Depending on where you live, an education can be expensive and time-consuming. For those without a lot of money or time, an entire industry was born to help close the gap. Unfortunately these get-smart-quick schemes are not only too good to be true, they're counterproductive.
Live and Learn, Not Sleep and Learn
Despite the growing trend of "learn while you sleep" products, the only positive to this approach is that it is positively a waste of money - and might even disturb your sleep. According to Dr. Jerome M. Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, attempts to learn while sleeping hold no value because "the sound had to actually wake you before you would benefit. Even when you’re sleepy, but not asleep, you don’t learn very well.”
Dr. Michael J. Sateia, the head of the sleep disorders program at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, agrees. He says the sleeping brain is not so suggestible. “Generally, sleep is considered to be a state of being relatively ‘offline,’ as it were, with respect to extrasensory input.”
Interest in subliminal sleep-learning was reawakened, if you will, by researchers at the University of Lübeck in Germany last year. They observed subjects with an improved ability to recall a string of words learned before sleep when the brain was gently stimulated with electrical current at a certain frequency during sleep. This is not the same as the concept of subliminal sleep-learning, and the connection between the two is labored at best. That hasn't stopped anyone from putting a lot of their money where their pillows are, as consumers spend as much as $400 for a set of tapes containing information they either can't learn or don't have time to learn when awake.
The average, middle-aged American doesn't get the recommended eight hours of sleep at night, opting instead for about 6.1 hours. While shortcuts may be tempting for those whose time is cut short, the most important and productive thing doctors suggest you do with your sleep is rest.
Article comments
1 - Christopher Rose
There's a lot of work being done in the field of life extension these days. If I'm really lucky, it will become a usable technology before I die!
On a more serious note, when all the research into this field pays off, it is going to completely change the face of society as we know it. Just imagine what is going to happen in the fields of work, pensions, health care, banking and social relationships if people start to enjoy good health up to the age of 150 or more as a matter of routine...