What if it was possible to quit smoking while sleeping?

January 03, 2023

I have just read a scientific article demonstrating that it was possible to learn certain conditionings during sleep, which gave me the idea that it would then be theoretically possible to "learn unconsciously" to quit smoking.

Before telling you more about this approach, I will briefly introduce you to this article published by Arzi and his collaborators (ref at the end of the article).

Who has never dreamed of learning while sleeping? Is it really an unattainable dream? Imagine being able to slip a book under your pillow and absorb all the information it contains? Imagine how many hours you could save if you could listen to your English or Spanish lessons while you sleep. So you could wake up and speak that language fluently?

In a previous article, I explained to you how sleep helps your brain consolidate and deepen the memories you form while awake. Unfortunately, studies indicated that it was impossible to register new information during sleep. At the time, scientists asked subjects to recall about 100 facts stated at 5-minute intervals throughout their night's sleep. Unsurprisingly, not a single subject had been able to recall any of the information that had been uttered that night.

Learning while sleeping is actually possible! While all this seemed scientifically impossible, researchers have recently shown that the fantasy of learning while sleeping could well become a reality. Indeed, the researchers show that it is really possible to act unconsciously on the recording of new information during sleep.

The success of the latest study lies in the simplicity of the protocol of the experiment. While the volunteer subjects were asleep, the researchers sprayed some pleasant (eg, smell of shampoo) and unpleasant (eg, smell of rotten fish) odors. The scientists then observed that the subjects exhibited deeper breaths when presented with pleasant rather than unpleasant odors. These experiments clearly show that the brain is able to distinguish odors during sleep in the same way as during wakefulness. The scientists then associated each type of odor with a sound signal. For example, pleasant odors were associated with high-pitched "beeps", while unpleasant odors were associated with low-pitched "beeps".

The next morning, the two sounds were presented again to the subjects without the smells. Researchers were excited to find that high-pitched sounds induced subjects to take deeper breaths similar to those associated with pleasant smells. Surprisingly, this answer seems to have been learned overnight!

In other words, the volunteer subjects learned this conditioning “lesson” while they slept. This conditioning seems to have been preserved after they woke up. Naturally, the volunteers did not recall that the scientists presented them with a combination of smells and sounds while they slept.

Thus, new information learned during sleep could unconsciously alter behavior during wakefulness.

It is clear that the learning used by the scientists was quite simple, and it is not obvious that we could register more complex information while sleeping.

Would it be possible to quit smoking while sleeping using this method?

It is hard to imagine that we could retain declarative information in a state of sleep. On the other hand, it is theoretically probable according to the study presented in this article that we can stop certain addictions such as tobacco for example.

Indeed, it would be possible to associate the smell of cigarettes during sleep with an unpleasant stimulus such as a sound or a combination of unpleasant sounds (music with a negative emotional connotation) or another unpleasant smell. This negative signal could be adapted to each smoker in order to specifically identify the signal that would evoke a true internal state.unpleasant ent likely to stop bad smoking behavior.

Thus, after several nights of learning, smokers could then unconsciously associate the smell of cigarettes with an unpleasant emotional sensation, leading them to put out their cigarettes and stop their consumption for a long time.

Now that we know that we can learn something while we sleep, it will be interesting to know where the limits of this ability are. What can or cannot we learn while we are asleep?

Reference: Arzi, A., Shedlesky, L., Ben-Shaul, M., Nasser, K., Oksenberg, A., Hairston, IS & Sobel, N. (2012). Humans can learn new information during sleep, Nature Neuroscience, 15 (10) 1465.

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