Whenever I travel abroad, I like to arrive with a few phrases in the local tongue. Fluency is another matter. The son of a language teacher, I learned French as a boy. I picked up Spanish during a ramble through Mexico in my 20s. Since then, I’ve been busy. Despite a lifelong yearning for Italian, I reached middle age without getting much beyond per favore and grazie. Recently, an invitation to a conference near Milan made me eager to venture further. But my days were crammed with work deadlines and family obligations; there was no room for an evening course or a regimen of home-instruction through an online app. Maybe, I conjectured, I could master la bella lingua by listening to recordings in my sleep.
Almost a century ago, a fad for sleep-learning swept the industrialised world, ending only after neuroscientists determined it was physiologically impossible. Yet today, a growing body of research suggests they were wrong. Sleep-learning appears to be heading for a revival, on a far more solid scientific basis than its earlier incarnation. By subjecting sleep to a few engineering fixes, we could minimise the time our brains are offline each night, gaining precious hours for absorbing information. Over many nights, we could vastly expand our stock of knowledge and skills, or even treat stubborn addictions and psychological traumas. All of which raises an unsettling question: should the prospect be welcomed or dreaded? If we harness sleep for self-improvement, will we lose something essential about ourselves?
The idea that humans can learn during slumber dates back at least to biblical times, when God gave Jacob a glimpse of his destiny in a dream of angels climbing a ladder to heaven. But the first person to make money from the concept was Alois Benjamin Saliger, a Czech-born New York-based businessman and inventor – ‘tall, spare, thin-lipped’, according to a contemporary account, ‘with piercing eyes and a wide forehead’ – who in 1932 patented the Psycho-Phone. A phonograph fitted with a repeating mechanism and a tiny acoustic horn, the device was meant to sit by a sleeper’s bed and replay spoken-word recordings at the volume of a whisper. It was marketed with disks whose titles included Prosperity, Inspiration, Normal Weight, and Mating. ‘I desire an ideal mate,’ Saliger intoned on the latter record. ‘I radiate love. I have a fascinating and attractive personality. I have a strong sex appeal.’ If the machine functioned as advertised, the user would awaken filled with irresistible confidence, ready to stride off and conquer his chosen territory.
The Psycho-Phone operated on the premise that people are as suggestible while asleep as they are under hypnosis, an unproven theory picked up by Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel, Brave New World (1932). There, recorded messages are used to train sleeping children in the values of a soulless future society. A proud official in the book calls the new method, dubbed ‘hypnopaedia’ by Huxley, the ‘greatest moralising and socialising force of all time’.
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