BILBAO, Spain (Reuters) – sleep contributes to fix in the
brain the knowledge acquired during the day and serves for
improve skills language, according to reveals a new
study.
These are the conclusions of the work of the Belgian researcher
Nicolas Dumay, the Centre of Basque on cognition, brain and
Language (BCBL for its acronym in English) of San Sebastián, in
Spain.
Dumay research was looking for entering in the
functions that develops the brain while sleep, one
question on which science has not even a response
complete.
Its experiments, according to the author, show that
during sleep the brain check words
learned during the day, and the sets in the linguistic memory.
The BCBL scientist used the word learning
new to prove his hypothesis on brain activity
during sleep, says a press release from the Basque Centre
international research.
According Dumay, who developed the experiment with vocabulary
in English, “the words fighting among them for access to the
“”
memory in our brain”, and this experiment demonstrates that
“only after sleeping words newly learned achieved the
“”
Word assimilated status”.
“Somehow, sleep makes real the words,” adds.
Dumay, published in the journal research
scientific Cognition, specializing in the study of the brain,
has been tested during the hours of sleep the brain check out the
words learned during the day, improves skills
language and sets the learned words.
In the experimental phase, developed at the University of
York, in United Kingdom, the researcher of the BCBL showed 36
new words to 32 people. One of those words was
“numesstac”, without any meaning in English, but in whose
composition is contained the word “mess”, very common, and it means
disaster or turmoil.
Five minutes after listening to words of this kind, the
participants remembered a 7 per cent of the new terms.
But 24 hours later, i.e. After sleeping, the rate of
memory of the words rose up 12 percent.
The most significant, according to the author of the experiment, was
that the people were much slower to recognize the
words that already knew as “mess,” which were buried in
the proposed terms.
According Dumay, this slowness in recognition of the
already known words is because during sleep the
the experiment participants assimilated the new terms
as “numesstac,” which stopped to be a new Word for
become a word assimilated, which made it difficult for the
recognition of the term “mess”.
On the basis of this conclusion and other previous studies on
the dream and the mind, Dumay ensures that the brain assimilates more
easily the words learned the night before
sleep, because during the day the brain has many others
stimuli that interfere with the learned words by the
morning.
In addition to this experiment, Dumay carried out several
related to learning, Linguistics research
and the brain. Some of his conclusions are being applied
to the development of new techniques in language teaching.