. Many times I am working on some bug or some complex issue. I give up on the problem for the day I go home, sleep and early morning (for some reason its always early morning) I actually solve the problem with minute details. When I wake up I know what the issue is. Happens at least once a month to me.
My anecdotal experience with this comes from learning musical instruments. I've come to believe that the brain does a fair bit of rewiring when you're not paying attention to something you're trying to learn. This happens when sleeping or otherwise.
I remember learning riding a bicycle in a dream. Woke up the next day and suddenly I could ride a bicycle, despite months of struggle without success. So, I guess sometimes it takes one especially lucid dream to solve an initially "unsolvable" problem.
For how cool it sounds, it seems more like you have managed to overcome the struggle than learning to ride a bike, as in you jumped on the bike for the first time in your life, in your dream, and the day after you could ride a bike in real life.
That's what I basically meant - sometimes one dream is enough to move on. Not only rational problems are being solved inside the brain while asleep. I believe that dreaming of riding a bike like it was effortless made me believe that it's actually effortless and voila, it worked.
Did they compare to a group who slept without listening to the words? I'm curious whether the playback actually had any effect or whether it was just sleeping right after learning that did it.