A woman learning how to play guitar.
Learning a new skill means studying and then practice, practice, practice. That might mean learning how to read music and then playing “Für Elise” by Beethoven over and over again. Or, if you’re learning to speak French, you have to memorize the words and then hone your pronunciation through repetition. But what would happen if you gave your brain a moment during practice to really soak in what it was doing instead of a nonstop information dump?
How to learn things faster
A 2021 study from the National Institutes of Health found that when you’re studying a new skill and practicing, you can speed up your progress by taking short breaks. Instead of keeping your head in the piano and playing for 45 minutes straight, your brain does a better job at encoding new information if you drop in a series of 10-second breaks.
The strategy makes a lot of sense for this simple reason: your brain has difficulty encoding and learning new information simultaneously. So why not give it a second to catch up?
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"Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced," the senior author of the study said, according to Fox 13 Seattle. "Understanding this role of neural replay may not only help shape how we learn new skills but also how we help patients recover skills lost after neurological injury like stroke."
How to use the 10-second memory technique
There isn’t any official time limit between when you should take a break and let your mind encode the new information. Still, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman suggests that “every few minutes” you stop what you’re doing, clear your mind, and let your brain encode the information for 10 seconds. “Now, you actually have to do the work, and how many of these to insert? It should be random,” Huberman said.
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So, if you were playing “Für Elise” on the piano, set a time for five minutes of intense playing, then when the alarm goes off, sit still for ten seconds and clear your mind of everything, almost like a meditation. Then your brain will kick into action, like a computer booting up, and encode what you just learned. Next, set a timer for three minutes; after the next encode break, set a timer for seven minutes, and so on.
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The researchers tested their hypothesis by placing a brain-scanning cap on right-handed participants who were shown a series of numbers on a computer screen and asked to type them as many times as possible with their left hand. The gains were even greater for those who did the 10-second breaks than for those who had just had a great night’s rest.
Ultimately, the 10-second technique makes a lot of sense because it’s a lot harder to concentrate on something when doing two things at the same time. You’ve got to give your brain a moment to jot down notes instead of learning and writing at the same time.
At the end of the day, what’s not to like about the 10-second technique? You get to take a break and improve your skills at the same time.