Validation

And what do the sleep-learning people claim? They find that, once the barriers are overcome, it takes but a few short hours to memorize a play, a whole book of notes or a foreign language. They also find that repetition is useful.

So learning in one's sleep carries with it the same contradictory qualities as conscious learning. Some things require frequent repetition and some are remembered almost immediately.

Fewer repetitions are necessary during the Transitional Sleep Period than during the Reverie Period. Sleep-learners can no more explain these phenomena than could psychologists since the days of Aristotle. They can only verify the findings.

Thus we find consistency—even if it is in contradiction.

The early thinkers who stressed the importance of perception through the senses were undoubtedly speaking of perception during working hours. Here, too, sleep-learning has a common point since it is through the sense of hearing that the subject learns during sleep.

The physiological methods and careful measurement of results, can be considered one of the forerunners of sleep-teachers. While the final answer has not been found, and the successful results can be explained only partly by science, it must be acknowledged that the sleep-learning investigators are attempting to interpret and apply the evidence they have gathered in the light of present scientific knowledge and discoveries.

The theories of association-learning do not appear to be applicable to sleep-learning. The advantage of understanding the material and thinking about it intelligently during waking hours is stressed, but no importance is given to the connections between ideas and facts.

On the other hand, the ideas of reflex and succession, of "stamping in," of the importance of motivation, of the conditioned response, of the positive effects of reward (real and anticipatory) and of recognition of individual differences all crop up in sleep-learning literature.

Trial-and-error learning seems to have no place in what we learn and absorb while asleep. Nor is there any concern with the theory that transference of successful responses makes further learning possible, except that once the barrier is broken, the capacity to sleep-learn expands.

From the reports of how sleep-learning is used in Russia, there can be no doubt that it owes much to discoveries of the conditioning school of adherents as an explanation of how we learn. Once again there is agreement with those who find that motivation and success affect the learning process and that reward strengthens it. There is also agreement that forgetting is inhibition of the response (or learning) by a competing response (or information).

The sleep-therapy approach appears consistent with the behaviorists in that both seem to feel that reinforcement of stimulus-response habits, if they are useful, will make for a happy adaptation to environment; and neither seems to require special consideration of feelings, emotion or consciousness except in terms of behavior.

It must be noted that responsible sleep-learning advocates recognize that problems exist where sleep-therapy alone is inadequate.