Does sleep learning work?

Of course it doesn’t, or else I would know all the lyrics on Yes’s album, “Close to the Edge,” when I fall asleep halfway through. Plus the lyrics of “Pictures at an Exhibition” and “Meddle,” which follow it on my playlist.

QED, but where did anybody get the idea it did work? The first commercial attempt was Saliger’s Psycho-Phone in 1927, but because of limitations, both technical and conceptual, all it could manage was a two-minute pep talk every hour. Sleep learning became a darling of SF and sitcoms, and you can still get recordings that purport to teach you languages and such while you sleep, but as I noted above, as soon as I’m out my auditory circuits are switched off and nothing gets through.

Of course it doesn’t. Asked and answered in the OP.

Now, sure, a priori, it isn’t a stupid idea. We know the unconscious mind retains information that conscious mind discards. We know that unconscious perception is subtle. So it was a fine idea to give it a rigorous, scientific testing.

They did. It doesn’t work. Oh, well.

(Now, how about this silly idea of giving someone a weak infection, to protect them against a later, stronger infection? Crazy, huh? Except…)

Definitely works IME. I fell asleep during a Top Gear marathon and woke up as a racist. On the plus side, I now know the difference between understeer and oversteer.

Hope is stronger than logic.

Which races are most prone to understeer? And how does understeer correlate with haplogroups?

Stranger

Blacks are more likely find old Cadillacs appealing and Whites are more likely to lust after old Porsche 911s. Clearly, Blacks are prone to understeer and Whites to oversteer. :smiley:

Guy in my office building has a fancy, new 911. Once, before winter, I remarked how he’d be putting it away before it snowed.

“It has four-wheel drive,” he said.

I was confused and asked, “What fun is that?” A car that doesn’t go sideways because it feels like it? He probably learned that 4WD doesn’t help when your ground clearance is about three inches, because he mostly put it away until spring. RWD 911s won the Monte Carlo Rally, but they were jacked like monster trucks.

So, basically, the only people who think it works are the victims of hucksters? Seems like it to me.

Well I slept most of the time in school but I still learned a couple of things.