We can learn new information when we sleep

Let’s get this out of the way first: no, you cannot play an audiobook under your pillow and wake up as a genius. No, we’re not a step closer to Inception. That being said, there’s an interesting new study showing that people can learn new information when they sleep. Earlier work tells us that we can certainly strengthen existing memories when we slumber, but actually adding new information is different. And retaining that information when we wake up, even if we have no actual awareness of what we learned, is just plain cool. I wrote about the new study for The Scientist. Head on over.Image by Alessandro Zangrilli