Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity. He is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation fellow and recipient of the 2017 Cogan Award for his discoveries in the study of vision. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford Medicine has been consistently published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell.
According to Huberman, there is solid data from several studies on so-called gap effects. Studies ranging from both physical skills and mental skills where people will for instance try to learn the scales on the piano, or a math problem, or a spatial problem, or physical skill. Then at random, every so often, a buzzer will go off and the person will just be told to do nothing. Sit there with eyes closed, or eyes open, and do nothing. Just stopping the learning process for about 10 seconds, and then return to what they are doing after these micro rests.
It turns out that during those micro rests the hippocampus (a brain area that is associated with learning and memory), and the neocortex (another brain area which is also associated with learning and memory), undergoes reply of the thing that the individual is trying to learn at 20 times the speed, also in reverse, just as in sleep. That can lead and has been shown to lead to accelerations in learning.
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