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."

在你睡着的时候听声响可能增进你的记忆。

伊利诺斯州西北大学的研究者们教导参加研究的 12 个人，把 50 张图像的每一张与电脑屏幕上的一个随机位置联系起来。

在"学习期"之后的 45 分钟，要求参加者们躺到一个安静、黑暗的房间里睡觉。用装在他们头皮上的电极测量他们大脑的活动。然后向一些自愿者播放与参加者先前见到的一些图像相应的声响片段，而不叫醒他们。

该研究小组发现，播放过声响的这一伙人比那些没有播放任何东西的参加者，在将屏幕上的对象拖动到他们原来见到它们的位置上时，具有更高的准确性。

"这项研究强烈启示，我们没有在深睡时关闭自己的心灵，"这份研究报告的主要作者并且为西北大学神经系统科学博士学位学生的 John Rudoy 说。"恰恰相反，这是巩固记忆的重要时刻。"

这个研究小组继续主张说，可以选择声响来帮助沉睡者反复思考某些信息。"在睡觉时，人们会处理白天发生的任何事情--早餐他们吃的是什么，他们看过什么电视节目，等等任何事情，"这项研究报告的资深作者，西北大学温伯格艺术与科学学院的心理学教授 Ken Paller 说。"但是我们一个小时前引领他们预演他们学习的一些地方，决定了我们的志愿者将活化哪些回忆。"