21 ms·

Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

596 points by occamschainsaw 8y ago

arkades 8y ago
The “rest periods” were ten seconds long. This doesn’t generalize into anything meaningful; when was the last time you focused on a new skill so intensely that you didn’t have ten second pauses?
- JesseAldridge 8y ago
  Yes but the work periods were also ten seconds. So the suggestion seems to be that we should spend 50% of our time resting, with many very small rest periods interspersed between many very small work periods.
  - zitterbewegung 8y ago
    So, if i'm teaching myself to do unit testing I should take a 10 second break by checking HN and then go back to the task?
    - projektir 8y ago
      I'm curious what is considered a break. Is HN fluffy enough? says projektir, checking HN as a break from typing practice says projektir, typing as a break from typing practice
    - vturner 8y ago
      Not sure reading HN is "restful" ;)
    - hanniabu 8y ago
      Probably better to do a walk around the room and reflect.
      - beaker52 8y ago
        This. I think what you do in that break really matters. If it's taking a sip of coffee, browsing HN or answering a question then it's not going to help. I have learnt to race cars over the past 5 years. I can lap and lap and lap, but the greatest improvement comes from the breaks between sessions, which can be minutes, hours, days or weeks. I stumbled upon the most effective strategy the other week when training in my simulator: I was doing a small number of laps, say between 7 and 10 then returning to the pits. I'd reflect on how the "stint" felt for a couple of minutes and then have a look at the telemetry, comparing laps and correlating my memory of the on-track experience with the sensor outputs that I could see in the telemetry. After doing this for 20 minutes, decide on some small setup tweaks and jump back in for another 7-10 lap stint, rinse and repeat. I spent maybe 3 hours doing it and drove maybe 50 laps during that time (I could have done over twice that number if I hadn't taken my approach), but the improvement I got from it by the end was far and above anything I've tried before. I can also relate it to another time in a real car where I was learning a new track and car in a short 20 minute session. I had done ~15 minutes on track and the session was stopped. I got back to the pits and sat in the car. I asked my engineer about the time I'd done in relation to other drivers and just sat there in the car thinking through my laps and where I could be "better". I went back out on track for the final 5 minutes and made a huge improvement, finishing top. It wouldn't have happened without that brief period of reflection. TL;DR Do what you're doing for the shortest meaningful period of time. Stop and reflect on what you've been doing and what you could do differently/try/better. Let your mind relax whilst you're doing this - it shouldn't be an intense process. The go back in and put your reflection into action. It's important that you try to make adjustments to your performance, even if they fail. If you just do the same thing over and over again, you're missing the opportunity to diverge from your current behaviour, which is probably suboptimal given your experience.
        Expez 8y ago
        What you're describing here is really what Ericsson refers to when he talks about 'deliberate practice' (from the 10 000 hours meme). You correctly recognized that instead of doing more laps some of your time was better spent on deep analysis. If we stick with the racing analogy I think what the article talks about is that you would've seen solid gains if you had tried to run a single lap perfectly, stopped, stayed in your car, and just relaxed while your subconscious got some time to process everything that just happened, without your bombarding it with new information. If you were to follow the instructions to the letter you'd hang out for a time equivalent to your lap time, but they left it as an open question if this mechanic scales beyond the 10s repetitions used in the study. I hope they do more of the studies because the required time of rest could plausibly scale in different ways: 1. Your subconscious can only remember so much stuff to replay and learn from while resting so a break beyond X isn't beneficial. 2. The rest time needed is linear with the stimulus. 3. Long action sequences are such a rich source that the subconscious can mine them for a long time. Beneficial rest time scales exponentially.
    - JesseAldridge 8y ago
      I imagine 10 seconds of quiet reflection would work better.
- fersc 8y ago
  Everything else considered, the closing remarks of the the press release would be useful to keep in mind if you wanted to develop this technique further > “Our results suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of rest intervals when implementing rehabilitative treatments in stroke patients or when learning to play the piano in normal volunteers,” said Dr. Cohen. “Whether these results apply to other forms of learning and memory formation remains an open question.”
- rexpop 8y ago
  Basically every time I practice my horn. 10 seconds is a long time when I'm trying to crank through an exercise book. The thought of holding off, even closing my eyes for 10 seconds, is pretty alien to my practice style.
  - aiisjustanif 8y ago
    ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
whatshisface 8y ago
Are you telling me that checking Hackernews every couple hours is going to pay off? >take a 10 second break I guess that's the next browser plugin, instead of blocking Reddit/HN/Facebook/Twitter, limit them to 10 second bursts.
- meowface 8y ago
  >I guess that's the next browser plugin, instead of blocking Reddit/HN/Facebook/Twitter, limit them to 10 second bursts. No clue if this would actually be beneficial for me, but I'd love to try an extension like this.
  - aasasd 8y ago
    Leechblock NG is that.
- 6nf 8y ago
  My slow internet already takes 10 seconds to load a new site
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    So you have this benefit already built-in. I guess we finally have a sensible argument in favour of website bloat.
- codyb 8y ago
  I have a feeling breaks where you’re doing something relatively mindless (walking around the block, washing a dish, taking a shower, etc) would allow the mind to “breathe” and “digest” a bit better than a break on social media or the news. All conjecture but it plays well for me when I’m using pomodoro to get up, move, get water, do a dish, look out the window; as opposed to when I check reddit or hacker news for whatever new information has come out in the last two hours or whatever.
  - varrock 8y ago
    Meal prepping between my work has done me wonders. I'm still being productive, but it's mindless enough to the point where I return back to my work feeling refreshed and more efficient than if I had stuck it out.
dogsgobork 8y ago
Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro Technique.
dorkwood 8y ago
In my experience, this effect is most noticeable while learning an instrument. Practice until you start to see diminishing returns, take a short break, and then return to practicing. You’ll notice you’re slightly better than you were before taking a break.
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  I really notice this during video games. As soon as I feel stuck/frustrated I try stop, take a 15 minute break, then quite often nail it on the first retry.
trillic 8y ago
I drink tons of water, I try and drink my 32 oz bottle once an hour when I'm working. I feel more productive for two reasons because I do this: 1. I'm not dehydrated, 2. it forces me to get up to use the restroom a lot more than usual. This forces me to have lots of mini breaks almost every hour or so to walk and fill up my bottle and use the restroom.
- ramraj07 8y ago
  Yep let's overwork our kidneys to learn the guitar edit: seriously though I'm pretty sure that's not good for you. That sounds actually being in the ballpark of water poisoning.
  - veryworried 8y ago
    He’s fine. A typical developer’s true work day is probably all of one gallon.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  You may wish to go see your doctor, that doesn't seem normal (excess fluid consumption can be a sign of diseases like diabetes). And more worrying you're bordering on water intoxication at 32 oz/hour: > Your kidneys can eliminate about 5.3-7.4 gallons (20-28 liters) of water a day, but they can't get rid of more than 27-33 ounces (0.8-1.0 liters) per hour. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318619.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318619.php Also, you don't need 8 glass of water a day, that is a myth, you should listen to your body[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have...
  - mrob 8y ago
    There are only 24 hours in a day, so how it is possible to eliminate 28 liters in 24 hours without exceeding 1 liter per hour?
    - 8y ago
randomacct3847 8y ago
I think the key is sleep...
- mkl 8y ago
  The article is about research that shows the key isn't sleep.
tjbiddle 8y ago
This is something I've found true in my own personal experimentation over the past few years. Any time I've been training something, if I take a break from it, I come back and I have more skill than I had previously. Recently this occurred with my handstand practice. It's something that I've been working on the past year or two on and off, but more heavily recently. I've made some great strides, but the past week or two I've had a number of things distract me from my normal practice. Jumping back into it this past week, I've found my balance and strength is or order of magnitude better. This is only a single anecdote - but I've felt it rings true every time.
- projektir 8y ago
  I have observed similar things and so far the relationship continues to bewilder me. At times I return with a better ability for something I haven't touched in years, while when I was actively training it, improvement was slow. Perhaps some cross-pollination from another source, but still strange. It's... not always encouraging, as at times it's very hard to say what has improved it and whether practice is all that useful.
- debt 8y ago
  There’s a phrase “sleep on it”
  - mkl 8y ago
    The article is all about how that saying is not even close to the whole story.
- hanniabu 8y ago
  Speaking of handstands, I've been wanting to get started with that too as an item on my skills-to-acquire list. Any tips for a fellow beginner? I could never seem to get past the point needed to balance. I kick my body back and it stop right before the balance point and my body slowly goes off center and comes crashing down. Have you found it easier to do with trying to keep your body straight and stiff or feet tucked in a bit? Is it easier to learn with using your head against the ground or going for it with your arms straight? Any supplemental exercises or methods that you've found have helped?
lanewinfield 8y ago
With both this article and the propranolol one, it sure seems that resting (both short breaks and full sleeps) really help a lot. Wonder why every CEO's boasting 4 hour nightly sleeping schedules?
- acura 8y ago
  Isn't there people that actually needs less sleep? And needing less sleep could be an explanation to why they reach these levels?
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  Lies and testosterone? It also allows you to do more work that you already know how to do, but makes any new work frustrating and difficult.
ketzo 8y ago
Anecdotally found this to be totally true, particularly with muscle-memory. I’m currently learning to play the drums, and I could be beating my head against a wall trying to get a certain fill down over and over with no success, but the moment I get up and take a walk around the room, I sit back down and nail it!
nabla9 8y ago
In other words, for humans batch learning improves results over online learning.
mrcoder111 8y ago
Sounds good, the problem is in social settings (at work) if you take a break i.e. play a game during work hours people think you're lazy.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  I think playing a game during the break (I assume video game?) would be counterproductive. It is not at all the same as taking a "resting" break, as described in the article. I actually have some experience here, as I have for several years played the same video game on my phone every time I go on break at work and, anecdotally, actually feel it has not helped me in this area. I've recently decided to avoid the game except on my longer lunch breaks, and attempt to have 'restful' breaks instead. We shall see how it goes :-)
mikekchar 8y ago
I wonder if this is related to desirable difficulty [1] Ironically the idea is that making your task more difficult by making yourself less familiar with it helps with the learning process. One of the main concepts, the spacing effect [2], shows that spreading out learning over time improves learning. However, the interesting thing is that laving a long "lag" time (time between repetitions) is better than having a short lag time. I should note that this effect is similar, but different than the similarly named "spaced repetition" [3] Most spaced repetition systems use the SM2 algorithm [4] to determine the amount of lag time. This achieved a recall rate of 92% in Wozniak's studies, however as far as I know he never justified that target. It's always been interesting to me to consider the possibility that increasing the lag time in order to increase the difficulty (reduce the recall rate) might actually increase learning rates. I've never gotten around to trying it. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desirable_difficulty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desirable_difficulty [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition [4] - https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm2 https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm...
asimjalis 8y ago
I’m curious how the learning effect would have changed if the breaks had been 20 seconds. What if they had been 5 seconds?
kirillzubovsky 8y ago
The title is rather misleading. The outcome of the research, as per the writeup, is correlation in a particular set of circumstances, at best. Although I find science fascinating and would want this to be true, stuff like this is what leads people to disbelieve in legitimate science. If someone can say that breaks improve memory, for sure, 100%, definitely (but actually only, you know, maybe), then someone else could say that vaccines cause cancer, and that would be totally believable. Game over.
echelon 8y ago
This seems to fit with the spaced repetition learning curve. By default, Anki (spaced repetition software) will repeatedly show you new facts on a minute-long interval. Once you've got it, that interval becomes ten minutes, and then a day. This stuff works. I've used it to study Japanese and Chinese with great success. I'd love to see more studies as to why. If we understand the biochemistry, perhaps we can enhance it.
- spookybones 8y ago
  As a Japanese learner who would also like to learn Korean, what do you constitute great success? Are you conversational in each? Can you read in each language? I find Anki pretty boring, but want to like it. After studying the basics, I’ve had better success with extensive reading.
  - Reelin 8y ago
    That's an engagement issue. If a particular tool, approach, or technique doesn't hold your interest then it's very unlikely to work for you. You could try reflecting on why and try to change it, but it will probably be more productive to find a different approach that works from the start.
  - kd5bjo 8y ago
    I started with Anki(1), but had trouble sticking with it. I moved to a Leitner system with handwritten flash cards, and it’s much more comfortable to use — something about working with physical objects makes it much more effective. I’ve also played with the contents of the cards much more than I would have with Anki, because I don’t have to deal with the templates. As it turns out, most of my cards are either Cloze deletions from known-good texts or reciting declension tables. For the declension tables, I have one card for each row and column. That’s a lot of work, so I only have these for irregular words and a few representatives of each regular patterns. For the Cloze deletions, I’ll read an article or a book chapter straight through without stopping to look anything up, and highlight 1 or 2 sentences on each page that seem interesting and come back to make flash cards out of them (and look up words I don’t know) after I’m done reading. Sometimes I’ll delete entire words, sometimes everything except the first letter, and sometimes drop the dictionary form in place of the declined one - The goal is to get my brain trained to choose the right word or word form without me having to think about it consciously. For new words that aren’t obvious in context, I’ll look them up in a native-language dictionary. If I can understand the entry, I’ll make a Cloze card from that as well, usually just deleting any form of the word (especially the heading itself). In my dictionary, there’s generally an example sentence and I’ll transform key words there into dictionary form so that I have to remember which case, gender, etc I have to use. (1) For learning Icelandic, not Korean or Japanese, but I suspect the concepts will transfer.
punnerud 8y ago
Sleep = Backpropagation + Updating “weights”?
ramblerman 8y ago
The best piano teacher I ever had, left me with a little trick like this. When I was working through a song, getting the next few bars in my fingers lets say. If I got it right without mistake I had to stop immediately. lift my hands of the keyboard, and reward myself with a little breath - and tell my subconscious that was it. Before that I would just practice the loop over and over.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Sounds curiously like dog/animal training. The training session ends on completion of a task (eg fetch), followed by some sort of reward (food, play...). Part of the art is recognizing when the animal isn't into it anymore. If that happens, and you go into another repetition, the last rep is frustrating and/or unsuccessful and it's hard to end on a satisfying success... which is counterproductive. Much better to skip that last rep and get the optimal reinforcement. It occurs to me that whether training an animal or yourself, this needs to be a conscious plan. It's more natural to continue when things go well and quit when they stop.
  - motohagiography 8y ago
    Horsemanship is like this as well. Short lessons, end on high note. Get off and praise. I use compounding as a model, where I evaluate the risk of pushing past comfort level based on whether I have the ability to return to a calm high note ending if my gambit goes sideways. Regular small improvement yields a higher and more reliable trajectory than grinding toward inconsistent leaps that exhaust a lot of wasted effort. I'm learning there is a cargo cult around work and effort in that it is a substitute for the tact and intelligence you get with a lighter approach. Like managers who think they are getting results by having staff work through suffering, and point to how hard people are working as an indicator of their ability to lead. Whether it's horses or people, it's always a disgusting spectacle. My trainer likes to say, "go slow, I'm in a hurry."
atoav 8y ago
Making a break not only gives you time to reflect on what you did, but it also prevents you from meaningless repitition.
avjinder 8y ago
I've had this happen to me multiple times now. The last time it happened, I was trying to learn Kotlin Coroutines and found them very difficult. After struggling for a while I gave up and stopped. Almost a week later I gave it another try and to my surprise found it very easy to understand. I felt surprised and elated.
bechampion 8y ago
this reminds me when i was younger and i would tell my mom that i need to take breaks because "knwoledge needs to rest in my brain"(sentence translated from spanish) , now i can tell her science backs me up.
ciaran-ifelse 8y ago
Barbara Oakley's book "A Mind For Numbers" talks about this.
dpatru 8y ago
Learning is a physical process. The brain needs time to form connections. Like building muscle, the best we can do is stimulate and then give time to grow.
pkghost 8y ago
A couple of anecdotes: I went to a group rhythm workshop in San Francisco called TaKeTiNa wherein a group of 50 of us learned, over the course of a few hours, to perform a stomp/clap polyrhythm (that is, a sequence that is really the combination of two sequences with different time signatures) that I wouldn't have guessed we could learn in a single session. The facilitator guided us through by starting with an approachable subunit of the pattern, added to it piece by piece over a few minutes until we fell apart, and then gave us a few minutes of laying-down closed-eye rest time. When we came back, the previous segment seemed relatively easy, and we moved into further complexity. By the end, I was both exhausted and impressed at how much we had learned. I played lacrosse in high school (West coast, believe it or not). Several times we were in a rut a few days before a big game, and our coach would cancel the intervening practices. We'd show up to the game and be astonished at how well we played. (I realize this is a very different time scale of effect, and is perhaps better explained by higher level psychological factors rather than a lower level neurological/memory-formation mechanism, but, then again, maybe it applies at multiple scales.)
- zeropnc 8y ago
  San Francisco really is a different planet
  - pkghost 8y ago
    the workshop facilitator was of ambiguous mediterranean origin and clearly traveled the world giving this workshop. i've lived in SF for close to a decade—while it remains a very special and unique place, its reputation as a nexus of counterculture is overinflated.
  - piva00 8y ago
    I'd say that something similar would be possible in any city with a big artsy kind of people. Berlin came to mind immediately when I read what the workshop was about, for example.
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jkuria 8y ago
Good study. The phenomenon is also well documented and explained in George Leonard's book Mastery: https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfillment/dp/0452267560 https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfil... James Clear has a nice summary here: https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery
GiantSully 8y ago
I have been trying to remember 15 thousand words for the last 3 years during which I have similar experiences.Several times, I pushed myself hard to keep learning for hours, but ended up with efficiency decreasing as time went by. I may be unable to take in anything after two hours of intense learning. Then I try to rectify my own approach to find the most suitable method for myself. Following is my own experiences. Whether the break is needed depends on my specific task. Whatever task I do, I try to keep doing it without any break for at least about 45 minutes. If I’m coding, I need less intervals of break, and I can keep coding as if I enter a status called the mind flow. While if I’m reading and digesting a whole book, I need to stop sometimes to think. Well, if I’m remembering and digesting plenty of words and its usages, it’s better for me to take a break more frequently, maybe I will watch a short video about 20 minutes every 45 minutes, to clear my mind. IMO, it all about the ability to keep oneself concentrated. I’ve heard that some people can stay concentrated for a very long time, like several hours, and I’m not this type of person although I once experienced this state for two days and lost it forever. And I get exhausted more quickly when I am less concentrated than I am.

The “rest periods” were ten seconds long. This doesn’t generalize into anything meaningful; when was the last time you focused on a new skill so intensely that you didn’t have ten second pauses?

JesseAldridge 8y ago
Yes but the work periods were also ten seconds. So the suggestion seems to be that we should spend 50% of our time resting, with many very small rest periods interspersed between many very small work periods.
- zitterbewegung 8y ago
  So, if i'm teaching myself to do unit testing I should take a 10 second break by checking HN and then go back to the task?
  - projektir 8y ago
    I'm curious what is considered a break. Is HN fluffy enough? says projektir, checking HN as a break from typing practice says projektir, typing as a break from typing practice
  - vturner 8y ago
    Not sure reading HN is "restful" ;)
  - hanniabu 8y ago
    Probably better to do a walk around the room and reflect.
    - beaker52 8y ago
      This. I think what you do in that break really matters. If it's taking a sip of coffee, browsing HN or answering a question then it's not going to help. I have learnt to race cars over the past 5 years. I can lap and lap and lap, but the greatest improvement comes from the breaks between sessions, which can be minutes, hours, days or weeks. I stumbled upon the most effective strategy the other week when training in my simulator: I was doing a small number of laps, say between 7 and 10 then returning to the pits. I'd reflect on how the "stint" felt for a couple of minutes and then have a look at the telemetry, comparing laps and correlating my memory of the on-track experience with the sensor outputs that I could see in the telemetry. After doing this for 20 minutes, decide on some small setup tweaks and jump back in for another 7-10 lap stint, rinse and repeat. I spent maybe 3 hours doing it and drove maybe 50 laps during that time (I could have done over twice that number if I hadn't taken my approach), but the improvement I got from it by the end was far and above anything I've tried before. I can also relate it to another time in a real car where I was learning a new track and car in a short 20 minute session. I had done ~15 minutes on track and the session was stopped. I got back to the pits and sat in the car. I asked my engineer about the time I'd done in relation to other drivers and just sat there in the car thinking through my laps and where I could be "better". I went back out on track for the final 5 minutes and made a huge improvement, finishing top. It wouldn't have happened without that brief period of reflection. TL;DR Do what you're doing for the shortest meaningful period of time. Stop and reflect on what you've been doing and what you could do differently/try/better. Let your mind relax whilst you're doing this - it shouldn't be an intense process. The go back in and put your reflection into action. It's important that you try to make adjustments to your performance, even if they fail. If you just do the same thing over and over again, you're missing the opportunity to diverge from your current behaviour, which is probably suboptimal given your experience.
      - Expez 8y ago
        What you're describing here is really what Ericsson refers to when he talks about 'deliberate practice' (from the 10 000 hours meme). You correctly recognized that instead of doing more laps some of your time was better spent on deep analysis. If we stick with the racing analogy I think what the article talks about is that you would've seen solid gains if you had tried to run a single lap perfectly, stopped, stayed in your car, and just relaxed while your subconscious got some time to process everything that just happened, without your bombarding it with new information. If you were to follow the instructions to the letter you'd hang out for a time equivalent to your lap time, but they left it as an open question if this mechanic scales beyond the 10s repetitions used in the study. I hope they do more of the studies because the required time of rest could plausibly scale in different ways: 1. Your subconscious can only remember so much stuff to replay and learn from while resting so a break beyond X isn't beneficial. 2. The rest time needed is linear with the stimulus. 3. Long action sequences are such a rich source that the subconscious can mine them for a long time. Beneficial rest time scales exponentially.
  - JesseAldridge 8y ago
    I imagine 10 seconds of quiet reflection would work better.
fersc 8y ago
Everything else considered, the closing remarks of the the press release would be useful to keep in mind if you wanted to develop this technique further > “Our results suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of rest intervals when implementing rehabilitative treatments in stroke patients or when learning to play the piano in normal volunteers,” said Dr. Cohen. “Whether these results apply to other forms of learning and memory formation remains an open question.”
rexpop 8y ago
Basically every time I practice my horn. 10 seconds is a long time when I'm trying to crank through an exercise book. The thought of holding off, even closing my eyes for 10 seconds, is pretty alien to my practice style.
- aiisjustanif 8y ago
  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

whatshisface 8y ago

Are you telling me that checking Hackernews every couple hours is going to pay off? >take a 10 second break I guess that's the next browser plugin, instead of blocking Reddit/HN/Facebook/Twitter, limit them to 10 second bursts.

meowface 8y ago
>I guess that's the next browser plugin, instead of blocking Reddit/HN/Facebook/Twitter, limit them to 10 second bursts. No clue if this would actually be beneficial for me, but I'd love to try an extension like this.
- aasasd 8y ago
  Leechblock NG is that.
6nf 8y ago
My slow internet already takes 10 seconds to load a new site
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  So you have this benefit already built-in. I guess we finally have a sensible argument in favour of website bloat.
codyb 8y ago
I have a feeling breaks where you’re doing something relatively mindless (walking around the block, washing a dish, taking a shower, etc) would allow the mind to “breathe” and “digest” a bit better than a break on social media or the news. All conjecture but it plays well for me when I’m using pomodoro to get up, move, get water, do a dish, look out the window; as opposed to when I check reddit or hacker news for whatever new information has come out in the last two hours or whatever.
- varrock 8y ago
  Meal prepping between my work has done me wonders. I'm still being productive, but it's mindless enough to the point where I return back to my work feeling refreshed and more efficient than if I had stuck it out.

dogsgobork 8y ago

Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro Technique.

dorkwood 8y ago

In my experience, this effect is most noticeable while learning an instrument. Practice until you start to see diminishing returns, take a short break, and then return to practicing. You’ll notice you’re slightly better than you were before taking a break.

PinkMilkshake 8y ago
I really notice this during video games. As soon as I feel stuck/frustrated I try stop, take a 15 minute break, then quite often nail it on the first retry.

trillic 8y ago

I drink tons of water, I try and drink my 32 oz bottle once an hour when I'm working. I feel more productive for two reasons because I do this: 1. I'm not dehydrated, 2. it forces me to get up to use the restroom a lot more than usual. This forces me to have lots of mini breaks almost every hour or so to walk and fill up my bottle and use the restroom.

ramraj07 8y ago
Yep let's overwork our kidneys to learn the guitar edit: seriously though I'm pretty sure that's not good for you. That sounds actually being in the ballpark of water poisoning.
- veryworried 8y ago
  He’s fine. A typical developer’s true work day is probably all of one gallon.
Someone1234 8y ago
You may wish to go see your doctor, that doesn't seem normal (excess fluid consumption can be a sign of diseases like diabetes). And more worrying you're bordering on water intoxication at 32 oz/hour: > Your kidneys can eliminate about 5.3-7.4 gallons (20-28 liters) of water a day, but they can't get rid of more than 27-33 ounces (0.8-1.0 liters) per hour. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318619.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318619.php Also, you don't need 8 glass of water a day, that is a myth, you should listen to your body[1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have...
- mrob 8y ago
  There are only 24 hours in a day, so how it is possible to eliminate 28 liters in 24 hours without exceeding 1 liter per hour?
  - 8y ago

randomacct3847 8y ago

I think the key is sleep...

mkl 8y ago
The article is about research that shows the key isn't sleep.

tjbiddle 8y ago

This is something I've found true in my own personal experimentation over the past few years. Any time I've been training something, if I take a break from it, I come back and I have more skill than I had previously. Recently this occurred with my handstand practice. It's something that I've been working on the past year or two on and off, but more heavily recently. I've made some great strides, but the past week or two I've had a number of things distract me from my normal practice. Jumping back into it this past week, I've found my balance and strength is or order of magnitude better. This is only a single anecdote - but I've felt it rings true every time.

projektir 8y ago
I have observed similar things and so far the relationship continues to bewilder me. At times I return with a better ability for something I haven't touched in years, while when I was actively training it, improvement was slow. Perhaps some cross-pollination from another source, but still strange. It's... not always encouraging, as at times it's very hard to say what has improved it and whether practice is all that useful.
debt 8y ago
There’s a phrase “sleep on it”
- mkl 8y ago
  The article is all about how that saying is not even close to the whole story.
hanniabu 8y ago
Speaking of handstands, I've been wanting to get started with that too as an item on my skills-to-acquire list. Any tips for a fellow beginner? I could never seem to get past the point needed to balance. I kick my body back and it stop right before the balance point and my body slowly goes off center and comes crashing down. Have you found it easier to do with trying to keep your body straight and stiff or feet tucked in a bit? Is it easier to learn with using your head against the ground or going for it with your arms straight? Any supplemental exercises or methods that you've found have helped?

lanewinfield 8y ago

With both this article and the propranolol one, it sure seems that resting (both short breaks and full sleeps) really help a lot. Wonder why every CEO's boasting 4 hour nightly sleeping schedules?

acura 8y ago
Isn't there people that actually needs less sleep? And needing less sleep could be an explanation to why they reach these levels?
andy_ppp 8y ago
Lies and testosterone? It also allows you to do more work that you already know how to do, but makes any new work frustrating and difficult.

ketzo 8y ago

Anecdotally found this to be totally true, particularly with muscle-memory. I’m currently learning to play the drums, and I could be beating my head against a wall trying to get a certain fill down over and over with no success, but the moment I get up and take a walk around the room, I sit back down and nail it!

nabla9 8y ago

In other words, for humans batch learning improves results over online learning.

mrcoder111 8y ago

Sounds good, the problem is in social settings (at work) if you take a break i.e. play a game during work hours people think you're lazy.

loco5niner 8y ago
I think playing a game during the break (I assume video game?) would be counterproductive. It is not at all the same as taking a "resting" break, as described in the article. I actually have some experience here, as I have for several years played the same video game on my phone every time I go on break at work and, anecdotally, actually feel it has not helped me in this area. I've recently decided to avoid the game except on my longer lunch breaks, and attempt to have 'restful' breaks instead. We shall see how it goes :-)

mikekchar 8y ago

I wonder if this is related to desirable difficulty [1] Ironically the idea is that making your task more difficult by making yourself less familiar with it helps with the learning process. One of the main concepts, the spacing effect [2], shows that spreading out learning over time improves learning. However, the interesting thing is that laving a long "lag" time (time between repetitions) is better than having a short lag time. I should note that this effect is similar, but different than the similarly named "spaced repetition" [3] Most spaced repetition systems use the SM2 algorithm [4] to determine the amount of lag time. This achieved a recall rate of 92% in Wozniak's studies, however as far as I know he never justified that target. It's always been interesting to me to consider the possibility that increasing the lag time in order to increase the difficulty (reduce the recall rate) might actually increase learning rates. I've never gotten around to trying it. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desirable_difficulty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desirable_difficulty [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition [4] - https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm2 https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm...

asimjalis 8y ago

I’m curious how the learning effect would have changed if the breaks had been 20 seconds. What if they had been 5 seconds?

kirillzubovsky 8y ago

The title is rather misleading. The outcome of the research, as per the writeup, is correlation in a particular set of circumstances, at best. Although I find science fascinating and would want this to be true, stuff like this is what leads people to disbelieve in legitimate science. If someone can say that breaks improve memory, for sure, 100%, definitely (but actually only, you know, maybe), then someone else could say that vaccines cause cancer, and that would be totally believable. Game over.

echelon 8y ago

This seems to fit with the spaced repetition learning curve. By default, Anki (spaced repetition software) will repeatedly show you new facts on a minute-long interval. Once you've got it, that interval becomes ten minutes, and then a day. This stuff works. I've used it to study Japanese and Chinese with great success. I'd love to see more studies as to why. If we understand the biochemistry, perhaps we can enhance it.

spookybones 8y ago
As a Japanese learner who would also like to learn Korean, what do you constitute great success? Are you conversational in each? Can you read in each language? I find Anki pretty boring, but want to like it. After studying the basics, I’ve had better success with extensive reading.
- Reelin 8y ago
  That's an engagement issue. If a particular tool, approach, or technique doesn't hold your interest then it's very unlikely to work for you. You could try reflecting on why and try to change it, but it will probably be more productive to find a different approach that works from the start.
- kd5bjo 8y ago
  I started with Anki(1), but had trouble sticking with it. I moved to a Leitner system with handwritten flash cards, and it’s much more comfortable to use — something about working with physical objects makes it much more effective. I’ve also played with the contents of the cards much more than I would have with Anki, because I don’t have to deal with the templates. As it turns out, most of my cards are either Cloze deletions from known-good texts or reciting declension tables. For the declension tables, I have one card for each row and column. That’s a lot of work, so I only have these for irregular words and a few representatives of each regular patterns. For the Cloze deletions, I’ll read an article or a book chapter straight through without stopping to look anything up, and highlight 1 or 2 sentences on each page that seem interesting and come back to make flash cards out of them (and look up words I don’t know) after I’m done reading. Sometimes I’ll delete entire words, sometimes everything except the first letter, and sometimes drop the dictionary form in place of the declined one - The goal is to get my brain trained to choose the right word or word form without me having to think about it consciously. For new words that aren’t obvious in context, I’ll look them up in a native-language dictionary. If I can understand the entry, I’ll make a Cloze card from that as well, usually just deleting any form of the word (especially the heading itself). In my dictionary, there’s generally an example sentence and I’ll transform key words there into dictionary form so that I have to remember which case, gender, etc I have to use. (1) For learning Icelandic, not Korean or Japanese, but I suspect the concepts will transfer.

punnerud 8y ago

Sleep = Backpropagation + Updating “weights”?

ramblerman 8y ago

The best piano teacher I ever had, left me with a little trick like this. When I was working through a song, getting the next few bars in my fingers lets say. If I got it right without mistake I had to stop immediately. lift my hands of the keyboard, and reward myself with a little breath - and tell my subconscious that was it. Before that I would just practice the loop over and over.

dalbasal 8y ago
Sounds curiously like dog/animal training. The training session ends on completion of a task (eg fetch), followed by some sort of reward (food, play...). Part of the art is recognizing when the animal isn't into it anymore. If that happens, and you go into another repetition, the last rep is frustrating and/or unsuccessful and it's hard to end on a satisfying success... which is counterproductive. Much better to skip that last rep and get the optimal reinforcement. It occurs to me that whether training an animal or yourself, this needs to be a conscious plan. It's more natural to continue when things go well and quit when they stop.
- motohagiography 8y ago
  Horsemanship is like this as well. Short lessons, end on high note. Get off and praise. I use compounding as a model, where I evaluate the risk of pushing past comfort level based on whether I have the ability to return to a calm high note ending if my gambit goes sideways. Regular small improvement yields a higher and more reliable trajectory than grinding toward inconsistent leaps that exhaust a lot of wasted effort. I'm learning there is a cargo cult around work and effort in that it is a substitute for the tact and intelligence you get with a lighter approach. Like managers who think they are getting results by having staff work through suffering, and point to how hard people are working as an indicator of their ability to lead. Whether it's horses or people, it's always a disgusting spectacle. My trainer likes to say, "go slow, I'm in a hurry."

atoav 8y ago

Making a break not only gives you time to reflect on what you did, but it also prevents you from meaningless repitition.

avjinder 8y ago

I've had this happen to me multiple times now. The last time it happened, I was trying to learn Kotlin Coroutines and found them very difficult. After struggling for a while I gave up and stopped. Almost a week later I gave it another try and to my surprise found it very easy to understand. I felt surprised and elated.

bechampion 8y ago

this reminds me when i was younger and i would tell my mom that i need to take breaks because "knwoledge needs to rest in my brain"(sentence translated from spanish) , now i can tell her science backs me up.

ciaran-ifelse 8y ago

Barbara Oakley's book "A Mind For Numbers" talks about this.

dpatru 8y ago

Learning is a physical process. The brain needs time to form connections. Like building muscle, the best we can do is stimulate and then give time to grow.

pkghost 8y ago

A couple of anecdotes: I went to a group rhythm workshop in San Francisco called TaKeTiNa wherein a group of 50 of us learned, over the course of a few hours, to perform a stomp/clap polyrhythm (that is, a sequence that is really the combination of two sequences with different time signatures) that I wouldn't have guessed we could learn in a single session. The facilitator guided us through by starting with an approachable subunit of the pattern, added to it piece by piece over a few minutes until we fell apart, and then gave us a few minutes of laying-down closed-eye rest time. When we came back, the previous segment seemed relatively easy, and we moved into further complexity. By the end, I was both exhausted and impressed at how much we had learned. I played lacrosse in high school (West coast, believe it or not). Several times we were in a rut a few days before a big game, and our coach would cancel the intervening practices. We'd show up to the game and be astonished at how well we played. (I realize this is a very different time scale of effect, and is perhaps better explained by higher level psychological factors rather than a lower level neurological/memory-formation mechanism, but, then again, maybe it applies at multiple scales.)

zeropnc 8y ago
San Francisco really is a different planet
- pkghost 8y ago
  the workshop facilitator was of ambiguous mediterranean origin and clearly traveled the world giving this workshop. i've lived in SF for close to a decade—while it remains a very special and unique place, its reputation as a nexus of counterculture is overinflated.
- piva00 8y ago
  I'd say that something similar would be possible in any city with a big artsy kind of people. Berlin came to mind immediately when I read what the workshop was about, for example.

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jkuria 8y ago

Good study. The phenomenon is also well documented and explained in George Leonard's book Mastery: https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfillment/dp/0452267560 https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfil... James Clear has a nice summary here: https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery

GiantSully 8y ago

I have been trying to remember 15 thousand words for the last 3 years during which I have similar experiences.Several times, I pushed myself hard to keep learning for hours, but ended up with efficiency decreasing as time went by. I may be unable to take in anything after two hours of intense learning. Then I try to rectify my own approach to find the most suitable method for myself. Following is my own experiences. Whether the break is needed depends on my specific task. Whatever task I do, I try to keep doing it without any break for at least about 45 minutes. If I’m coding, I need less intervals of break, and I can keep coding as if I enter a status called the mind flow. While if I’m reading and digesting a whole book, I need to stop sometimes to think. Well, if I’m remembering and digesting plenty of words and its usages, it’s better for me to take a break more frequently, maybe I will watch a short video about 20 minutes every 45 minutes, to clear my mind. IMO, it all about the ability to keep oneself concentrated. I’ve heard that some people can stay concentrated for a very long time, like several hours, and I’m not this type of person although I once experienced this state for two days and lost it forever. And I get exhausted more quickly when I am less concentrated than I am.