Hypnopedics

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This article describes hypnopedics in terms of methods of learning while you sleep. According to another understanding of the term, hypnopedics is a term for teaching methods that want to convey teaching material with the help of hypnosis or in a hypnosis-like state. The latter can be done by a hypnotist or by means of a sound carrier .

Hypnopedics refers to methods of learning while you sleep.

Human wish

The idea of ​​acquiring knowledge without exertion in sleep is an old human wish. According to reports, private tutors in ancient Greece practiced the method of whispering to their students texts in their sleep that they had trouble memorizing during the day. Imprinting was more intense while sleeping than while awake.

In the USA for the first time in 1923 a message appeared that a naval school in Florida had learned Morse code in the sleep.

Can be learned in sleep

Good memory is generally dependent on three factors: the degree of attention, the material to be learned (it must be significant for the learner so that it can evoke a well-developed emotional excitability) and the transfer of the learning information from short-term to long-term memory .

According to studies, hypnopedics has so far been able to help memorize texts, vocabulary, schemes or tables better and to support the entire learning process. According to the current state of research, however, it is not possible to learn logical connections with hypnopedics.

Example of a test arrangement in the sleep research center

Students who were in good mental and physical health and who did not suffer from sleep disorders were admitted to the experiment .

EEG alpha waves, relaxed waking state

EEG theta waves, increased in light sleep phases with a reaction only to important or strong environmental stimuli

Before going to bed, the text to be learned should be read aloud. The learner was then asked to relax and, while falling asleep, was presented with a sound recording of the learning material, which was spoken more and more softly towards the end. Before waking up in the morning, the sound carrier was played again, after waking up the learner read the text aloud again and during the day the knowledge was checked.

These courses ran for two to three weeks, depending on the amount of information. The best results were measured when the imprinting with the help of hypnopedics took place in a state in which an alpha rhythm of an EEG recording was present, which corresponds to a relaxed waking state. Even in the asleep stage, memorizing was still possible if the EEG shows the flat theta rhythm . (This corresponds to NONREM stage 1). Thus, hypnopedics is a learning method that as such should be taken seriously.

Dystopia

The practice of hypnopedics, however, is controversial by scientists and can be found in the futuristic end-time novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley , where hypnopedics is used to train and influence people.

See also

• Lucid Dream Application

Videos

• Manfred Spitzer : Learning in Sleep ( Memento from March 31, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) . RealVideo from the BR-alpha series "Mind and Brain" (approx. 15 minutes)