conditioning

Sleep Learning with Smell Could Reduce Addiction

Brain and Behavior jhalper | November 12, 2014

Get rid of your addictions while you sleep? Weizmann Institute researcher Dr. Anat Arzi is not promising this yet, but she and Prof. Noam Sobel have shown that changing bad habits through sleep conditioning could someday be possible. After just one session in the Neurobiology Department’s sleep lab, volunteers reported smoking on average 30% fewer cigarettes over the course of a week. Volunteers given the same conditioning while awake did not reduce their nicotine consumption. Arzi and Sobel had first demonstrated true sleep learning in 2012. This is the same conditioning that Pavlov…

While You Were Sleeping

Physical Sciences jhalper | August 26, 2012

“Imagine that you wake up in the morning feeling nothing special, yet you find yourself inexplicably behaving just a bit differently during the day. For example, you take a sniff every time you hear a tone,” says Prof. Noam Sobel. Of course, the people this actually happened to knew they had volunteered for a sleep experiment in Sobel’s lab. They knew that their sleep patterns had been closely monitored. But they had no recall, whatsoever, of the “lesson” they had learned while snoring peacefully. It was the sniffing that gave it away: While asleep, they had undergone conditioning to…