In a study of healthy volunteers, researchers found that our brains were able to reinforce memories of new skills learned just a few seconds earlier by resting. The results emphasize the extremely important role rest can play in learning.
"Everyone thinks you have to 'practice, practice, practice' when you learn something new, but instead we found that rest, early and often is just as important to learn as practice," said the researcher.
Like many scientists, the researcher was convinced that our brains needed long periods of rest, such as a good night's sleep, to reinforce the memories formed while practicing a newly learned skill. But after looking at brain waves recorded in healthy volunteers in learning and memory experiments, she began to question the idea.
The waves were recorded from right-handed volunteers using a highly sensitive scanning technique. The participants sat in a chair facing a computer screen and under a long cone-shaped brain-scanning cap. The experiment started when they were shown a series of numbers on a screen and asked to type the numbers in with their left hands as many times as possible for 10 seconds; then take a 10-second break; and then repeat this trial cycle of alternating practice and rest 35 times. This strategy is usually used to reduce any complications due to fatigue or other factors.
As expected, the volunteers' speed with which they correctly typed the numbers improved significantly during the first few trials and leveled off around the 11th cycle. When the researcher looked at the brain waves of the volunteers, she observed something interesting.
"I noticed that participants' brain waves seem to change a lot more during the rest periods than during the typing sessions," the researcher said. “This gave me the idea to look much more closely at when the learning actually happened. Was it during practice or rest?”
By reanalyzing the data, she and her colleagues made two key findings. First, they found that the volunteers' performance improved mainly during the short rest periods, and not during typing. The improvements made during the rest periods were in addition to the overall progress made by the volunteers that day. In addition, these benefits were much greater than those seen after the volunteers returned the following day to try again, suggesting that the early breaks played a critical role in learning as well as practice itself.
Specifically, they found that the changes in brain wave size, called beta rhythms, correlated with the improvements the volunteers made during rest.
Further analysis suggested that the changes in beta oscillations occurred primarily in the right hemispheres of the volunteers' brains and along neural networks connecting the frontal and parietal lobes known to help control movement planning. These changes only happened during the breaks and were the only brainwave patterns that correlated with performance.
