http://www.cbsnews.com/news/can-gender-and-racial-biases-be-unlearned-during-sleep/ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6238/1013.abstract
Although people may endorse egalitarianism and tolerance, social biases can remain operative and drive harmful actions in an unconscious manner. Here, we investigated training to reduce implicit racial and gender bias. Forty participants processed counterstereotype information paired with one sound for each type of bias. Biases were reduced immediately after training. During subsequent slow-wave sleep, one sound was unobtrusively presented to each participant, repeatedly, to reactivate one type of training. Corresponding bias reductions were fortified in comparison with the social bias not externally reactivated during sleep. This advantage remained 1 week later, the magnitude of which was associated with time in slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep after training. We conclude that memory reactivation during sleep enhances counterstereotype training and that maintaining a bias reduction is sleep-dependent.
In an accompanying editorial, two other psychologists, Gordon Feld and Jan Born, caution that this type of research needs to be guided with much ethical consideration. “Sleep is a state in which the individual is without willful consciousness and therefore vulnerable to suggestion,” they write.
Beyond that, they say that the study’s findings “highlight the breadth of possible applications to permanently modify any unwanted behavior by targeted memory reactivation during sleep.”
it would be amazing if this had broader applications, like to reverse phobias.
Imagine the marketing & propaganda potential! Your bedside iphone clandestinely broadcasting in the middle of the night: “you want to buy your wife a fur coat… you want to buy your wife a fur coat…”
This kind of work has so many problems but I’ll refrain from that and offer only this:
Chandler gets a sleep tape to stop smoking and starts acting more feminine. Joey hears the tape and realizes it’s repeating, “You are a strong, confident woman.”
The flip side is that you can learn biases as well as “un-learn” them. It’s classic brain-washing which also can occur with sleep deprivation.