Our brain needs to rest to perform better every day. But what if you could fool your brain by “telling” it that you slept very well and rested even though you did not? Well, your brain will work better . How has this conclusion been reached? Thanks to the experiment carried out by researchers at the University of Colorado and whose results have been published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition .
The conclusion is as simple as it is curious: if your brain believes that you have slept well, the brain will function optimally . So much so, that if we fool our brain with what they have called “the placebo effect of sleep”, even if we have spent a sleepless night, it will work like a charm.
How is it possible? The researchers used 164 volunteers as “guinea pigs” for the placebo effect experiment. All of them were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how soundly they had slept the night before, at the same time that they were told that thanks to a new technique they could measure the quality of their sleep using a series of sensors. After this explanation, which was part of the experiment but was not true, the participants were randomly divided into two groups.
The first group was told that their deep or REM sleep had been 28.7% of the total rest time. The second group was informed that their figure had been 16.2%, well below the average. After discussing these details, both groups were invited to a conference on how to get more sleep, arguing that sleeping more and better improved cognitive function. The researchers then conducted a series of tests that assessed auditory attention and processing speed – the skills that are most often used for lack of sleep.
Participants who were told they had slept worse answered the tests poorly, regardless of how they themselves thought they had slept the night before . The group that was told they had slept better performed the tests significantly better than expected .
This proved that sleep information was much more critical than sleep quality itself . This placebo effect of sleep shows that it is possible to “trick” the brain into improving its functioning, and that there is still much to explore about the placebo effect.
