The results don’t mean that after a nighttime Beethoven sonata, a piano novice will wake up with the ability to play it. But the results do suggest that an existing skill can be sharpened during a nap…
Just because a skill can be sharpened during sleep doesn’t necessarily mean that it should, says sleep researcher Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School. “I think your brain does a lot of triaging at night. Now, you’re trying to override that triaging and tell your brain what it should be worrying about.”
And overriding the brain is fraught with the problem of choosing what to listen to, Stickgold says. “I would argue that sleep might be smarter than you.”