Brain Learns While You Snooze

Victor Montalvo Science
Title of Article: Brain learns while you snooze
By: Laura Sanders
Source: www.sciencenews.org
Date of article: August 26, 2012

While you are asleep you can stilllearn brand new information, researchers report online August 26 in Nature Neuroscience. A new study shows that entirely new information can go into your sleeping mind, says study coauthor Anat Arzi ofthe Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Arzi and her colleagues relied on the subject’s sense of smell. Anyone knows that if you pass by a dumpster most people would try to inhale less but onthe other hand with the scent of a flower you would take deeper breathes. Arzi and her team used this to their advantage on their experiment and also the sense of hearing.
As people slept in thelaboratory the researchers got a pleasant smell, such as shampoo and an unpleasant smell such as rotten fish. As the nice smell crept into the sleepers noses they played a particular tone and when thethe bad smell crept into the sleepers noses they played another particular tone different from the first one. After just four exposures to the smell –tone pair during a single night the sleepersautomatically responded to the tones without the accompanying smells. So with the shampoo scent tone the sleepers would take deeper breaths and with the rotten fish scent tone they would take more shallowbreaths. This shows that indeed you can learn brand new things while you sleep.

Vocabulary words:
1. Colleagues: associate
2. Elicit: to draw or bring out of fort
3. Neuroscientist: thestudy of the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology of the nervous system.
I chose this article because I thought it was very interesting that you could sleep and still learn newthings. I do agree with what they are saying because when you sleep your smelling and your hearing senses still work and plus they have an experiment to prove it. For me it was very fun learning...