To sleep, perchance to succeed

“While you sleep!” has become an Internet marketing catchphrase. The idea plays on two classic, if contradictory, impulses: the desire to get ahead, and the compulsion to avoid the slightest expenditure of effort.

There are diet pills sold under names like Lose and Snooze and Sleep ‘n Slim, which contain collagen and which the makers say can help maximize the body’s metabolism. There are foot pads from Japan that look like tea bags and promise to drain toxins and restore energy while you sleep.

The products with perhaps the broadest potential market, and often the most extravagant promises, are designed for so-called sleep learning.

Professionals who think the boss has been a little slow with that promotion — and who have left their skepticism in their other briefcase — can try to kick-start their careers. Sold through sleeplearning.com, many of such programmes can be played through stereo pillow speakers available on the same Website for $29.95.

“The grow-yourself revolution started in the ‘50s,” said David Allen, a productivity consultant who wrote “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”. “ It is the one industry that has never faltered in the last 40 years. All they have done is give you more clever ways of getting it without having to give anything.”

Hypnosis is generally accepted as a legitimate technique to facilitate other forms of treatment, like cognitive behavior therapy. But unlike the hypnotized brain, which is receptive to spoken suggestions, the sleeping brain is not so suggestible, said Dr Michael J Sateia, the head of the sleep disorders programme at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH. “Generally, sleep is considered a state of being relatively ‘offline,’ as it were, with respect to extrasensory input.”

Sleep learning is a self-empowerment concept that dates back at least to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” published in 1932, but for most of the intervening years it could be found mainly on cassette programmes tucked away on self-help shelves in bookstores.

That all changed with the Internet.

This apparent renewed interest in learning while snoozing comes at a time of increased academic research into the topic. Last year, for example, researchers at the University of Lübeck in Germany found that gently stimulating the brain during sleep with an electrical current at a certain frequency improved the ability of test subjects to remember a string of words they had learned before a nap.

Still, Dr Jerome M Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, said most research he has seen indicates that subliminal sleep learning is of little or no value because “the sound had to actually wake you before you would benefit.” Dr Siegel recalled rigging a speaker system under his own pillow in junior high school in a failed effort to learn French. “Even when you’re sleepy, but not asleep,” he added, “you don’t learn very well.”

A study in 1992 by the British Psychological Society dismissed the concept of sleep learning, finding that it can “only occur if the sleeping person is partly awakened by the message.” But such findings did not kill off interest in the concept and its seductive, something-for-nothing allure.

For Candace Kinsella, a retired nurse in Florida, who wanted to reduce by a few sizes, diet pills were not enough, so she turned to a weight-loss sleep programme that is not subliminal, but consists of spoken messages like “eat more vegetables,” she said. Despite the potential distraction of someone talking while you’re trying to sleep, she said the programme helped her lose 50 pounds over one year.