Brain Breaks

We all know that practice makes perfect, but can taking short breaks between practices actually increase your productivity? That's what a team set out to find out from the National Institutes of Health. When we learn new skills like playing an instrument, or doing a specific movement in sports, we train our brains to remember them. The scientist discovered that taking short breaks is actually key to learning and preforming complex movements like these effectively and efficiently. The reason this works is because the brain kind of consolidates all that it just learned in the past time. To figure how this works in terms of the actual anatomy of the brain, a study was conducted at NIH Clinic, and the team there used a technique called magnetoencephalography, which will record the brain waves of 33, adult right handed people. To figure how this works in terms of the actual anatomy of the brain, a study was conducted at NIH Clinic, and the team there used a technique called magnetoencephalography, which will record the brain waves of 33, adult right handed people. They were tested on typing a code. The participants were told to type the code over and over again for 10 seconds, and then take a 10 second break. They did this 35 times. What happened was that the typing increasingly improved, and then leveled off at the 11th time. A similar test was done, but with a night's sleep, a greater result came in typing. So now, you know that taking a break isn't all so bad.