Piano Video Lesson: Can you learn the piano while sleeping?

Hi, and welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. The question today, it sounds very thought-provoking. Can you learn the piano while you sleep? Now this might sound absurd, but there's actually scientific evidence that supports the idea that indeed, there is a possibility of learning music while you sleep.

I'm going to mention this study first. But really the most important thing I'm going to bring up after I tell you about researchers, who actually taught a group of people to play piano melodies, using a technique borrowed from the video game Guitar Hero. Afterward, all the volunteers got to nap. When they woke up, they were all asked to play the tune again. Unbeknownst to their sleeping participants, one group that played the same melody, they just learnt as they slept. The other group was not. The volunteers who had played the sound while they napped, even though they had no memory of it, played the melody far better than those who didn't hear it as they snoozed.

So indeed, you can absorb some information while sleeping. Now here's where I think, rather than to try to do some weird experiment where you're playing music while you're sleeping, in the hopes that when you wake up, you'll be able to play some Beethoven Sonata you had always wanted to play. I think we're a little bit far off from that. But this just shows the power of even while you're sleeping. There have been other studies, and this is where I think it's really important for you to embrace this idea. That what you think about just before going to bed, affects you. Now you probably are already somewhat aware of this phenomenon. Did you ever think of things before going to bed that were kind of scary? Watch a scary movie or something, and then you have nightmares? Obviously things you think about just before bedtime, tend to seep into your subconscious.

So, what does this mean? You can actually leverage your practice time by doing some practicing or at least refreshing the music you'd learned during the day, just before going to bed. That way it's kind of percolating up here and indeed it will get reinforced, just because, throughout the entire night, it's going to be replaying in your head one way or another.

I don't know about you, but I sometimes have music going on in my head. All night long, the same themes keep coming. Every time I wake up, I'll still be on that same page, that same place in the music. Indeed, your subconscious is affected by your consciousness just before bedtime, and even while you're sleeping. I'm not sure if there's any way of leveraging the time you're asleep by playing recordings while you're sleeping, as that study indicates, actually have some success. But certainly, a refreshing of your music that you played throughout the day, before bedtime, is going to help you, and reinforce things by cementing it in your subconscious.

I bet you didn't expect this, right? You saw the title. Maybe some of you just clicked on this because you thought it was the silliest thing you ever heard. But there is actually some scientific truth to this fact. This phenomena, I should say.

Try it out, see how it works for you. I know that I do this all the time and I end up thinking of music while I sleep. Sometimes I think of music, I actually come up with music in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, I'll go play it through a few times in my head and the next morning I still remember it. I'm always scared that I won't, but I'm just too lazy to get up and write it down, which I suppose I should do. At least you can cement things through your sleep, by just refreshing before bedtime. Try it out and see how it works for you.

Again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Lots of videos here that you're welcome to subscribe. Even more at Patreon. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/learn_while_asleep/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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