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Andy’s Quick Hits (55): Breaks During Learning Lead to More Effective Brain Activation
One of my most popular quick hits here on medium was this one where I reported on research that showed that breaks as short as ten seconds can increase the effectiveness of learning.
This effect of taking breaks to increase learning is well known, known as spacing, and most people know it. But we so far haven’t known the actual underlying biological basis of this is. And research just out from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft investigating this has come up with a surprising result.
They put mice through various maze learning tasks while tracking activation of neurons. What they found, which was surprising, is that when the mice repeated tasks without breaks they ended up activating different neurons. This is counterintuitive — you would expect the same neurons to be activated particularly when the tasks are close together. In contrast when the tasks were spaced out, and recall was much better, the mice activated much similar, and smaller, patterns of neurons.
