Study shows how taking short breaks may help our brains learn new skills
ninds.nih.gov
ninds.nih.gov
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.
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.
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.
That's my take as a layman.
Otherwise I agree after sleep, what we learn seems more readily available.
I've done polysomnography and they told me nothing except I don't have sleep apnea, and got a lot of microawakenings -- to me it felt I didn't sleep at all with all the wires and noise by other patients in other rooms snoring, nurse re-attaching wires, nurse walking on hallways to check on other patients and so on.
My smartwatch tells me I spend 60% in light sleep, 20% in REM and 20% in deep sleep, but I get very little continous deep sleep.
YMMV Of course
My mileage does value indeed :))
Does that actually happen outside of stories?
edit: the waking up part didn't happen until I started working from home. I was always over-sleeping when I had to get showered, dressed, and commute every morning.
In general, getting good sleep means that you fall asleep fairly quickly (30 minutes or less), don't wake up often (once or twice), and you get around the average sleep for your age (even if it varies a bit). You should feel pretty well-rested through the day, and not overly tired if you are in good health.
I'd wager that you don't get good sleep, and you are suffering from us not really being able to "fix" sleep very well - in no small part because we are really in the infancy of sleep science. The sleep study, for you, really just ruled out some things, but couldn't provide answers.
Yes, the only drug that made me feel like a baby waking up in the morning was trazodone.
But it also made me wake up with painful boners in the middle of the night, so that's out. I'm so envious of a female acquaintance who swears by trazodone.
I also have physiological anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, attention/concentration/alertness/consciousness/memory deficits, tachycardia >100, rapid shallow breathing, high blood pressure (diastolic), veinous insufficiency, cold hands (but normal perfusion), almost no sensation anywhere, excessive sweating w exertion, lower blood volume, swelling neck/fingers/toes, and flushed forehead/ears/cheeks.
I wonder if it's a lack of exercise, chronic blood-vessel narrowing, and/or chronic low blood volume.
I have a rare form of dysautonomia. It is a very rare immune-mediated neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system, called autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy. It is in pharmaceutical remission, which means that it hopefully stays in remission, as long as I take medicine for it, for life.
Anyways, I can help you out with all of this, and really show you the way. I literally have all of the above symptoms. Check out my profile for my email. I will respond to you with advice.
You may want to start here: DYNA (Dysautonomia Youth Network of America) is an awesome organization, and they have a phone line that they answer during the day. You may want to call them first for advice. Adults call the line all the time. I mean, I am a member of it, and participate there regularly, and I am in my early 30s. Anyways, the DYNA office phone number is: 301-705-6995
I strongly encourage you to call them. Also, please contact me. I also promise that I will help you.
Here are some good references:
Dysautonomia Symptoms: http://dynainc.org/dysautonomia/symptoms
About Dysautonomia: http://dynainc.org/dysautonomia
Living With Dysautonomia: http://dynainc.org/living
Finding the Right Doctor: http://dynainc.org/living/finding-right-doctor
For Newly Diagnosed Patients: http://dynainc.org/living/new-patients
There is now a special board certification/subspecialty in neurology in the United States for Autonomic Disorders (my neurologist has this board subspecialty certification also has an autonomic disorder--so I am tremendously lucky to have him). A handful (about 50) doctors in the US are certified in this subspecialty. But, you really need to get an EMG test, since you are having sensory issues. A neurologist does this test. You really need to be seeing a neurologist regularly if you are having these types of symptoms.
Anyways, to find a neurologist with the Autonomic Disorders subspecialty (you need, at minimum, both a neurologist [most important] and a cardiologist/electrophysiologist who deals with autonomic disorders regularly) go to this website: https://www.ucns.org/Online/Online/Diplomate_Directory.aspx
Under "Please choose a subspecialty" (drop-down menu), select "Autonomic Disorders" and press the blue button "Find"
If you want to get better and stay healthy: do not go to Reddit/Social Media/etc. It is a really toxic place with respect to this illness. People on there are extremely dramatic. Also, avoid the organization Dysautonomia International. The people who run it (primarily women--and I am female myself) are drama queens. They also post inaccurate information on their official Facebook feeds all the time. Also, don't read stuff posted to random blogs. Content that is not moderated about dysautonomia tends to really get wild and can be quite harmful. Trust me on this. If you want to get better with this illness, you have to be careful about what you expose yourself to on the internet.
I hope this helps and I hope to hear from you.
Previous discussions on HN:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519
TBH I haven't made up my mind about the book yet, just thought you should know about these things too.
I got into the habit of all night slogs right since high school and it persisted till recently due to the pressure of sticking to deadlines. So I could relate well to several experiments cited in the book.
Considering we do not know nearly as much as we ought to know yet, I would rather err on the side of caution and give far more importance to sleep than I have previously.
> In a previous study, led by former NIH postdoctoral fellow Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., Dr. Cohen’s team showed that most of these gains happened during short rests, and not when the subjects were typing. Moreover, the gains were greater than those made after a night’s sleep and were correlated with a decrease in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms.
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.
- 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.
To me this doesn't sound like it's testing a skill at all. It's testing short term memory, maybe. 10 seconds on 10 seconds off to test your ability to memorize a string of numbers and type them out isn't the same thing as testing a skill.
For example, if I want to learn some new tech I will jump in and tinker until I get to some spot that is beyond what I understand. Take a few days or weeks, and when I come back the base has solidified making it almost trivial to move on.
I also just noticed the same thing with training Jiu-Jitsu. I had to take a long break because of covid. While I was obviously rusty on my return, I had a bunch of skills solidify while I was gone leading me to see many more details than before I had to take a break.
Learning is a lot like weight lifting. It's the breaks between sessions where the strength gains occur.
Practice doesn't necessarily make perfect, it can also make you habitually wrong.
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I've trained, I don't, 50 apprentices. They all learn faster of they can do a short stint on a new task, say 10 to 29 mins, then come back to it after at least one sleep.
They almost always develop bad habits if you make then do the new task all day because they'll get either overly focused on some inconsequential aspect of it, it lose interest because they're not good at it, or sone such.
Once you start getting sloppy, it's time to context switch.
I have this experience playing GTA. After failing a hard mission 6+ times, I take a break, and usually pass it on the first attempt after the break. I also had not problem following the train, but the RC copters were a nightmare.
I first noticed this for myself wayy back when I was learning how to ride a bike. I remember falling and falling and then giving up, coming back a few weeks later and nailing it on the first try!
Then again I noticed this as a youth while playing video game campaigns. I remember not being able to defeat Bowser in Luigi's Mansion or something, giving up, then returning in a week to handily defeat him.
I think it's after noticing this in video games that I began to internalize it as a learning strategy.
From then on I never really crammed for tests (which also benefits you on test day as you're not sleep deprived or stressed) or stressed out over pushing past any walls I would hit like you mention. Instead I'd focus on gradual learning with LONG breaks to absorb (not actively, just put your attention to something else and let the information "download asynchronously/on background" so to speak).
More recently I've begun to speak up about this learning style and, as I've begun mentoring junior employees or teaching friends technical skills, I've realized this is a foreign concept to many. So fascinating :)
Our subconscious churns through a lot without us really realizing it. In the book, he suggests thinking/working on something and stepping away with intent when you get stuck to let your mind wander while your subconscious gets to work.
I think this is a similar concept. You don't necessarily need to be stuck, but while you're away from something your mind puts all the "files and folders" away neatly.
It’s given me a whole new perspective on how I can learn complex things over time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, exercise (including walking) plays a role in learning, memory consolidation, and novel thought process formation.
I haven’t kept exact track, but I’m definitely hitting over .500 with that specific technique.
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.
The process I use isn't everything the book said to do, it's just what I chose to adopt to strengthen my weaknesses. The book covers much more.
Even with exercise, I've observed that intermittent rest has helped.
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?
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.
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.
But I’m with you - if the work at hand isn’t stimulating, any break will take a long while to “recover” from.
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.