Taking a short rest following a learning activity to help strengthen memory consolidation

In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may solidify the memories of new skills we just practised a few seconds earlier by taking a short rest. The results highlight the critically important role rest may play in learning.
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“Everyone thinks you need to ‘practice, practice, practice’ when learning something new. Instead, we found that resting, early and often, may be just as critical to learning as practice,” said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., senior investigator at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and a senior author of the paper published in the journal Current Biology. “Our ultimate hope is that the results of our experiments will help patients recover from the paralyzing effects caused by strokes and other neurological injuries by informing the strategies they use to ‘relearn’ lost skills.”

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