
Scientists find how relaxed minds remember better - gibsonf1
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62N4VJ20100324
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EliAndrewC
Anecdotally this fits with my experiences on death march projects. I've often
seen people learn a new programming language and/or set of libraries while on
a tight deadline and getting yelled at for being behind schedule. Their
knowledge retention is _drastically_ worse than when they're on a more relaxed
project. In my experience, someone who takes an unhurried week to do a small
project in an unfamiliar environment will learn a lot more than someone forced
to spend a month frantically trying to make a deadline in that same
environment.

An interesting corollary is that someone who really cares about their job may
end up being less effective in the long run than someone who does.
Specifically, someone who cares about making their insane deadlines and who
gets stressed at the thought of looking bad will end up retaining less
knowledge about the programming languages and libraries that they use. They'll
also be more inclined to copy/paste code without really understanding it just
to make their deadline, etc.

Conversely, when someone who doesn't care much about their company's
priorities is given a task, they can take a more relaxed attitude and learn
much more. They might say, "Well I'm supposed to finish this C# program in 2
days, but if I take 1 extra day then I can learn how to use the .NET logging
framework, figure out how to use delegates, and really understand how its
threading model differs from pthreads." In the long run, this employee will
probably be more effective than the ones who listen to their managers and try
to finish everything now-now-NOW! And according to the OP, they'll probably
retain what they learn much better as well, which definitely fits with my
experiences.

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gregdetre
The actual paper is here:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08860.html)

I'm not convinced about the Reuters article's framing of things in terms of
relaxedness - the paper doesn't seem to make any mention of emotional state.

We don't fully understand what theta oscillations do, or why there are
oscillations throughout the brain. We know they're more present during
activities like navigation and learning, but there are other, slower
oscillations that are usually more associated with meditation and states of
relaxation than theta.

This is an important finding though, because it throws more light on how
oscillations relate to learning.

Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain is a great though dense resource for learning
about oscillations in the brain:

[http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy-
Buzsaki/dp/019530...](http://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Brain-Gyorgy-
Buzsaki/dp/0195301064)

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Xurinos
"The research team studied eight volunteers" -- Is that a large enough sample
size to be drawing scientific conclusions?

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gregdetre
It looks like they were doing single-cell recording in humans. Almost
certainly, these were epileptic patients being prepped for surgery, because
that's almost the only time when scientists have access to data from invasive
recording techniques. Ah, yes:

"The subjects were nine patients who were evaluated for possible surgical
treatment of epilepsy using implantation of depth electrodes."

As a result, it's pretty typical to have small sample sizes like this. It's
certainly possible to achieve statistical significance with this few subjects.

