Is it possible to learn a language while you sleep?

by Target Language Translation Services

- October 13 2021

The average human sleeps around eight hours a night for, on average, 75 years, which adds up to about two hundred and 22,000 hours in a lifetime. Luminaries from Benjamin Franklin to Jon Bon Jovi have poured scorn on the simple mammalian inactivity of sleep. Franklin famously asserted that, “there will be sleeping enough in the grave.”

Today, this loss of vitality has been repackaged as a loss of productivity. We’re told of the hyper-productive CEOs of the world’s richest companies who are awake and alert hours ahead of the rest of humanity. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gets up at 3:45 every day, answers his emails and works out before heading to the office at 6:00.

Before we restructure our lives and set the alarm clock to shriek an hour or two earlier, we should take a step back. All the above is very normative: measuring success against CEOs is fairly futile, and waking up at four in the morning to answer emails certainly isn’t everyone’s definition of success. There are also the very real dangers of sleep deprivation, which has been linked to a host of afflictions ranging from a lower pain threshold to heart disease and diabetes.

Learn a foreign language while you sleep

So where do we go from here? Modern lives are short on time and short on sleep, so what should we do to find the time for something that is fulfilling and vital?

The old saying that we can solve problems more effectively when we “sleep on it” may be especially true for our brains are still very much active while we're asleep.

Our brains are constantly processing information, even during deep sleep — and new research suggests that it may actually be possible to learn new information while we sleep. Previously learned information can be remembered during deep sleep, so the scientists' predicted that it might be possible to absorb new information too.

Researchers from two Swiss universities wanted to know if they could enhance the learning of words from a foreign language by exposing people to the words during non-rapid eye movement sleep (NonREM sleep) – the deep, dreamless sleep period that most of us experience during the first few hours of the night.

To find out, they gathered two groups of study participants, all of whom were native German speakers, and gave them a series of Dutch-to-German word pairs to learn at 10 pm. One group was then instructed to get some sleep, while the other group was kept awake. For the next few hours both groups listened to an audio playback of the word pairs they’d already been exposed to and some they hadn’t yet heard.

The researchers then re-gathered both groups at 2 am and gave them a test of the Dutch words to find any differences in learning.

And indeed there was a difference: the group that listened to the words during NonREM sleep did significantly better at recalling the words they’d heard at 10pm.

The simple yet potent trick the researchers applied is known as “verbal cueing,” and this isn’t the first claim made for its success while sleeping. But what makes this study different is that it puts a finer point on the conditions necessary for this trick to actually work—namely, it only works when we’ve already been exposed to the verbal cues before we sleep.

The researchers added a techie dimension by conducting electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of the sleeping participants’ brains to track neural electrical activity during the learning period. They found that learning the foreign words overlapped with the appearance of theta brain waves, an intriguing result since theta is the brain wave state often associated with heightened learning while awake (usually we’re in either the high-frequency, high-alertness alpha or beta states while awake, but it’s thought possible to induce theta state—slower in frequency than alpha and beta—through concentration techniques).

So, to make practical use of these findings you’ll need to make sure of two conditions: only play audio of foreign words you’ve already heard, and set the audio to run for the first two to three hours of sleep. When you wake, give yourself a quiz to test your recall.  Do that for a few weeks before and you’ll likely find yourself communicating more fluently in another language.

States of consciousness such as ''asleep'' and ''awake''

Though we utilize the terms "awake" and "asleep" a lot to define our state of consciousness, our brains aren't quite that straightforward.

Our brains alternate between two phases approximately every half second — active phases or "up-states" and passive phases, also known as "down-states".

In the experiment, participants were given headphones to listen to while asleep.

Words from an artificial language played while they slept, as well as translations for these words — when the second word of a pair was repeatedly played in an "up-state", meaning associations were formed unconsciously in the brain.

"It was particularly interesting that language areas and the hippocampus — which normally regulate language-learning while we're awake — were also activated when learning the vocabulary learned in deep sleep," said co-author of the study, Marc Züs, in an Informationsdienst Wissenschaft press release.

"It seems these structures regulate memory formation independent of whatever state of consciousness we're in — whether unconsciously in sleep, or consciously while we're awake."

So it seems sleep is not a state where we're shielded from the outside world, as was widely accepted in the field of sleep research — that indicates sophisticated learning is possible while you're snoozing.

This article is reprinted from INSIDER, Babbel and Forbes.

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