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Study shows how taking short breaks may help our brains learn new skills
- bichonnages 5y agoI wonder what are the best ways to take breaks when you're on the computer for 7 hours or more a day without losing your concentration when you have to go back to the screen (NB: I often have several client projects to manage in the same day, my brain goes crazy)
- dstick 5y agoThe Pomodoro method jumps to mind. But I’m with you - if the work at hand isn’t stimulating, any break will take a long while to “recover” from.
- tenken 5y agomental burnout is a thing. The best way to take breaks ... Is to take breaks! :D Benefits of taking breaks are many. Such as getting up and moving, increasing blood circulation. Also relieving eye strain by focusing on far away things, rather than your close-up monitor.
- mgummelt 5y agoI try to practice the 90m on, 30m off regimen that Huberman advocates, and it's worked well. I can do that all day without burnout.
- shoto_io 5y agoI will read this article now and then take a (long) break…
- iscrewyou 5y ago> "An experiment began when a subject was shown the code “41234” on a screen and asked to type it out as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times." I was hoping this would be about taking a few days or weeks off from whatever you are learning and have that break strengthen that skill. It's worked for me for several things in the past when I get bored or burnt out. When I get back to the task after about a week or so, I instantly understand the task I was learning. Also, some things that weren't clear before suddenly make sense.
- johnmaguire 5y agoI have experienced this as well. Similarly: - Learning controls in a new-to-me video game can be tough (e.g. Rocket League, Quake Live, games with lots of mechanics.) Playing daily can slowly improve the ability. However, taking a few days off can sometimes result in a dramatic improvement upon return. - Entering a flow state of code is great for churning out a lot of lines of code quickly. However, sometimes I see that while I am objectively achieving my goal, the code feels messy and hard to follow. At this point, I aim to just get it working by the end of the day, then stop. In the morning, I usually have a much better sense of how to refactor the code.
- grasshopperpurp 5y agoSame experience with Rocket League. A few years ago, I had a couple months between jobs, and my brother was in a similar spot, so we'd hang out and play Rocket League a fair amount. I slowly got better, but I only improved significantly after some time away from the game. Now, we might play once every few weeks or once every few months. Takes a bit to knock off the rust, but once we get going, I almost always notice some unexpected improvement - dribbling, positioning, and transitions from ball to car cam are the areas that seem to improve the most. Love the game, but it's not high on my list of areas I want to improve, and I'd definitely improve more with shorter breaks (days instead of weeks or months) and more time playing.
- LegitShady 5y ago
- EADGBE 5y agoI’m most productive on my 10-minute walk during the work day when I rubber ducky to myself about the problem I’m working on. I haven’t kept exact track, but I’m definitely hitting over .500 with that specific technique.
- datameta 5y agoLooks like this gives credence to the efficacy of the pomodoro technique. Similarly, exercise (including walking) plays a role in learning, memory consolidation, and novel thought process formation.
- heroHACK17 5y agoTaking a 10-20 minute break to practice non-sleep deep rest immediately following a period of intense focus (~90 minutes or so) has been shown to increase rates of learning of whatever you were doing during the period of focus.
- User23 5y agoIs this why I retain so much of my high school and early college education? I deep rested so hard my face hit the desk once per lecture or so, but I can still tell you about what the professor was teaching.
- tuyguntn 5y ago> "An experiment began when a subject was shown the code “41234” on a screen and asked to type it out as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times." This makes me suspicious of finding. Doesn't it decrease our focus/attention span with so many breaks? Isn't it equivalent of checking Twitter/FB every minute and not able to deliver anything?
- yosito 5y agoWhen results don't match your hypothesis, it's usually your hypothesis that was wrong, not the results.
- tuyguntn 5y agototally agree, not saying my hypothesis is correct, but it is already proven that checking social network frequently is bad for mental health, especially notifications which is related to dopamine generation. not apples to apples comparison, but something is common on these things
- mgummelt 5y agoThere's a big difference between checking Twitter and sitting in silence.
- fighterpilot 5y agoDepends on the amount of noise in the domain that you're studying. The more noise and the more implausible the alternative is, the stronger the evidence you need to be shifted off the null.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoYou're suspicious because the results don't match up with your bias? The ten second break doesn't really provide the ability to change focus to something else. It's not very long and you are limited to what you can focus on, so the ten seconds will more likely be spent on determining how to improve performance.
- octos4murai 5y agoSome practical advice on how this can be put to use from Barbara Oakley: https://youtu.be/vd2dtkMINIw https://youtu.be/vd2dtkMINIw
- TheAdamAndChe 5y agoI highly recommend her book too. Combining what I learned from her book with spaced repetition software has boosted my capacity to learn significantly.
- damontal 5y agoWhich book? She has quite a few published.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y agoA Mind for Numbers is the one I read. It also goes well with her Coursera course Learning How to Learn.
- fighterpilot 5y agoIs there one or two particularly high impact things you could share here?
- TheAdamAndChe 5y agoThere are high focus and low focus modes of thinking that serve different purposes in learning something. Chunking is the encapsulation of several steps or processes into an overarching process. Think of all the steps required to put on a shirt. You need to know how to hold the shirt, have an intuitive understanding of cloth dynamics, pull it in a certain way so that you can put your arms in, etc. But because you do it every day, it has become second nature and all you have to think to complete the task is "put on shirt." It has been chunked. Chunking requires 3 things: focus, understanding, and practice. Math is largely about chunking underlying concepts so you can learn more complex concepts. Chunking is a high focus activity, and spaced repetition is best as a low-focus activity that can be used to efficiently memorize jargon and other things that involve rote memorization. There's a lot more in the book, but those are the pieces that I remember best and that have had the biggest impact for me. I review flash cards every day, and once every few days, I do a high-focus learning activity. Even though I don't put much effort in, it feels like I am learning as much as I did in university.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoHmm, but I wonder if not doing enough at once continuously makes focus and productivity lower, up to a point, by doing activities like alternating between work and video games/glowing screen notification checking. I also would like to know what is the neurological basis for the painful post-exam / difficult work "hurty brain." I can only imagine what it must feel like after taking the JEE.
- philipswood 5y agoI suspect that alternating to another activity might interfere with the process by using up the bandwidth of the channel for replay.
- suifbwish 5y agoThis why I quit my job every couple years and take a sabbatical
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoAs I’ve been working on my own projects, on my own schedule, at home, I’ve taken to having breaks; sometimes, even short naps. I don’t really have a fixed schedule. I generally start the day with some goals, and usually take breaks between work on each goal. Sometimes, they are an hour or more. I may do errands. I tend to start the day quite early, and often work until bed. If I am stymied by a nasty problem, I will often take a break, and maybe watch a part of a movie, or something, then go back to it. Bugs never last more than a day, with me. If it’s a big context switch, I may have a “take it easy” day, where I take care of administrative crap. I enjoy more productivity than I have in my entire life.
- tachyonbeam 5y agoThat's how I organized my work in grad school. I basically worked when I felt like it. Some weeks that was 80 hours, others just 20, following the natural flow of my motivation. I went for errands in the middle of the day, took time to cook, parties, but also worked late nights and weekends when it felt right. I slept on a shitty futon and ate a lot of ramen noodles, but it sure felt nice to be able to work at my own pace and sleep as much as I needed, yet still manage to publish more than anyone else in my lab.
- MXp0A9B1 5y agoWhich is why I support smoke brakes in the office
- hnxs 5y agoThis is how I first learned programming at 25, then leetcoding five years later.
- sidm83 5y agoIts not just short breaks. Effect of a good night's sleep are almost magical in this respect. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is filled with examples on how sleep plays an outsized role in our lives. One relevant example from the book that comes to mind is an experiment where they instructed some college students to type out a particular sequence of characters on a keyboard and then measured their performance across two days. The group which had a good night's sleep had dramatic improvement in their typing coordination overnight. Apparently the author got an insight to pursue deeper into cognitive effects of sleep after a chance encounter with a pianist after a speech he gave on benefits of sleep, where the pianist told him how he struggled with new compositions on evenings and then magically gets them right after a good night's sleep.
- slver 5y agoI can list a bunch of trivial reasons why we sleep, about memory and so on. I can also give trivial explanations like "it's because you're tired and you get rest". But I wonder if anyone has explained why typing coordination would be worse without sleep. This is a mechanical task where analytical thinking and so on are not involved, just simple motor memory patterns.
- chayleaf 5y agoPlaying piano doesn't require analytical thinking either. Motor memory is just another set of patterns, and rest helps establish the patterns in our mind.
- slver 5y agoI feel we need to flesh that out more. Because if we just say sleep establishes the patterns, it's almost as if we say a pianist who has been playing for decades forgets how to be a pianist without a day of sleep, and then while sleeping he remembers how to be a pianist. I feel I need a more detailed explanation here. Apparently something gets depleted from the brain during the day, that we get back during sleep. Maybe it's structural, not chemical, but something gets depleted.
- alpb 5y agoAnyone who has learned an alternative keyboard layout will tell you this is true. When you get a new keyboard (say, with linear layout), you will struggle like crazy during the day doing typing tests like https://monkeytype.com/ https://monkeytype.com/ back to back like 20 times, and your speed won't improve –it will deteriorate. But give it a good night's sleep or at least a few hours not doing the exercises, you will come back at higher WPM speeds. And at some point you wake up and it just "clicks" in your brain, congrats you just re-wired your brain.
- jjallen 5y agoYou know how people, especially software developers, complain about being interrupted by others at work? I, as a dev, have recently realized that this can sometimes be a good thing. It gives the brain a few seconds to unconsciously process whatever we are working on. I have found a few times recently to return to my work with a slightly freshened mind, sometimes having a better solution than the one I was working on. Now, this said, there is a balance. We don't want to be interrupted very often but sometimes taking a break, even for a few seconds can be a good thing.
- pacoverdi 5y agoBeing interrupted with a question that forces you to flush all your brain caches and load up a different context is not the same as a nap or walk-induced interruption ;)
- tester34 5y agoI'd rather take break intentionally than having to context-switch due to somebody else
- andrei_says_ 5y agoBeing interrupted by my own rising task-fatigue, when I am at the natural end of a flow-cycle is very different from being interrupted in the middle of flow. Other people’s interruptions destroy my productivity. The balance there is zero outside interruptions. When I finish a flow cycle, my attention naturally goes to something else, a perfect time for a break.
- shreevari 5y agoI noticed this while learning to drive. When I practiced driving continually, I was learning little. But when I gave few days breaks in the middle, I found myself much more comfortable. Even with exercise, I've observed that intermittent rest has helped.
- hermitsings 5y agoAlways has been
- Cybotron5000 5y agoI’ve definitely noticed this teaching the guitar. If students first have a really good run at learning something, particularly something mechanical when you’re working on a piece/exercise, if you stop at some point and chat about/distract them with something briefly, subsequently when they start playing it again it’s sometimes as if ‘magically’ what they were working on previous to the break has been ‘digested’ on a more sub-conscious level or something, and afterwards they play it much better… I wondered if it was because initially the conscious mind was over-thinking and grappling with mapping a task from individual pieces (bit like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant ) …or even self-sabotaging, and the break helped somehow to reach a more ‘flow-y’, confident state where the brain has a starting point to work from - some sort of pre-prepared mental ‘map’…
- lobocinza 5y agoWhen I get 'lazy' taking a long timeout and doing something as mental as washing dishes always result in me getting back to the PC in a flow state.