11 ms·
A surprisingly potent technique can boost short and long-term recall
- KyleBrandt 9y agoA bit of sad irony with the interjected clickbait-like links: "... You really need to give your brain the chance for a complete recharge with no distractions. - The mystery of why you can’t remember being a baby - The man who can’t trust his own brain - A new way to master your emotions An excuse to do nothing may seem like a perfect mnemonic technique for the lazy student..."
- flatfilefan 9y agoThe content of the linked articles is no worse or better than the original one. So I would not call that a clickbait. Actually red the one about children memory with pleasure.
- Someone1234 9y agoAre the benefits of meditation really that new? For example this article from 2013[0]. Seems like this gets repeated every couple of years like clockwork. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/study-meditation-improves-memory-attention/275564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/study-med...
- rabidrat 9y agoEvery couple of years there's a whole new batch of people who've not heard it yet, or who've forgotten it and need to be reminded :)
- wahern 9y agoDon't forget the dangers of meditation: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...
- jimmytucson 9y agoThis. A lot of people get so caught up in the benefits of doing nothing they forget it’s dangerous to do too little. One technique that’s worked wonders for me is breaking up doing nothing with 15 minutes of doing something. That way I’m not doing nothing or something all of the time.
- ekianjo 9y agoIs taking a 15 minutes break to do nothing the same as meditation though?
- flatfilefan 9y agoThere’s a joke that meditation is better than just sitting around and doing nothing. But in this case I’m not sure anymore.
- jnordwick 9y agoIs meditation the same a active rest though? Guided meditation would certainly seem to be more closer to the group that was asked to think on an event, and that reduced their recall below the "do nothing" group. A non-guided meditation more focused on letting thoughts pass and quieting your inner dialog might affect memory formation differently.
- criddell 9y agoIs it well established that the benefits of mediation are more than just the placebo effect?
- dfabulich 9y agoJust as quiet contemplation can induce memory formation, playing Tetris after a traumatic event (like a car accident) seems to help prevent the formation of intrusive memories. https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201723 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201723 > Preventing intrusive memories after trauma via a brief intervention involving Tetris computer game play in the emergency department: a proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial
- taurath 9y agoDissociation is a very good way to avoid trauma - that’s how I got through grade school.
- wallace_f 9y agoI think it can be an extremely useful tool, but need be applied carefully. It can be therapeutic when dealing with unwanted emotions, but unfortunately sometimes those emotions need to run their course--they're designed as self-defense mechanisms to protect ourselves. Disassociation at the wrong time can enable more problems, sadly.
- taurath 9y agoOh sure, and especially when you continue to use it after the situation has passed. That’s the more difficult part, of course.
- colmvp 9y agoI don't think it's exactly the same process, but I recall Kumail Nanjiani (Screenwriter and star of The Big Sick) saying for the longest time he couldn't stand the sound of collecting coins in Mario games because it reminded him of the time he'd play Mario in the waiting room of a hospital while his then girlfriend (now wife) was in a coma.
- sjg007 9y agoThat’s Pavlovian I’m going to guess.
- camillomiller 9y agoAnother effortless way to improve memory and concentration: put your phone away
- jamesrcole 9y agophones can be pretty addictive, so "effortless" is not the word I'd use.
- camillomiller 9y agoTrue, but the action itself really is almost effortless: put the phone in another room, then go to your desk and start working. You’ll be surprised at how easier it becomes to get into “the zone”
- jamesrcole 9y agoYou're ignoring the part of it that's difficult. Like saying that not being addicted to a drug or poker machines is effortless because the action of not picking up the needle or not pulling the handle is almost effortless.
- linkmotif 9y agoI’ve noticed that if I don’t bring my phone to the toilet, I return to work with fresh thoughts and ideas, especially—queue this article—if I’ve just been zoning out instead of thinking (to the extent possible, I’m not so good at meditating).
- fineline 9y agoI feel (i.e. just my own subjective experience) it's not only the formation of memory that benefits from mental "down time" but also the gradual solution of abstract problems, such as the ones we come across in building complicated information systems. I'm not sure about this: >> we should aim for “minimal interference” during these breaks – deliberately avoiding any activity that could tamper with the delicate task of memory formation. So no running errands, checking your emails, or surfing the web on your smartphone. Whilst I agree that cluttering up the brain with other similar sorts of information (so stuff in emails or web) is counter-productive, I feel (again just my own experience) that undertaking a completely different sort of activity which exercises the brain in different ways (so for me things like a bike ride, chopping firewood, kicking a footy with the kids) can have great results. Getting back to the original task, I do often find progress has come out of "thin air".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- laser 9y agoIs it possible that people simply continue to think about what they were trying to learn, consciously or not, when given no tasks? Why is the control comparing people who tried to learn information and then took a break to people who tried to learn even more information? Would a more insightful control be to look at how people who took a break compared to people who continued studying the material during the break time? I would expect those who continued to study for more time would have better recall, but that would be incredible if untrue, ie. you could literally learn more by doing less. Taken to the extreme you seem to learn more by doing less at times. For example you'll learn more sleeping 8 hours each night for a week than staying up for a week straight, but I wonder if these short breaks allow for fatigue recovery and memory consolidation, like sleep, or if they simply provide opportunity to think more about material, which would obviously give an advantage as compared to the people in the studies "controls" that have to learn new information. Anecdotally, I definitely feel that meditation and breaks helps me consolidate my learnings and raise my overall productivity, but I'm not sure I find the particular scientific studies described here to be highly convincing of that.
- swsieber 9y agoOver studying is a real thing. The most common study techniques are the most ineffective, specifically rereading and cramming. Paridoxically, the close you are to forgetting something when you review it, the better the learning is. Specifically, the more effort it takes to recall it, the better you learn
- wahnfrieden 9y agoTo a degree: if you over-strain to recall, you’ll actually train your brain to struggle with that item. Better to limit the time you spend retrying to recall before giving up and looking up the answer.
- icebraining 9y agoIs there any empirical evidence for that? Not saying it's wrong, but it's unintuitive.
- nine_k 9y agoSo, doing nothing is not doing nothing; it's thinking and remembering.
- phinnaeus 9y agoThe title claims this is effortless but at a minimum I have to at least read this article. Misleading title.
- logicallee 9y agoI had the same reaction to the title, however the article is extremely convincing: in one case an 11-fold increase in recall. I will use this for the rest of my life. By the way I used the technique after reading the article. Likely this is why I recall the 11-fold figure. I even remember the numbers: 7% recall to 79% recall for the case I just quoted. This is far from normal for me. This is probably the most important article I read in the past year on HN.
- ramblerman 9y agothe 11 fold increase was for people with previous neurological damage. For healthy people it was 10-30%
- logicallee 9y agoYes I know, but didn't mention it as I wanted OP to read the article. Still a huge difference.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- satori99 9y agoDoing nothing at all was the way I approached high-school homework, and it worked well enough for me.
- Bumppy 9y agovery nice..http://www.bumppy.com/ http://www.bumppy.com/
- polskibus 9y agoYet, another argument against addictiveness of modern online services. I wonder how it will turn out in the end.
- sAbakumoff 9y agoI'm wondering is meditation is the best possible way to take a break after learning new things...
- sureaboutthis 9y agoWhen my son was in grade school, he had to learn the 13 colony names. He could only get about seven of them before stumbling. I told him to try memorizing them before he went to bed and he would do better in the morning. Needless to say, in the morning, he could rip off all 13 in a row without effort. I've found this method to work for me, too.
- bagacrap 9y agoThis worked for me in middle school when I had to memorize German-language poems while not knowing German. It was rather magical how I could go to sleep unable to regurgitate the words and have no problem the next morning. These days I don't have many opportunities to test my rote memory abilities, thankfully.
- lordnacho 9y agoWhat happens if you just go to sleep? Is stuff you learned right before bedtime easier to remember?
- leephillips 9y agoThe article mentions that "stuff you learned right before bedtime [is] easier to remember". Perhaps you should have read it just before bedtime.
- malloryerik 9y agoI wonder what happens if people meditate during the resting period.
- ferros 9y agoIsn’t this what people did this organically before the advent of smartphones? There would be gaps of time where you would just ‘think’. Now it feels like you don’t go a second without distraction. Any gap of seconds is automatically filled by picking up your smartphone.
- ivdivd0 9y agoThis and some other tricks are covered in the "Learning How to Learn" course on coursera (https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn).
- shahbaby 9y agoThe downtime from not having a smart phone allowed more time for me to contemplate my life and sow the seeds for better future decisions. Information and convenience is useful up to a certain point after which it can actually become a hindrance. There are billions spent on making you believe otherwise.
- YouAreGreat 9y ago> first documented in 1900 We should have put in 15 minutes of undisturbed rest after reading this in 1900. We didn't, and promptly forgot how not to forget.
- slaunchwise 9y agoI've found this technique also helps when trying to learn challenging (for me) things on the guitar. The act of learning to play something new means inducing muscle memory as well as simply memorizing the tune. I work on it in the evening to the point where I don't feel like I'm making progress any more. When I come back to it the next day, I find I've made progress.
- the_cat_kittles 9y agototally. i always think of it as "letting the glue dry"... you put the pieces together by practicing, apply glue by repeating it, and then let it set by sleeping.
- brokenmachine 9y agoI had the same experience when I played the guitar. Another thing is, a study was done where one group practiced the piano, the other group just sat in front of the piano imagining practicing, and another group did no practice. The group that just imagined practicing ended up playing almost as well as the group that was actually practicing, and both groups were obviously better than the group that did no practice. The mind is crazy.
- dmcswain 9y agoHere's a technology aid: a smartphone / smartwatch app that lets you add reminders by voice command with phrases like "remember to call your mother" or "remember that your locker combination is 98-7-65": http://bit.do/Treycent http://bit.do/Treycent
- zethraeus 9y agoThis 2012 paper seems to be the original research. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22829465 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22829465
- monktastic1 9y agoLot of comments about meditation here. The thing is, most forms of meditation are active -- for example, pay attention to your breath. Presumably at least some of the mind wandering that went on in this study was about the material, and most (though not all) forms of meditation would suppress that.
- fpgaminer 9y agoMy takeaway from my thus far limited experience practicing mindfulness meditation is that (at least that particular form of meditation) it is not about suppressing thoughts. It's not about actively quieting the mind. Rather, it's about becoming an observer of the thoughts in your mind, rather than the active participant you usually are. You view your thoughts as if they were just another sense from the external world. i.e. you become a passive observer. So, at least mindfulness meditation, is passive. And that's a rather popular form of meditation these days. It may have the same effects the article discusses, as a result. (NOTE: The focus on breath during mindfulness training is temporary, and is really just a technique to get you to A) relax and B) begin to focus on the present and sensations you don't normally observe).
- monktastic1 9y agoThis is true; genuine mindfulness does not suppress thoughts. Thank you for clarifying. In practice, most beginners (a phase that can last for years) find it much easier to use an attentional anchor like the breath. Even advanced practitioners can find great benefit in such a practice. As long as one understands these nuances, then yes, it is possible for "mindfulness" not to interrupt the natural learning process that can take place when we rest.
- malingo 9y agoI also like the mindfulness approach of Ellen Langer, who recommends active observation of surroundings, which has a side effect of quieting the mind and providing the same benefits (for me at least) of breathing-focused mindfulness meditation. Almost like a shortcut right to your point B. "Mindfulness, she tells the medical school audience, is the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on the new observations. Much of the time, she says, our behavior is mindless." https://harvardmagazine.com/2010/09/the-mindfulness-chronicles https://harvardmagazine.com/2010/09/the-mindfulness-chronicl...
- stevebmark 9y agoPlease skip the clickbait article, the entire thing is: "daydreaming boosts memory"
- alexland 9y agoSeems like there could be an interesting synergy here with the Pomodoro technique (though the 15/5 cycle would need to be modified since the studies appear to use 10 minute breaks).
- swsieber 9y agoFor anybody perusing the comments here for tips on how to better learn, consider reading "Make it stick". It's a research backed book about the most effective study methods. It starts off with the most research backed and simple techniques to the more complex and less well understood learning concepts. Here's the kicker: the two most common techiques, rereading and cramming, are the least effective. The underlying theme about what is effective: anything you can to do to make learning take more effort, while not hindering it, generally improves it. That includes spaced repetition, practicing recall in different settings, and even something as mundane as pre-modifying the text to replace random letters with underscores. Also, testing is very important to both to measurement of learning and the actual learning process itself. Don't forget a proper feedback loop either. Lastly, something I appreciated reading in the books was how as often as possible, there were studies done in classrooms to try to quantify how small technique and curriculum changes actually impact student learning.