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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 ba

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.

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.