We understand sleep as a time of partial shutdown for the brain. We certainly don’t expect the brain to have any of its regular abilities while we’re sleeping, especially the ones that allow it to encode learned information on the basis of sensory cues.
Surprisingly, the brain is capable of doing exactly that, as long as it happens during the REM phase. In a study published in Nature Communications, they put 20 volunteers to sleep and played acoustic patterns at them in all stages of their sleep.
They were then asked to identify the same patterns when they woke up.They found that the subjects could identify the sound patterns heard during the REM phase but didn’t recognize the ones from other, deeper phases of sleep.
Now, it certainly doesn’t mean that you can study for your tests while you sleep, but it disproves the previously held notion that the brain is unable to pick up new information when it’s sleeping.
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