Take short breaks to make learning a new skill easier

Take short breaks to make learning a new skill easierTake short breaks to make learning a new skill easierYou dont have to power through when learning something new, research says. Taking brief breaks might actually help absorb that skill better into your brain.The previously held idea was that our brains needed long breaks, such as a good nights sleep, to solidly form what we learned while acquiring a new skill. But after examining brain waves from healthy volunteers doing learning and memory experiments, some involving typing, at the NIH Clinical Center, the researchers involved in the study started to change their mind.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreI notlageiced that participants brain waves seemed to change much more during the rest periods than during the typing sessions, said Dr. Marlene Bnstrup, who led the study, in a release. This gave me the idea to look much more cl osely for when learning was actually happening. Was it during practice or rest?Productive restingResearchers discovered two important findings. First, the volunteers performance improved mostly during the short rests, not during the typing. The improvements made during the rest periods added to the overall improvements the volunteers made over the course of the day.Second, those improvements were much bigger than the ones seen after the ones the volunteers returned the next day to try again suggesting that the short breaks were as important as the practicing, and the full nights sleep theory not as important.Everyone thinks you need to practice, practice, practice when learning something new. Instead, we found that resting, early and often, may be just as critical to learning as practice, said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., senior investigator at NIHs National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and a senior author of the paper published in the journal Current Biology.U ltimately, Dr. Cohen hopes the results of this study, further explored, will be used to help people in need who have lost the ability to do certain skills because of accident or illness.Our ultimate hope is that the results of our experiments will help patients recover from the paralyzing effects caused by strokes and other neurological injuries by informing the strategies they use to relearn lost skills.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people