Hacker News Reader

Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

My own experience: I play guitar, I like to think I play very well and lots of people have praised my playing. I do it in bursts, spending lots of time playing and practicing and recording for a stretch of some months then I… don’t play at all.

Life makes that cadence happen as much as anything, but all of my significant strides forward in technique and creative breakthrough have come shortly after breaking long dry spells. And that’s not to say there haven’t been disappointing breaks where everything feels cumbersome or fruitless. But all of my noticeable improvements playing have come after a significant stretch of time not playing, even if they were followed by significant time practicing.

View on HN

Learning something like playing music, dancing, and many other things, is a process of becoming conscious of things, then learning to do the same things unconsciously (muscle memory), then becoming conscious of how you're not doing them right and correcting that, then again going back to doing those things unconsciously, lather, rinse, repeat until expert, then do it again.

All true but (again in my experience), I’ve found muscle memory improvements by basically dropping all of my work on developing it and staring all over, and I’ve found music writing/stylistic creativity improvements by just atrophying muscle memory and coming back feeling like I don’t know anything [about what I’m trying to do] at all.

I have seen this too. My pet theory is that, at all times, the brain is busy doing gradient descent on all the problems you have ever encountered in your life. Everything is getting improved in parallel. So when you step away from the problem for months at a time and come back you are reaping the benefits of all that background computation.

Alternatively, you where doing gradient decent with daily practice but got stuck at a local minima. Taking a real break helps you get past that.

However, I don’t think either represent what’s actually happening very well.

I think what happens is that during the active learning part you heavily overfit and end up in a local minima. Afterwards life acts like a regularisation, and when you return to it you are no longer in a minima but now have a gradient to descend on again.

I've experienced the same thing, but always had to wonder: maybe you're on an underlying trajectory of improvement fueled by practice, which is not influenced by brief breaks.

However, after a break, you notice all the improvement that has accumulated during the break. By contrast, when you practice daily, the day to day changes are small and you don't notice them.

I’ve been taking drawing classes and been trying to draw everyday for the last ~6 months, during the holidays I didn’t draw for 10 days due to being with family, when I got back to it it shocked me how much I had improved.

It’s so great when it happens! I’m glad you took a break and came back to big improvements.

I can relate, and I have to commend how well your comment put my in the picture for the article.

I have another hobby, that is language learning and etymology, which is notoriously plagued by false cognates and false friends. Arguably, forgetting about illconceived notions requires inhibition. Once I forgot about it, I will gladly accept the mainstream opinion.

I have experienced something similar in my general learning patterns -- and, being 35+, I don't think this has always been like that. Might well be that information overload etc has actually amplified this kind of impulsive learning sprints ("learning in bursts") for many of us.

This definitely shifted for me with age, with (again for me I don’t want to overgeneralize) bigger improvements and bigger gaps as I aged. I don’t think I could seriously describe playing guitar well until I was in my late 20s and couldn’t say it with much confidence until my mid 30s.

As far as information overload, it was my late-mid 30s when I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I have a lot of sensory sensitivities. I barely even listen to music right now.

I have experienced exactly what you're describing. I want to find out what the minimum effective layoff time is, however, so I can do it deliberately rather than randomly, and hopefully maximize the rate at which my playing progresses.

I don’t know if it works that way. I vouched for your comment because I think it’s a bummer it was dead, but I can’t say I’ve ever used breaks or falling out of practice as leverage and I don’t think it would be healthy for me to think of it like that.

Enjoy taking a break. It’s good for you, or at least necessary when you need to. Be present and grateful when you come back from a break and see improvements. And build on that if you feel like you have the momentum then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com