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✦ New Frontier Of Your Mind ✦
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Sleep is not a pause.
Your brain spends it sorting what to keep.
Labs have now found handles on that sorting.
One holds. Another has come loose… and a third is stranger than both.
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// Quick Check
First reaction?
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// Brain Hack
Learn It Late
Jessica Payne’s team put 207 students through word pairs, some at nine in the morning and some at nine at night.
The cleanest arm gave everyone a full night and a full day. Only the order changed.
Sleep soon after learning and recall held steady, at plus 0.7%.
Push that sleep fifteen hours out and it fell 6.5%.
The gain sat in unrelated pairs. Pairs that already made sense showed nothing.
| 01 |
Move the arbitrary material to the evening. Names, numbers, vocabulary. |
| 02 |
Leave what already makes sense to you for any hour of the day. |
| 03 |
Finish close to bedtime, then sleep a normal night. |
| 04 |
Never trade sleep hours for study hours. That was not what they tested. |
| 05 |
These were students of twenty. Nobody has run it at fifty. |
↗ Source: Payne, PLOS ONE, 2012
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// The Pivot
Sleep does the filing
Two of these want a lab and a wire. One wants an earlier evening.
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// ScentTag
Jan Born’s group had 18 people learn card positions with a rose smell in the room.
That night the smell came back during deep sleep.
They kept 97.2% of the pairs. Without it, 85.8%.
Take the smell away at learning and the trick dies. Seventeen more people showed nothing.
A later pool ran to 91 experiments and 2,004 people. The effect came out at 0.29, small but steady.
It works in the deep stages only. In dream sleep, and awake, nothing.
Correct that pool for the studies that never got published and it roughly halves, to 0.18. It still clears zero.
↗ Source: Rasch, Science, 2007
↗ Source: Hu, Psychological Bulletin, 2020
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// WaveKnock
Play a click on the rise of a slow brain wave, and the wave grows.
Back in 2013, eleven sleepers did that and recalled 22.2 words against 13.0.
The brainwave part replicates. Its memory part has not.
Twelve studies and 206 people pool to 0.14… and that interval crosses zero.
The predicted effect fell from 0.99 in 2013 to below zero by 2021.
Ngo, who ran the first one, is a co-author on one of the nulls.
One trial in 13 adults of 60 to 84 did find a gain. Recall improved 26.8% overnight on stimulation against 5.7% on sham. A later group of 16 older adults found nothing after a single night, and something only across three. Headbands sold for this do lift slow waves at home. No published trial shows they lift memory.
↗ Source: Ngo, Neuron, 2013
↗ Source: Harlow, Frontiers in Sleep, 2023
↗ Source: Papalambros, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2017
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// Your Pick
Which one would you want to try?
Pick one and hit send.
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// DreamLine
Four labs in four countries tried talking to people inside a dream.
Thirty six sleepers, 57 sessions, and 158 questions put to a dreaming brain.
Answers came back as eye movements and twitches of the face.
18.4% of them were right. On 60.1% of tries nothing came back at all.
And the right answers came from six people out of the thirty six.
Still, four labs found it separately. That is rare for something this odd.
↗ Source: Konkoly, Current Biology, 2021
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Most sleep advice stops at eight hours.
I spend more than $20,000 a year on private research… the sort hedge funds pay for. Walled off from the public.
Then I check whether the follow-ups held.
The click still lifts the wave. Its memory gain has fallen away across ten years of trying.
My own vocabulary deck runs at nine at night now. One man, and no electrode on my head.
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// Talk To Me
What do you put in front of sleep?
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Stay primal,
Dex
Primal Code
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