How to Learn Skills Faster
How taking short breaks may help our brains learn new skills faster.
“Practice makes perfect” is a popular phrase used to emphasize the importance of practice in acquiring and perfecting skills. During distributed practices — cycles of alternating practice and rest periods — consolidation of skill is greater than when the same total amount of practice is performed over longer continuous blocks (massed practice).
So we can say that “much, if not all” skill learning occurs offline during rest rather than during actual practice. This rapid form of skill memory consolidation, micro-offline gains, suggests that it develops over a much shorter timescale than previously thought. It is even roughly 4-fold greater in magnitude than studied overnight skill consolidation required sleep.
To further study these findings, researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered why taking short breaks from practice is a key to learning by mapping out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill.
Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in Cell Reports said:
“Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as…
