Quit Smoking in Your Sleep

Many decades of research have shown
that people cannot learn new
information during sleep and then
retrieve it once awake. Yet a growing
body of work finds that unconscious
associations made during sleep can
affect waking behaviors. One new study
found that pairing the smell of cigarettes
with unpleasant odors made people
smoke less during the following week.
Neurobiologist Anat Arzi and her
colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of
Science in Rehovot, Israel, recruited 66
smokers who wanted to quit and asked
them to keep a smoking journal for a
week before and a week after spending
one night in the laboratory. Some
subjects spent the night hooked up to
devices that measured breathing and
brain activity while they received puffs
of the smell of smoked cigarettes
followed by puffs of the odor of rotten
eggs or decaying fish through a face
mask. Other subjects underwent the same
odor training during the day while
awake. Smokers who got the putrid
smells during the restful second stage of
sleep cut their smoking by more than 30
percent during the following week. In
contrast, subjects who received the odor
treatment during rapid eye movement
(REM) sleep, an aroused brain state that
gives rise to dreams, had a much smaller
reduction in smoking, around 12
percent. Smokers trained while awake
did not change their smoking behavior.
Arzi presented the work last November
at the annual meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience in Washington, D.C. She
says that the preliminary study was
aimed at determining what the sleeping
brain is capable of but that the findings
might one day be developed into
treatments for smoking or other
addictive behaviors.