Speaker 1: Now, previously, I've talked about how in the attempt to learn skills, the vital thing to do is to get lots of repetitions. Sammy should still be able to learn through repetition. You've heard of the 10,000 hours thing. You've heard of, you know, lots of different strategies for learning faster, 80-20 rule and all that. The bottom line is you need to generate many, many repetitions of something that you're trying to learn. And the errors that you generate are also very important for learning. It also turns out that taking rest within the learning episode is very important. I want to be really clear what I'm referring to here. In earlier episodes, I've discussed how when you're trying to learn something, it's beneficial. It's been shown in scientific studies that if you take a 20-minute shallow nap or you simply do nothing after a period of learning, that it enhances the rates of learning and the depth of learning, your ability to learn and remember that information. What I'm about to describe are new data that say that you actually should be injecting rest within the learning episode. I'm not talking about going to sleep while learning. This is the way that the study was done. The study involved having people learn sequences of numbers or keys on a piano. So let's use the keys on a piano example. I'm not a musician, but I think I'll get this correct. They asked people to practice a sequence of keys, G, D, F, E, G, G, D, F, E, G, G, D, F, E, G. They would practice that either continually for a given amount of time or they would just do that for 10 seconds. They would play G, D, F, E, G, G, D, F, E, G, G, D, F, E, G for 10 seconds, and then they would take a 10-second pause, a rest. They would just take a space or a period of time, but they do nothing for 10 seconds. Then they would go back to G, D, F, E, G, G, D, F, E, G. So the two conditions essentially were to have people practice continually, lots of repetitions, or to inject or insert these periods of 10 seconds idle time where they're not doing anything, they're not looking at their phone, they're not focusing on anything, they're just letting their mind drift wherever it wants to go, and they are not touching the keys on the keyboard. What they found was that the rates of learning, the skill acquisition, and the retention of the skills was significantly faster when they injected these short periods of rest, these 10-second rest periods. You might ask, why would this work? Why would it be that injecting these 10-second rest periods would enhance rates of learning? What they called them was micro-offline games because they're sort of taking their brain offline from the learning task for a moment. Well, it turns out the brain isn't going offline at all. You've probably heard of the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in memory, and the neocortex, the area of the brain that's involved in processing sensory information. Well, it turns out that during these brief periods of rest, these 10-second rest periods, the hippocampus and the cortex are active in ways such that you get a 20 times repeat of the GDFEG. It's a temporal compression, as they say. So basically the rehearsal continues while you rest, but at 20 times the speed. If you were normally getting just, let's just say, five repetitions of GDFEG, GDFEG, GDFEG per 10 seconds, now you multiply that times 20. In the rest periods, you've practiced it a hundred times. Your brain has practiced it. We know this because they were doing brain imaging, functional imaging of these people with brain scanners while they were doing this. This is an absolutely staggering effect. It's one that, believe it or not, has been hypothesized or thought to exist for a very long time. This effect is called the spacing effect, and it was actually first proposed by Ebbington in 1885. And since then, it's been demonstrated for a huge number of different, what they call domains, in the cognitive domain, so for learning languages, in the physical domain, so for learning skills that involve a motor sequence. It's been demonstrated for a huge number of different categories of learning. So the takeaway is, if you're trying to learn something, you need to get those reps in, but one way that you can get 20 times the number of reps in is by injecting these little 10 second periods of doing nothing. Again, during those rest periods, you really don't want to attend to anything else as much as possible. You could close your eyes if you want, or you can just simply wait and then get right back into generating repetitions.