MODERN SLEEP-LEARNING: Page 107

became convinced by the message in the night that their fingernails tasted bitter, and gave up the habit, after being exposed to the message six times a night for fifty-four nights. In the same experiment a control group kept right on biting. In the original testing of Sherover's machine, Charles R. Elliot of the University of North Carolina used fifteen unrelated three letter words on his sleeping subjects: boy, egg, say, art, run, not, sir, leg, bag, row, ice, out, age, box and eat. He verified that his subjects were asleep by an electroencephalograph, which records brain waves. (Brain waves are different during sleep and wakeful-ness. ) The next day, this group, and a control group who had not heard the words in their sleep were asked to memorize the list of words. The first group learned the list 83% faster than the group which had not been exposed to the words in their sleep. Elliot said he thought sleep-teaching was similar to reteaching something the person has temporarily forgotten. Sherover reported that his students were learning languages 25% to 30% faster than students normally learn while awake. In 1948 Sherover prophesied that the device could be used to teach such necessary information as multiplication tables, chemical formulae, the Morse Code, logarithms, speeches, vocabularies and languages. He was indeed conservative in his forecasts. It was in 1949 that Ramon Vinay's feat in sleep-learning a complete opera in accentless Italian became celebrated in musical circles. A 1952 newspaper report (New York Times, July 6th)