In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health
researchers found that our brains may solidify the memories of new skills we
just practiced a few seconds earlier by taking a short rest. The results
highlight the critically important role rest may play in learning.
“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 NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and a senior
author of the paper published in the journal Current Biology. “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.”
The study was led by Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow in
Dr. Cohen’s lab. Like many scientists, she held the general belief that our
brains needed long periods of rest, such as a good night’s sleep, to strengthen
the memories formed while practicing a newly learned skill. But after looking
at brain waves recorded from healthy volunteers in learning and memory
experiments at the NIH Clinical Center, she started to
question the idea.
The waves were
recorded from right-handed volunteers with a highly sensitive scanning
technique called magnetoencephalography. The subjects sat in a chair facing a
computer screen and under a long cone-shaped brain scanning cap. The experiment
began when they were shown a series of numbers on a screen and asked to type
the numbers as many times as possible with their left hands for 10 seconds;
take a 10 second break; and then repeat this trial cycle of alternating
practice and rest 35 more times. This strategy is typically used to reduce any
complications that could arise from fatigue or other factors.
As expected, the
volunteers’ speed at which they correctly typed the numbers improved
dramatically during the first few trials and then leveled off around the 11th
cycle. When Dr. Bönstrup looked at the volunteers’ brain waves she observed
something interesting.
“I noticed that
participants’ brain waves seemed to change much more during the rest periods
than during the typing sessions,” said Dr. Bönstrup. “This gave me the idea to
look much more closely for when learning was actually happening. Was it during
practice or rest?”
By reanalyzing
the data, she and her colleagues made two key findings. First, they found that
the volunteers’ performance improved primarily during the short rests, and not
during typing. The improvements made during the rest periods added up to the
overall gains the volunteers made that day. Moreover, these gains were much
greater than the ones seen after the volunteers returned the next day to try
again, suggesting that the early breaks played as critical a role in learning
as the practicing itself.
Second, by
looking at the brain waves, Dr. Bönstrup found activity patterns that suggested
the volunteers’ brains were consolidating, or solidifying, memories during the
rest periods. Specifically, they found that the changes in the size of brain
waves, called beta rhythms, correlated with the improvements the volunteers
made during the rests.
Further analysis
suggested that the changes in beta oscillations primarily happened in the right
hemispheres of the volunteers’ brains and along neural networks connecting the
frontal and parietal lobes that are known to help control the planning of movements.
These changes only happened during the breaks and were the only brain wave
patterns that correlated with performance.
“Our results
suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of
rest intervals when implementing rehabilitative treatments in stroke patients
or when learning to play the piano in normal volunteers,” said Dr. Cohen.
“Whether these results apply to other forms of learning and memory formation
remains an open question.”
Dr. Cohen’s team
plans to explore, in greater detail, the role of these early resting periods in
learning and memory.
Journal article: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30219-2
Source: https://myfusimotors.com/2020/02/24/want-to-learn-a-new-skill-take-some-short-breaks/
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