To remember well, you need to take breaks
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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Do you know that those who study without a break risk to succeed in it less than those who allow themselves long pauses in memorizing new material?
Training and memorization are accompanied by perestroika in the brain: new information or new skills must be permanently registered in memory, new neural networks must be formed. The memory of what should be written down, as they say, is consolidated, turns from short-term into long-term.
It is known that these processes depend on sleep: if the brain is deprived of sleep, memory consolidation is very bad. In other words, if you have not had enough sleep, do not take up new material, be it higher mathematics or a musical piece. But, as studies of psychologists from the University of New South Wales (Australia) have shown, good training depends not only on whether you have slept well, but also on a competent schedule of classes. As the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, even when they are engaged in the same subject, it is important to periodically take breaks, since the transformation of memory occurs not only in sleep, but also in reality.
Scientists asked students to perform a complex task on the computer: it was necessary to monitor the movement of a group of points among the appearing and disappearing distracting images. The subjects were divided into several groups, each of which was to perform the task in its own way. One of the teams held one hour for training, the second - two hours without a break, the third - also two, but with an hour-long break. Rest could be any, at the discretion of the participants, but not a dream.
As a result, trained for one hour and engaged with a break coped with the task better than those who were trained a lot and without rest. It is important that the break was needed not as a gap between different tasks, namely as a pause in one of the same subject. It is worth noting that the data obtained by Australian psychologists resemble the recent results of researchers from the University of Southern California (USA) who reported on the benefits of waking in the clouds for the health of the nervous system.