Your brain can form new memories while you are asleep, neuroscientists show (WaPo)
By Ben Guarino August 8
A sleeping brain can form fresh memories, according to a team of neuroscientists. The researchers played complex sounds to people while they were sleeping, and afterward the sleepers could recognize those sounds when they were awake.
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But the idea that we can learn while unconscious holds more merit than gizmos named Psycho-phone suggest. In the new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, neuroscientists demonstrated that it is possible to teach acoustic lessons to sleeping people.
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Yet success is possible, if you're not trying to learn dictionary definitions or kung fu. In recent years, scientists have trained sleepers to make subconscious associations. In a 2014 study, Israeli neuroscientists had 66 people smell cigarette smoke coupled with foul odors while they were asleep. The test subjects avoided smoking for two weeks after the experiment.
In the new research, Andrillon and his colleagues moved beyond association into pattern learning. While a group of 20 subjects was sleeping, the neuroscientists played clips of white noise. Most of the audio was “purely random,” Andrillon said. “There is no predictability.” But there were patterns occasionally embedded within the complex noise: sequences of a single clip of white noise, 200 milliseconds long, repeated five times.
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The subjects remembered the patterns. The lack of meaning worked in their favor; sleepers can neither focus on what they're hearing nor make explicit connections, the scientist said. This is why nocturnal language tapes don't quite work — the brain needs to register sound and semantics. But memorizing acoustic patterns like white noise happens automatically. “The sleeping brain is including a lot of information that is happening outside,” Andrillon said, “and processing it to quite an impressive degree of complexity.”
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more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/08/your-brain-can-form-new-memories-while-you-are-asleep-neuroscientists-show/?utm_term=.bcc95472aad9
So you can't teach languages this way ... but what about music ? 
