
Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks - occamschainsaw
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/News-Events/News-and-Press-Releases/Press-Releases/Want-learn-new-skill-Take-some-short-breaks
======
tjbiddle
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.

~~~
hanniabu
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?

~~~
efqerqe54g545g1
The one trick that helped me quite a bit was to focus on alternating pressure
between the tips of your fingers and the base of your wrist.

~~~
woodandsteel
As a former (rather mediocre) college gymnast I would agree that is essential.

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ramblerman
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
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
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."

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arkades
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
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
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?

~~~
hanniabu
Probably better to do a walk around the room and reflect.

~~~
beaker52
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
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.

------
trillic
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.

~~~
farahday
> I try and drink my 32 oz bottle once an hour when I'm working.

Seriously, how do you get any work done? Thats like a sip every 30 seconds.

~~~
PaulBGD_
I refill my 26 oz water bottle about once every hour. It's not about sipping,
I drink about a third or fourth of the bottle every time I pick it up.

------
echelon
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
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.

~~~
kd5bjo
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.

------
pkghost
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
San Francisco really is a different planet

~~~
piva00
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.

------
dorkwood
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
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.

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whatshisface
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.

~~~
codyb
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
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.

------
jkuria
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-
Fulfil...](https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-
Fulfillment/dp/0452267560)

James Clear has a nice summary here:

[https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery](https://jamesclear.com/book-
summaries/mastery)

------
mikekchar
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/sm...](https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm2)

------
mrcoder111
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
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 :-)

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ketzo
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!

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lanewinfield
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?

~~~
andy_ppp
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.

------
GiantSully
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.

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dogsgobork
Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro Technique.

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

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

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dpatru
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.

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

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kirillzubovsky
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.

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bechampion
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.

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randomacct3847
I think the key is sleep...

~~~
mkl
The article is about research that shows the key _isn 't_ sleep.

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punnerud
Sleep = Backpropagation + Updating “weights”?

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nabla9
In other words, for humans batch learning improves results over online
learning.

