Learn While You Sleep

Long before Novelist AldousHuxley conceived of a Brave New World where schoolkids could learn their lessons through "hypnopaedia" (sleep-teaching), a less talented novelist wrote a book with a similar idea. It never broke into print: New York publishers thought it too badly written and too fantastic. In the novel, an ambitious man made himself ruler of the world by inventing a "cerebrograph" (mind-writer), which taught people while they slept. Author Max Sherover abandoned the novel, but not the idea.

Stubby, bubbly Sherover, 59, has made a fortune out of his ideas and his energy. He has edited a newspaper in Buffalo, built a hotel in Brooklyn, managed a trade magazine in Tokyo, designed a correspondence course ("How Do You Know You Can't Write?"), and run the Linguaphone Institute into a million-dollar business. He speaks eleven languages himself, none learned by Linguaphone. He looks so much like Actor Claude Rains that autograph hounds often pursue him until rebuffed in cold Japanese.

Pillow Mike. Sherover revived his interest in the cerebrograph when his eight-year-old son had to memorize Hood's The Song of the Shirt for school. After repeating it aloud patiently as his son fell asleep, Sherover was delighted next day to hear the boy babble the poem without a slip. Thus Sherover confirmed what many psychologists had long believed: a dozing person is often more receptive to suggestion than, a wide-awake one.

Last week, at the University of North Carolina, Psychologist Charles R. Elliott pronounced himself satisfied with two years of tests on Max Sherover's cerebrograph--a combination record-player, electric clock and pillow microphone. Elliott had selected 15 three-letter words (boy, egg, say, art, run, not, sir, leg, bag, row, ice, out, age, box, eat) and recorded them. Then he picked 40 students, all with perfect hearing, as his guinea pigs.

For three hours, each of the 40 snoozed in two sections of his laboratory (he could tell they were really asleep by means of an electroencephalograph, a brain machine with electrodes and straps reminiscent of electric chairs). Twenty students slept undisturbed; while the other 20 slept, records repeated the word list 30 times at intervals.

In the Recesses. When they awakened, all the guinea pigs listened to the list. Those who had heard it in their sleep learned it by heart in practically no time. Those who had never heard it took much longer. Elliott concluded that sleep-teaching is similar to reteaching something a person has temporarily forgotten.

Elliott and Sherover think the cerebrograph can be used to teach multiplication tables, chemical formulas, Morse code, logarithms, vocabularies. Eventually Sherover hopes to market his invention. "After all," says he, "a man spends one-third of his time asleep. This machine will add years to your life."

But that will be only the beginning. If Max Sherover has his way, no U.S. household will be complete without his latest invention: the "Readie" (pronounced reedy). This is a gadget to let people read without turning a page. Books will be printed on long tapes, run through a machine. The strips will be adjustable to the reader's normal eye-speed. Maybe even Readies will be too much trouble for lazy readers. If so, Sherover would have a voice ("Why not Lowell Thomas?") fill the room, reading aloud.

How far will this Brave New World be carried? Not much farther, says Sherover. "After all," he admits, "there's a limit even to me."

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