Brain 'can classify words during sleep'

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-29166466#

by mbeissinger • 12 years ago

86 42 12 years ago

walterbell5• 12 years ago

Once asleep, a new list of words was tested on participants to ensure that the brain had to work out the meaning of the words before classifying them using the buttons. Their brain activity showed they continued to respond accurately, the researchers said, although it happened more slowly.

EEG-based interrogation of sleeping people?!

gouggoug• 12 years ago

I'm wondering the same thing. The article is rather vague about how they gave "a new list of words to participants" while they were sleeping...

walterbell5• 12 years ago

If OpenBCI ships soon, people can try this at home :) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openbci/openbci-an-open...

biomimic• 12 years ago

jrapdx3• 12 years ago

Seems like a "filler" piece, not much info there. Sleep isn't "on/off", but normally goes through levels of consciousness from wakefulness to unaware. Not surprisingly we might be able to handle a simple task.

I remember a time when I was "on call". The phone rang at 04:00. It wound up being a long discussion, necessary to manage a complex problem. Strangely, when I got to work I had no recollection at all of what happened overnight, and stunned when I found out what I'd done (correctly too).

Handling a few words wouldn't be such a big deal.

junto2• 12 years ago

I remember when I first moved to Germany from the UK. I was immersed in a foreign language and my brain was constantly telling me I needed to go to sleep, especially after social occasions where the language input was extreme.

I pictured my brain sorting out words and linkages as I slept. Makes sense for the brain to require partial downtime for a index reorganisation.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

And garbage collection.

junto2• 12 years ago

Lol. Yes and garbage collection.

Funnily enough I'm now at the stage where certain German expressions and mannerisms have started to surplant my native British English ones. Germans often have one word for something where in English you need a whole sentence. Somehow these words creep into your vocabulary and merge across the language boundaries.

walterbell5• 12 years ago

Journal paper, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214...

"This study uncovers a promising avenue to study nonconscious processes ... although sleeping participants may continue to process information in a goal-oriented manner, this task set is presumably maintained without the participant being conscious of it ... studying sleep in this context allows pushing further the limits and extents of nonconscious processes and establishing the properties of a broader and more natural type of cognitive unconscious."

Another article, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140911125806.ht...

"The study also extends earlier work on subliminal processing by showing that speech processing and other complex tasks "can be done not only without being aware of what you perceive, but [also] without being aware at all." Kouider suspects that such unconscious processing isn't limited by the complexity of the task, but by whether it can be made automatic or not."

hooande• 12 years ago

Any task that could become automated could be maintained during sleep, he said.

So someone who is highly trained could continue to work while they are asleep. ie, an expert stock broker could classify market data (as interpreted by EEG readings) throughout the night. Interesting, and a bit worrisome to think that some corporations could use this technology to get 16 hour days out of employees.

I am interested in the idea of continuing to "work" while sleeping. I've read anecdotes about people who solve technical problems in their dreams and the concept of getting a few more mental hours out of the day is very appealing. Time is arguably the most valuable resource and anything that can create more of it has potential to have a big impact. Hopefully this early result will turn into something bigger, ideally some kind of technology that allows people to communicate with themselves while sleeping. For that, I would pay a lot.

edit: Also, does this method have any value as a lie detector? Someone could ask a target true or false questions and record their EEG readings, and then ask a different set of questions while the target is asleep. Even the most skilled liar might not be able to deceive while unconscious.

irremediable• 12 years ago

I've read anecdotes about people who solve technical problems in their dreams and the concept of getting a few more mental hours out of the day is very appealing.

Have you never experienced it? I've found it's very common that I'll sleep on a problem and have solutions in the morning.

RobAley• 12 years ago

I've experienced it occasionally. More often, I've (at least had the impression that I've) solved it in the night, been aware of solving it, and then forgotten the solution by morning.

oafitupa• 12 years ago

Yep, I solved several Math and Physics problems for school (I used to get into competitions), understood a martials arts technique (it was taught to us but nobody could make it work. In my dream I fought someone but I saw everything upside down, and there I figured the technique was very similar to other one we already knew, but upside down), and solved many programming problems I had when I started learning that.

I also feel like my naps defragment my brain even when I'm not 100% unconscious. I go through things that happened that morning or the day before and kind of classify everything. Sometimes I understand how the people I interacted with felt. Things that in the moment they occurred I couldn't appreciate. Like when you consciously try to think things from the other person's perspective, but dreaming sometimes forces me to do that.

totalrobe2• 12 years ago

When I was a kid I was stuck on a puzzle in "Ecco the Dolphin" (for the Sega Game Gear). I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night after I got through the puzzle while dreaming. Beat the whole game by morning.

Evgeny• 12 years ago

I've read anecdotes about people who solve technical problems in their dreams and the concept of getting a few more mental hours out of the day is very appealing.

This is one that every russian kid knows from school days:

"I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary."

—Mendeleev, as quoted by Inostrantzev

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev#Periodic_table

growlix• 12 years ago

I would consider your Mendeleev quotation as an example of a different, though also quite fascinating phenomenon. What is being discussed in the above article relates to processing sensory input during sleep. The Mendeleeev anecdote is related to memory consolidation/restructuring that occurs during sleep and can cause insight (ie "a mental restructuring that leads to a sudden gain of explicit knowledge allowing qualitatively changed behaviour"[0]), independent of sensory input during sleep. Your Mendeleev reference reminds of a fascinating study[0] that examines the capability of sleep to yield insight because they also reference the Mendeleev anecdote in their introduction. I highly recommend reading the article. It's short, easy to understand, and demonstrates the importance of sleep for problem solving.

[0] Original paywalled source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6972/full/nature0...; free-to-access copy: https://www.msu.edu/course/psy/401/Readings/WK9.PresentA.Wag...

seren• 12 years ago

I recently followed "Learning how to learn" on Coursera, and they mentioned two main mode of operation of the brain: focused and diffuse mode. In the first mode, you are obviously focused, but it does not allow you to use part of your brain not related to the task at hand. On the other hand, the diffuse mode is activated when you are more relaxed, and allows you to create connections with remote parts of your brain.

So they advise when you are stuck to sleep on it, to allow the diffuse mode to kick in.

If you are interested, I would recommend you to follow the course. Most of the advice are not earth shattering, but I found the explanation on how our brains work when learning quite interesting.

Jun8• 12 years ago

Excellent point but one can carry it further: why even wake them up! Sure, you can probably be much more efficient while awake but the gains may be more than compensated by the fact that it's so much easier to manipulate sleeping bodies. Once one contemplates this hellish scenario it becomes that The Matrix wasn't that much off (except for using humans as battery bit, which is BS; you use them for their organic processing units).

ToastyMallows2• 12 years ago

If I could earn even half of my pay while I was sleeping I would do it in a heartbeat. Step it up, corporations!

totalrobe2• 12 years ago

Are you kidding? It would be expected...they wouldn't pay you more.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

So someone who is highly trained could continue to work while they are asleep. ie, an expert stock broker could classify market data (as interpreted by EEG readings) throughout the night. Interesting, and a bit worrisome to think that some corporations could use this technology to get 16 hour days out of employees.

I just can't throw it out of my head that this would be a step towards ending like in this poem:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8o6/the_gift_we_give_to...

("em" in the poem means "emulated human", i.e. a mind running on computer hardware)

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

As somebody with a sleep disorder, I've suspected this for some time.

I think you keep on thinking while sleeping (at the higher levels), it's just a bit dissociative and you don't remember any of it. In fact, that's probably where you can do a lot of your best creative work.

Many times I'll "solve" a problem while deep in sleep, think to myself "Hey! I just solved this! I need to remember." then forget completely the next day -- only to come around to the solution again later on, seemingly on my own.

Sleep is a very strange process.

jryan49• 12 years ago

I'll create or solve some problem in my sleep and think it's the best thing since sliced bread, then wake up to find the idea not as amazing as I had thought it was.

Aqueous• 12 years ago

Seems pretty obvious considering words spoken to a sleeping person can be incorporated into their dream - and the only way to do that is through classification

walterbell5• 12 years ago

Are there any references you would recommend on spoken words influencing dreams?

ashwinne• 12 years ago

What a surprise! I wrote a short story last year about the exact same phenomenon: http://daariga.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/the-dream-worker/

Quite a shock to see it being found to be true as a research finding. Many of the details in the story matched so closely to the research methodology that I still cannot believe this is happening :-)

doctoboggan• 12 years ago

Excellent story, it reminded me of The Circle, where the main character does similar absentminded work but while awake and also doing other tasks.

My favorite line was:

Looking around curiously at the other passengers, she wondered how many of them were trading in their dreams for small change.

ericgj• 12 years ago

Shouldn't they be studying how we can get more restful sleep rather than fantasizing about extracting more work out of us? I don't consider it 'productive' (much less healthy) when I spend the night grinding on some technical problem. The Mendeleev anecdote and 'solving problems in your sleep' are about something entirely different, to me.

lazyant• 12 years ago

I've "solved problems" (more like getting a breakthrough idea) during my sleep so yes I'm sure your brain can do a lot during sleep

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Yep, same with me.

My subconscious brain is way better than my waking brain when it comes to untangling problems where there are more than about 4 or 5 levels of abstraction/indirection.

It is pretty common for me to be dealing with some hairy issue that spans multiple levels and then go to sleep and wake up with the seemingly obvious answer. Even without sleep I can often get similar results by just going for a long walk while listening to music and specifically not "thinking" (consciously) about the problem that is vexing me.

When there are lots of layers to a problem (and I basically understand all the layers but have trouble following all of the indirections), the less I "think" about the problem (consciously), the easier the solution comes.

calebm• 12 years ago

How about a "Classifying@Home" (similar to Folding@Home) - you wear an EEG helmet while you sleep to offload "unused" brain cycles to classify words for science! :)

Brain 'can classify words during sleep'

Related Stories