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Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

ninds.nih.gov

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Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#81

Post by ajuc »

random_kris wrote: post #74
tjbiddle wrote: post #24

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…

This has happend to me with video games. Been really trying to get good at fortnite in februrary/march and I actually got quite good but hit some kind of a mindblock... Then due to busy life I couldn't play for a month. Got sick 3 days ago and been staying home and playing it and I am noticably better than I was a month ago. So maybe alternating in playing for a 14 days and then taking a break for few days could do s…

This may be caused by other factors as well. Some multiplayer games tweak matchmaking algorithms to increase addictivness - after you stop playing for some time when you return they will put you in easier games for a while to make you win and hook you again. Same happens when you are on a long losing streak.

More: https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/ea-using-unfair-matchmaki...

I've been to a few gamedev conferences and some of the monetization lectures sound like taken straight from a movie villain. They calculate the perfect intervals to invoke the skinner box response, and to milk it for the most microtransactions money.

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#82

Post by acura »

lanewinfield wrote: post #43

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?

Isn't there people that actually needs less sleep?

And needing less sleep could be an explanation to why they reach these levels?

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#83

Post by agumonkey »

tjbiddle wrote: post #24

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…

I'm a self taught jack of all trades. What you describe is ultra common in music. I used to obsess for hours on exercises and quickly got nowhere. Whereas not doing anything for a week and going back to the instrument, everything was in place without even trying. Super odd at first.

Recently I've been trying to learn electrochemistry and electromechanics, by copying youtube videos, which is different from doing it in real life (the consequences can be lethal at times). And I've noticed an amplified version of the music pause-improvement. When I'm stuck on a project, 6 monthes later I wake up one morning and feel 1) confident, 2) motivated, 3) sure about some ideas I didn't really see before

Again, nothing but time away from the task and again, very odd.

Got me thinking about progress and time. You can clearly see the steps taken by people or groups in lifting up their lives. You do a bit, live this way, wait, and one day you make a new step. There's a natural rhythm. Except for the illuminated that can skip gaps over the average person of course.

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#84

Post by dalbasal »

ramblerman wrote: post #66

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.

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.

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#85

Post by random_kris »

ajuc wrote: post #81
random_kris wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happend to me with video games. Been really trying to get good at fortnite in februrary/march and I actually got quite good but hit some kind of a mindblock... Then due to busy life I couldn't play for a month. Got sick 3 days ago and been staying home and playing it and I am noticably better than I was a month ago. So maybe alternating in playing for a 14 days and then taking a break for few days could do s…

This may be caused by other factors as well. Some multiplayer games tweak matchmaking algorithms to increase addictivness - after you stop playing for some time when you return they will put you in easier games for a while to make you win and hook you again. Same happens when you are on a long losing streak. More: https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/ea-using-unfair-matchmaki... I've been to a few gamedev conferences a…

Hmm maybe it could be matchmaking. But I was thinking more about in-game skills. Fortnite is quite intensive in button spamming, lots of different variations based on your position + 360 movment of your mouse. And I noticed great improvements in this area.

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#86

Post by jddj »

shard wrote: post #53
Razengan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I’ve experienced this first hand, almost like a tangible thing, while learning a language. Whenever I came back to it after a break, sometimes after months of no exposure to the language, I was sometimes surprised to find myself being able to understand some new dialogue without looking at subt…

Although I wonder if the break is really necessary. I have taken an intensive language course (10 weeks, full language immersion and homework from waking to sleeping every weekday), and the full brunt of the language skills I learned didn't hit me until ~2 months later, where I find myself understanding the learned language constructs intuitively without deliberate analysis. It may just be that it takes time for one'…

Anecdotally my experience would suggest that they are important.

As someone living in one European country where English is less frequently spoken and occasionally traveling for work to others where English is more prevalent, I always felt that I could notice a real improvement in my second language upon returning "home" after speaking English for three or four days.

Incidentally, those same breaks usually resulted in improvements in rock- climbing (which are a bit easier to measure objectively because of the grading system), but I tended to attribute that to a full recovery / perhaps I was over-training.

Thinking about it now, maybe it's odd that I always accepted that the stenuous physical activities naturally needed a recovery period while assuming that I could just keep hammering at the mentally taxing skills day after day.

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#87

Post by agumonkey »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #41
tjbiddle wrote: post #24

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…

This may be true, but the article is talking about 10 second breaks so it's a little bit different from what you're describing.

it may be a similar principle of system mutation, gp is more discrete than the article

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#89

Post by p1esk »

Iv wrote: post #72
tjbiddle wrote: post #24

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…

What I noticed a few years ago when I decided to bring myself up to date again on machine learning after a ten years break (and what ten years that was for the domain!) I read a ton and watched several online classes. I realized that the pace was very different from the classes I had been during my student years: classes were boring, so I had time to think about stuff. The rhythm that I found worked really well for s…

I thought the point of the breaks was not to “think about it”.

Re: Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks

#90

Post by Expez »

beaker52 wrote: post #78
hanniabu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 m…

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.

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