New Delhi, Dec 5 || Eight-hour sleep every night not only rejuvenates the body but also helps brain to store and learn a new language, according to a new study.
A team of international scientists, led by the University of South Australia and published in the Journal of Neuroscience, revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain significantly improves our ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules.
In an experiment with 35 native English-speaking adults, researchers tracked the brain activity of participants learning a miniature language called Mini Pinyin that is based on Mandarin but with similar grammatical rules to English.
Mini Pinyin contains 32 verbs and 25 nouns, including 10 human entities, 10 animals and five objects. Overall, the language contains 576 unique sentences.
Half of the participants learned Mini Pinyin in the morning and then returned in the evening to have their memory tested.
The other half learned Mini Pinyin in the evening and then slept in the laboratory overnight while their brain activity was recorded.