"Researchers have long known that sleeping plays an important role in the learning process. While we catch Z’s, our brains are busy organizing and consolidating the information and events we encountered that day. Important stuff gets filed away, while unimportant stuff gets deleted to make room for new learning. Yet scientists didn’t think it was possible to actually learn new things while we sleep. They thought our brains were too focused on the nightly housekeeping. But a new study from the Decoding Sleep Interfaculty Research Cooperation at the University of Bern, Switzerland, has shown that the brain’s channels for learning are also open during sleep."

"When you are awake you learn new things, but when you are asleep you refine them, making it easier to retrieve them and apply them correctly when you need them the most. This is important for how we learn but also for how we might help retain healthy brain functions."

"Listening to other languages while you sleep help reinforce learning, a team of Swiss psychologists has found."

"The idea of learning by osmosis might be some kind of childish dream, but it turns out that exposure to certain cues while we're asleep can actually reinforce memories and enhance recall when we wake up."

"In other words, if you're learning a foreign language, it may help to play recordings of the language while you sleep. If you need to memorize information presented in a classroom lecture, it might also help to record the lecture and play it quietly at night."

"This acquired behavior persisted throughout the night and into ensuing wake, without later awareness of the learning process. Thus, humans learned new information during sleep."

From grasping a new language to quitting smoking, studies have shown that a range of skills can be improved from the comfort of your bed.

"It turns out there actually are a few things you can learn - or at least improve your grasp of - while you snooze. Most of them depend on one thing: sound. Here are some of the skills you may be able to sharpen in your sleep."

I"n fact, slow-wave or deep sleep has been recognized for some time as critical for memory consolidation – the stabilization of memory from short-term to long-term." 

"The old saying that we can solve problems more effectively when we “sleep on it” may be especially true if the problem we’re trying to solve is learning a new language."

"Subliminal learning in your sleep is usually dismissed as pseudo-science at best and fraud at worst, but a team of Swiss psychologists say you can actually learn a foreign language in your sleep."

"For us, these results are further evidence that sleep promotes memory formation, with the brain spontaneously activating content that it had learnt beforehand."

"Prof Wen-Biao Gan, from New York University, told the BBC: "Finding out sleep promotes new connections between neurons is new, nobody knew this before."