National Institutes of Health researchers have found that the brains of healthy volunteers were able to solidify the skills they learned a few seconds earlier if they paused for a short break, indicating the important role that rest has on learning new skills.
“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.”
Lead researcher Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., had thought the human brain required long periods of sleep in order to strengthen the memories it forms when learning something new. Not entirely so, according to this study in which the researchers recorded the brain waves of 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.
The volunteers were able to type numbers correctly dramatically faster during the first few trials before leveling off around the 11th cycle, said the researchers.
“I noticed that participants’ brain waves seemed to change much more during the rest periods than during the typing sessions,” said Dr. Bönstrup in an NIH news release. “This gave me the idea to look much more closely for when learning was actually happening. Was it during practice or rest?”
Performance improved mostly during the short rests rather than when typing and improvements made during the rest periods added up to the overall gains the volunteers made that day. Additionally, the advances 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.
Also, certain activity patterns suggested that the brains were “consolidating or solidifying” their memories when resting for short duration and that changes in the size of the brain waves (beta rhythms), were connected to the improvements.
In conclusion, the research indicates additional “analysis suggests 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.”
