Listening to sounds while you're asleep could improve your memory.

    Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois taught 12 study participants to associate each of 50 images with a random location on a computer screen.

    Forty-five minutes after a "learning session", the participants were asked to lie down in a quiet, darkened room to sleep. Electrodes attached to their scalp measured their brain activity. Sounds corresponding to some of the images that participants had seen earlier were then played to some of the vounteers but without waking them.

    The team found that the group to which the sounds had been played then had a higher accuracy in dragging objects on screen to the position they had originally seen them than those participants who had not been played anything.

    "The research strongly suggests that we don't shut down our minds during deep sleep," said John Rudoy, lead author of the study and a neuroscience PhD student at Northwestern. "Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories."

    The team goes on to argue that sounds could be chosen to help sleepers ruminate over certain information. "While asleep, people might process anything that happened during the day – what they ate for breakfast, television shows they watched, anything," said Ken Paller, senior author of the study and professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. "But we decided which memories our volunteers would activate, guiding them to rehearse some of the locations they had learned an hour earlier."

    在你睡著的時候聽聲響可能增進你的記憶。

    伊利諾斯州西北大學的研究者們教導參加研究的 12 個人，把 50 張圖像的每一張與電腦屏幕上的一個隨機位置聯系起來。

    在"學習期"之后的 45 分鐘，要求參加者們躺到一個安靜、黑暗的房間里睡覺。用裝在他們頭皮上的電極測量他們大腦的活動。然后向一些自愿者播放與參加者先前見到的一些圖像相應的聲響片段，而不叫醒他們。

    該研究小組發現，播放過聲響的這一伙人比那些沒有播放任何東西的參加者，在將屏幕上的對象拖動到他們原來見到它們的位置上時，具有更高的準確性。

    "這項研究強烈啟示，我們沒有在深睡時關閉自己的心靈，"這份研究報告的主要作者并且為西北大學神經系統科學博士學位學生的 John Rudoy 說。"恰恰相反，這是鞏固記憶的重要時刻。"

    這個研究小組繼續主張說，可以選擇聲響來幫助沉睡者反復思考某些信息。"在睡覺時，人們會處理白天發生的任何事情--早餐他們吃的是什么，他們看過什么電視節目，等等任何事情，"這項研究報告的資深作者，西北大學溫伯格藝術與科學學院的心理學教授 Ken Paller 說。"但是我們一個小時前引領他們預演他們學習的一些地方，決定了我們的志愿者將活化哪些回憶。"