[jpletting]

At the end of my junior year in high school, my horrible, strict English teacher handed out a review for the final exam: 150 multiple choice questions on everything we'd studied. I procrastinated until it was too late, and the night before the exam, recorded every "example" question on the review and what I thought was the correct answer. I played this cassette in my auto-reversing Walkman overnight (in addition to having already "studied" the exam through the act of recording it) and woke up... a little late. I just missed the bell to my English class and was told I'd have to come back at the end of the day, which happened to be the last day of school--friends leaving, hugs, goodbyes, etc. So pissed was I by the end of the day that I flew through those 150 questions in half an hour. My hand had a mind of its own and ticked off Scantron dots before I could finish reading the questions. I have no doubt that subconsciously I was recognizing the correct answer out of the group from having pressed it into my brain the night prior.

Though in this instance it was pretty much a desperate CYA situation rather than a deliberate test, my experience with it causes me to lean toward an acceptance of sleep learning as a viable, reliable method of ingraining information into your subconscious. What I didn't get to experience is how to access that information in a conscious manner. Recognizing memorized multiple choice answers isn't the same as trying to learn philosophy or mathematics if one has never encountered the material before. I'd like to try it again sometime just to see what else I can do.