5 ms·

Is 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

by laser 9y ago

Is 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 ago
Over 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 ago
  To 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 ago
    Is there any empirical evidence for that? Not saying it's wrong, but it's unintuitive.
    - Smaug123 9y ago
      I'm interested to know why you think it's unintuitive. Certainly it matches my personal experience very well. For example, I have certain Anki cards which I see and immediately think "oh God, not this card again, this one's really difficult" whether or not I actually know the answer to it.
      - montyf 9y ago
        That gives me an idea for a personal experiment. Have a session or two where your default attitude to every card is "this is really easy" and try not to think of any card as difficult in any way. Compare your recall percentage for the session compared to previous ones (Anki's statistics are great for this). I'll try this experiment myself.
      - mitchty 9y ago
        I think its unintuitive because I have flashcards that I now have memorized pat that took me ages to recall easily. Of course I don't think of them as bad, only "If its hard to remember, it'll be hard to forget". Aka, the ones that I have a hard time learning are the ones I always remember. I'll probably never forget the german word for security guard, die Sicherheitsbedienstete but it took me ages to memorize it. For some odd reason that is my intuition, which appears to be not that of everyone. But my approach to learning is "failure is a good thing, its how you learn", which might be all the difference amounts to in the end.
        HedgeSparrow 9y ago
        That's a good approach. I suspect, for others (and in my experience) when one consistently comes to The Difficult Card, they might have spent more time remembering that it was hard to remember than remembering the answer. Or, they agonize over the answer for too long, then when they flip it over, they think "Of course!" but move along almost immediately. And I think you're right also; when you finally get it, it's hard to forget.
brandall10 9y ago
My thought is too much focus on a thing can cause blockages in the deeper processing of that thing. I'm sure many engineers are familiar with the concept of banging their head against the keyboard all day on what's a seemingly simple issue/bug, only to find the solution miraculously appear hours later in their heads out of thin air - maybe over dinner talking to a friend, maybe awaking in the middle of the night, maybe in the shower the next morning. The point is it all happened a good chunk of time away from the glow of the screen with their debugger at hand. It's a combination of having space to process subconsciously which is often spurred on by a context switch. I imagine a similar thing happens with learning, perhaps even the act of trying to recall something that happened in the past itself causes a deeper processing/association in your brain. All of a sudden you're not relying so much on rote memory but deeper, somewhat disparate contextual cues to aid in the recall.
- zaphirplane 9y ago
  Being creative (debugging loosely falls in that category) and learning has to be different. When creating or inventing you can fall well and truly inside the box, taking a break helps you think outside the box, learning sounds like the more in the box/zone the more you get it. TLDR; sometimes you want a new perspective, sometime re-energise, taking a break is an easy way to get both. You
  - brandall10 9y ago
    But that's the thing - I believe deep learning is actually a creative process. The new information needs to fit in your existing model of what you already know/believe, and doing so is a creative endeavor. The more you move away from that the more you end up with rote memorization. That's why people respond better to different teaching styles, different angles of explanation, top-down vs. bottom-up, etc - because they better align with how their creative mind works.
maruhan2 9y ago
I agree. It's no brainer that repetition helps retention. If you gave your mind a time to think about what you learned, obviously you would retain it more.
yeukhon 9y ago
I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associations with the new information (coming from my auditory sensory registers), so I context-switch involuntarily every second. Think of process preemption. Roughly like this: t0: hear the word "dog"; my auditory registers record it t1: my brain processes the word "dog"; I imagine what "dog" looks like hear the word "cat" concurrently, goes into registers t2: my brain processes the word "cat" I imagine what "cat" looks like hear the word "lamb" concurrently, goes into registers This works all thanks to the fact our auditory sensory registers can withhold information longer than visual's (and the reason why we tend to forget what we see). > 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. The second point I want to make is eyewitness testimony and memory biases. Given enough time, a witness can tell untruth. There is a limit to how long we can keep the "truth" in our brain. Long-term memory is not a perfect storage system. Without rote rehearsal, our memories will decay. During our sleep, some believe (at least this is how I was taught in my class) that the brain will do "garbage collection", basically removing things the brain don't think is important. Onto the third and the last point. Our brain can develop by forming new neurons (or undevelop skills by killing neurons). When a person becomes deaf after an accident, then his/her speech ability will lose over time. Thanks to our neuroplasticity, we can reverse the change by learning again, though we may not recover 100%. This is happening to me: some of my cognitive functions have stopped functioning well after an accident last summer, I have been trying hard to recover, even though there are some improvements, I don't know how much can recover. In general, I am impaired and disabled. I just started my neuroscience studies, so I recommend reading on dendrite spines. They are "cute" and play vital role involving memory. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM * https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm012114.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm0121... * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X15000859 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X1...
arkades 9y ago
> In each case, the researchers simply asked the participants to sit in a dim, quiet room, without their mobile phones or similar distractions. “We don’t give them any specific instructions with regards to what they should or shouldn’t do while resting,” Dewar says. “But questionnaires completed at the end of our experiments suggest that most people simply let their minds wander.”

by laser 9y ago

swsieber 9y ago

Over 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 ago
To 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 ago
  Is there any empirical evidence for that? Not saying it's wrong, but it's unintuitive.
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    I'm interested to know why you think it's unintuitive. Certainly it matches my personal experience very well. For example, I have certain Anki cards which I see and immediately think "oh God, not this card again, this one's really difficult" whether or not I actually know the answer to it.
    - montyf 9y ago
      That gives me an idea for a personal experiment. Have a session or two where your default attitude to every card is "this is really easy" and try not to think of any card as difficult in any way. Compare your recall percentage for the session compared to previous ones (Anki's statistics are great for this). I'll try this experiment myself.
    - mitchty 9y ago
      I think its unintuitive because I have flashcards that I now have memorized pat that took me ages to recall easily. Of course I don't think of them as bad, only "If its hard to remember, it'll be hard to forget". Aka, the ones that I have a hard time learning are the ones I always remember. I'll probably never forget the german word for security guard, die Sicherheitsbedienstete but it took me ages to memorize it. For some odd reason that is my intuition, which appears to be not that of everyone. But my approach to learning is "failure is a good thing, its how you learn", which might be all the difference amounts to in the end.
      - HedgeSparrow 9y ago
        That's a good approach. I suspect, for others (and in my experience) when one consistently comes to The Difficult Card, they might have spent more time remembering that it was hard to remember than remembering the answer. Or, they agonize over the answer for too long, then when they flip it over, they think "Of course!" but move along almost immediately. And I think you're right also; when you finally get it, it's hard to forget.

brandall10 9y ago

My thought is too much focus on a thing can cause blockages in the deeper processing of that thing. I'm sure many engineers are familiar with the concept of banging their head against the keyboard all day on what's a seemingly simple issue/bug, only to find the solution miraculously appear hours later in their heads out of thin air - maybe over dinner talking to a friend, maybe awaking in the middle of the night, maybe in the shower the next morning. The point is it all happened a good chunk of time away from the glow of the screen with their debugger at hand. It's a combination of having space to process subconsciously which is often spurred on by a context switch. I imagine a similar thing happens with learning, perhaps even the act of trying to recall something that happened in the past itself causes a deeper processing/association in your brain. All of a sudden you're not relying so much on rote memory but deeper, somewhat disparate contextual cues to aid in the recall.

zaphirplane 9y ago
Being creative (debugging loosely falls in that category) and learning has to be different. When creating or inventing you can fall well and truly inside the box, taking a break helps you think outside the box, learning sounds like the more in the box/zone the more you get it. TLDR; sometimes you want a new perspective, sometime re-energise, taking a break is an easy way to get both. You
- brandall10 9y ago
  But that's the thing - I believe deep learning is actually a creative process. The new information needs to fit in your existing model of what you already know/believe, and doing so is a creative endeavor. The more you move away from that the more you end up with rote memorization. That's why people respond better to different teaching styles, different angles of explanation, top-down vs. bottom-up, etc - because they better align with how their creative mind works.

maruhan2 9y ago

I agree. It's no brainer that repetition helps retention. If you gave your mind a time to think about what you learned, obviously you would retain it more.

yeukhon 9y ago

I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associations with the new information (coming from my auditory sensory registers), so I context-switch involuntarily every second. Think of process preemption. Roughly like this: t0: hear the word "dog"; my auditory registers record it t1: my brain processes the word "dog"; I imagine what "dog" looks like hear the word "cat" concurrently, goes into registers t2: my brain processes the word "cat" I imagine what "cat" looks like hear the word "lamb" concurrently, goes into registers This works all thanks to the fact our auditory sensory registers can withhold information longer than visual's (and the reason why we tend to forget what we see). > 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. The second point I want to make is eyewitness testimony and memory biases. Given enough time, a witness can tell untruth. There is a limit to how long we can keep the "truth" in our brain. Long-term memory is not a perfect storage system. Without rote rehearsal, our memories will decay. During our sleep, some believe (at least this is how I was taught in my class) that the brain will do "garbage collection", basically removing things the brain don't think is important. Onto the third and the last point. Our brain can develop by forming new neurons (or undevelop skills by killing neurons). When a person becomes deaf after an accident, then his/her speech ability will lose over time. Thanks to our neuroplasticity, we can reverse the change by learning again, though we may not recover 100%. This is happening to me: some of my cognitive functions have stopped functioning well after an accident last summer, I have been trying hard to recover, even though there are some improvements, I don't know how much can recover. In general, I am impaired and disabled. I just started my neuroscience studies, so I recommend reading on dendrite spines. They are "cute" and play vital role involving memory. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM * https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm012114.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm0121... * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X15000859 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X1...

arkades 9y ago

> In each case, the researchers simply asked the participants to sit in a dim, quiet room, without their mobile phones or similar distractions. “We don’t give them any specific instructions with regards to what they should or shouldn’t do while resting,” Dewar says. “But questionnaires completed at the end of our experiments suggest that most people simply let their minds wander.”