Hi, I would like to ask YOU about learning a language while I sleep. Does anyone have any experience with it? I started listening to English even at night while I sleep. I have been listening to English approximately 15 hours a day for several month, but I love English and I must listen to it even at night :-)))) Is that effective? Can it help me or it is nonsense and I should take it easy and relax at night - at least? :))))) I have heard that it is possible to learn while you sleep…and somebody has already learnt a language by using it…on the Internet, there are some articles about it.
Once you are fully asleep, your brain will not learn anything new. It is before falling asleep and after waking up where your brain is very receptive; a good time to revise or start something new.
I can’t remember which brain waves are most active then, but I remember those times as the most effective. That’s why it’s not advisable to watch or read anything to stimulating if you want to have an early night!
Your body - and your hearing - will not get enough rest if you expose it continually to sound (even if you don’t consider it a disturbance) and all your efforts will be wasted in the end.
My husband sleeps all night with the radio playing in his ear. It hasn’t made him any more knowlegable 
Too stimulating for me, this discussion, I need my beauty sleep. (A subtle way of correcting my typo.)
Learning by sleeping? I am pretty skeptical to it, I tried it to some extend and couldn’t detect any marked effect.
There is still some interest in studying the learning while sleeping process, but the classic study of Simon and Emmons in 1956 debunked that concept. Using an EEG, they discovered that people only learn and retain information when the brain is producing alpha waves, which only occurs while someone is a awake or awaking.
I don’t believe you could learn while you are asleep. But I used to listen to a French podcast that was designed to work with mediation practices and I found that nice to listen to before bed. Listening to songs in the language you are studying while you are falling asleep is also a nice thing to do.
Thank you for your opinions.
by the way…have a look at http://www.sleeplearning.com/
@ TheDoctor
I stopped reading when I saw this: “The average human only uses 5% of normal brain capacity, the other 95% goes to waste.” This is a MYTH! Here’s a wikipedia article about this: Ten percent of the brain myth - Wikipedia. I think you should also take a look at James Randi’s video on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_randi.html because the web site you refer to it clearly a fraud trying to make you believe that the CDs they sell with “subliminal messages” will “cure” all your problems.
I wish learning a language was as easy as that… xD
The idea is used in the science-fiction novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The book came out in the thirties I believe. Suggests the idea was fashionably then.
Q: For those of us who like to cram for exams, is it possible to learn while sleeping, e.g., by listening to audiotaped lectures while we sleep?
Don Lemieux, Waikato Institute of Technology, New Zealand
A: Dear Don,
A series of studies done in the early 1990s investigated whether information conveyed to the brain upon falling asleep and soon after was later remembered better. The answer was no. Indeed, when we are asleep, the brain stops focusing and perceiving external signals and, instead, focuses internally on what it learned during the day. As such, your brain’s mode of operation during sleep is particularly unfavorable to learning from your surrounding environment (such as a tape player under your pillow).
What does this mean for those who want to cram effectively for exams? The answer is a simple, three-part trick:
(1) Get a full night of sleep before a day of cramming. This will allow your brain to be as receptive as possible to laying down new information (a dry sponge is a good analogy here, and if you don’t sleep, it will still be water-logged with learning from the prior day).
(2) During the following day, learn the material deeply (i.e., think about what you are learning, and understand it, rather than use simple rote memorization).
(3) Get a full night of sleep afterwards to cement and consolidate that information into the architecture of the brain. Indeed, a recent study of our own demonstrated that, following learning, sleep not only enhances individual pieces of new information but also builds associative links between them, allowing you to “see the bigger picture.”
Good luck with your cramming and exams!
interview of Matt Walker NOVA | scienceNOW | Sleep Ask the Expert | PBS
There is a conference of Matt Walker in fora.tv about sleeping and memory
http://fora.tv/2009/08/11/Matt_Walker_Secrets_of_the_Sleeping_Brain
You can download the audio and the video… it’s british english! (no transcript here, but there are other conferences which have, you just have to subscribe to the website to get them)
listen to chapeter 29, there he talks about listening to tapes while you sleep