Does Sleep Learning Work?
Sleep learning sounds great: a simple way to learn or enhance learning without any of the hard work normally involved. In fact it sounds too good to be true. Does it actually work?Effectiveness of Sleep Learning
There is some scientific evidence to suggest that sleep learning does have an accelerated learning effect, however much of this is outdated. The current scientific fashion seems to be to dismiss sleep learning.
Some people who have tried sleep learning, subliminal or otherwise, found no benefit. Others who have report excellent results.
Some of these differences could be due to the exact nature of the sleep learning material used - what works for one person won't necessarily work for another. Other factors probably also come into play such as the stages of sleep at which the tape is played. In addition, terms such as accelerated learning and super learning are difficult to define and judge outside of scientific experiments.
Speaking personally I haven't found sleep learning to work as a replacement for ordinary learning or behaviour modification techniques. However when used alongside other methods it certainly seems improve their effectiveness and accelerate other forms of study. It's arguable that this is simply a self-fulflling prophecy: if I care enough about something to go to the effort of sleep learning then my brain is more likely to remember it. The important thing for me is the result, not the mechanism.
As with all these things, what matters is whether or not it works for you. The only way you'll know that is to try it.