Olfactory Conditioning Helps With The Possibility Of Sleep-Learning

Many individuals struggle with sleeping. Yet now, recent findings published in The Journal of Neuroscience reveal that sleep-learning could actually be a possibility, particularly via olfactory conditioning. In other words, researchers believe that it may be possible to induce or change certain behaviors while asleep. 

For the study, researchers at the New Weizmann Institute were able to actually provoke changes in smokers' behavior with the help of certain kinds of sleep conditioning.

They used rotten eggs and fish scents combined with cigarette scents that were exposed to sleeping participants asked to record how many cigarettes they smoked in the following week.

The study involved 66 participants who were looking to quit smoking. They were asked to fill out questionnaires regarding smoking habits, and later divided into groups with some being exposed to the foul smells of rotten eggs and cigarettes, combined. This happened repeatedly throughout the night in a special sleep lab.

As participants did not remember smelling the odors the next morning, they did report smoking less over the course of the next week. However, any participants who were exposed to the paired smells while awake did not experience the benefits.

"We have not yet invented a way to quit smoking as you sleep. That will require a different kind of study, altogether," concluded lead study author Dr. Anat Arzi in the group of Prof. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department, in a news release. "What we have shown is that conditioning can take place during sleep, and this conditioning can lead to real behavioral changes. Our sense of smell may be an entryway to our sleeping brain that may, in the future, help us to change addictive or harmful behavior."