Get rid of your addictions while you sleep? Weizmann Institute researcher Dr. Anat Arzi is not promising this yet, but she and have shown that changing bad habits through . 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 in 2012. This is the same conditioning that Pavlov discovered when he trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell: Teach the mind to subconsciously associate one sensation with another. Their twist was to use smell instead of the bell: We can register and even react to odors while we sleep without waking up. So when the volunteers were exposed throughout the night to the smell of cigarette smoke together with that of rotten fish, they did not remember it in the morning. And yet their need for a “ciggie” was not as strong as it had been.
The second trick was to monitor the sleepers’ brain waves and administer the smells at the right stage of sleep. The group’s previous research had suggested that the associations are formed and cemented in the brain during non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep – the stage in which researchers believe that memories from the previous day are being consolidated. The new study supported this finding quite strongly.
Arzi assiduously points out that the research has proven a point about the workings of the sleeping brain. She will be pleased, of course, if clinical researchers adopt the method and improve on it. She, herself, intends to use this window on the brain’s activity to keep investigating the mysterious phenomena of sleep and learning, and the apparently unique place of smell among our senses.