There was a time in the 60s when various people promised you could learn in your sleep. Just play a tape of a lesson as you slept, and voila! you would be ready to ace the test in the morning. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
But at the Sleep Grand Rounds at Stanford recently I did hear about a method of sleep learning that does work. Technically it is sleep remembering, rather than sleep learning, but it is just as valuable.
We already know that sleep is very important in consolidating memories. People who deprive themselves of sleep to study will not remember something as well as someone who has had a good night’s sleep. What this researcher also showed, at least in mice, was that if the mice were exposed to a scent (rose, in this case) while they learned a task, and then had the rose scent in their cages while they slept, they would remember what they learned far better than those mice that did not get the sleep scent. This was true not only for positive learning (a sequence of moves that produces a reward) but also for aversive learning (a tone followed by a slight shock). My assumption is that the scent put the brain in the same frame as it occupied while learning, so the things that were learned are at the head of the line to be solidified in long-term memory.
So put some perfume in front of you while you learn and then again while you sleep (but use that scent for nothing else), and it will help solidify your learning.