Could auditory cues during slow-wave sleep help one to quit smoking or alter other undesired behaviors?
Social biases based on gender and race were “unlearned,” according to researchers who used auditory cues to implement counterbias training in sleeping subjects, based on the results of a study by Xiaoqing Hu, Ph.D., of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and his associates.
The researchers studied 40 white university students found to hold implicit bias against women or black people. The study subjects were engaged in a training program that used image and word associations, combined with an auditory cue, to challenge their biases.
The auditory cue was then later used when the subject reached slow-wave sleep during a nap, with the results suggesting that intervention resulted in a significant and sustained reduction in implicit bias.
“Given that training to reduce implicit bias can be conceptualized as a type of habit learning, perhaps novel sleep manipulations could be adapted to aid people in changing various unwanted or maladaptive habits, such as smoking, unhealthy eating, catastrophizing, or selfishness,” wrote Dr. Hu and his coauthors (Science 2015;348:1013-15.
The study was supported by Northwestern University, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. One author declared serving as an advisor to a company developing educational technologies relating to sleep.