In a study published in the journal Current Biology, a team of researchers from the United States, Switzerland and Israel found that taking short breaks, early and often, may help our brains learn new skills.

“Everyone thinks you need to ‘practice, practice, practice’ when learning something new,” said study co-lead author Dr. Leonardo Cohen, senior investigator at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

“Instead, we found that resting, early and often, may be just as critical to learning as practice.”
Like many scientists, Dr. Cohen and his colleagues from Tel Aviv University, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne held the general belief that our brains needed long periods of rest, such as a good night’s sleep, to strengthen the memories formed while practicing a newly learned skill.

But after looking at brain waves recorded from healthy volunteers in learning and memory experiments, they started to question the idea.

The waves were recorded from 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.

As expected, the volunteers’ speed at which they correctly typed the numbers improved dramatically during the first few trials and then leveled off around the 11th cycle.

When the researchers looked at the volunteers’ brain waves they observed something interesting.

“We noticed that participants’ brain waves seemed to change much more during the rest periods than during the typing sessions,” said study co-lead author Dr. Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

“This gave me the idea to look much more closely for when learning was actually happening. Was it during practice or rest?”

By reanalyzing the data, the scientists made two key findings.

First, they found that the volunteers’ performance improved primarily during the short rests, and not during typing. The improvements made during the rest periods added up to the overall gains the volunteers made that day. Moreover, these gains 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.

Second, by looking at the brain waves, the study authors found activity patterns that suggested the volunteers’ brains were consolidating, or solidifying, memories during the rest periods.

Specifically, they found that the changes in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms, correlated with the improvements the volunteers made during the rests.

Further analysis suggested that the 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.

“Our results suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of rest intervals when implementing rehabilitative treatments in stroke patients or when learning to play the piano in normal volunteers,” Dr. Cohen said.

“Whether these results apply to other forms of learning and memory formation remains an open question.”