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.