My thought is too much focus on a thing can cause blockages in the deeper processing of that thing.

I'm sure many engineers are familiar with the concept of banging their head against the keyboard all day on what's a seemingly simple issue/bug, only to find the solution miraculously appear hours later in their heads out of thin air - maybe over dinner talking to a friend, maybe awaking in the middle of the night, maybe in the shower the next morning. The point is it all happened a good chunk of time away from the glow of the screen with their debugger at hand. It's a combination of having space to process subconsciously which is often spurred on by a context switch.

I imagine a similar thing happens with learning, perhaps even the act of trying to recall something that happened in the past itself causes a deeper processing/association in your brain. All of a sudden you're not relying so much on rote memory but deeper, somewhat disparate contextual cues to aid in the recall.

Being creative (debugging loosely falls in that category) and learning has to be different. When creating or inventing you can fall well and truly inside the box, taking a break helps you think outside the box, learning sounds like the more in the box/zone the more you get it.

TLDR; sometimes you want a new perspective, sometime re-energise, taking a break is an easy way to get both. You

But that's the thing - I believe deep learning is actually a creative process. The new information needs to fit in your existing model of what you already know/believe, and doing so is a creative endeavor. The more you move away from that the more you end up with rote memorization.

That's why people respond better to different teaching styles, different angles of explanation, top-down vs. bottom-up, etc - because they better align with how their creative mind works.

Over studying is a real thing. The most common study techniques are the most ineffective, specifically rereading and cramming.

Paridoxically, the close you are to forgetting something when you review it, the better the learning is. Specifically, the more effort it takes to recall it, the better you learn

To a degree: if you over-strain to recall, you’ll actually train your brain to struggle with that item. Better to limit the time you spend retrying to recall before giving up and looking up the answer.

Is there any empirical evidence for that? Not saying it's wrong, but it's unintuitive.

I think there's probably a high correlation between consistently straining to remember something, and some form of interference going on - the better option would likely be to cut short the effort to recall, and instead identify why recall was difficult, identify any interfering information and devise a way to better remember it.

So in short, I think consistently struggling to recall something is an indication that you need to build a better recall strategy for it.

I'm interested to know why you think it's unintuitive. Certainly it matches my personal experience very well. For example, I have certain Anki cards which I see and immediately think "oh God, not this card again, this one's really difficult" whether or not I actually know the answer to it.

I think its unintuitive because I have flashcards that I now have memorized pat that took me ages to recall easily.

Of course I don't think of them as bad, only "If its hard to remember, it'll be hard to forget". Aka, the ones that I have a hard time learning are the ones I always remember. I'll probably never forget the german word for security guard, die Sicherheitsbedienstete but it took me ages to memorize it.

For some odd reason that is my intuition, which appears to be not that of everyone. But my approach to learning is "failure is a good thing, its how you learn", which might be all the difference amounts to in the end.

That's a good approach. I suspect, for others (and in my experience) when one consistently comes to The Difficult Card, they might have spent more time remembering that it was hard to remember than remembering the answer.

Or, they agonize over the answer for too long, then when they flip it over, they think "Of course!" but move along almost immediately.

And I think you're right also; when you finally get it, it's hard to forget.

That gives me an idea for a personal experiment. Have a session or two where your default attitude to every card is "this is really easy" and try not to think of any card as difficult in any way. Compare your recall percentage for the session compared to previous ones (Anki's statistics are great for this). I'll try this experiment myself.

There is an inverted U relationship between cortisol levels and memory formation. Going from no stress to low stress enhances learning, but as stress levels continue to increase learning begins to degrade. This relationship is well documented in the scientific literature.

> In each case, the researchers simply asked the participants to sit in a dim, quiet room, without their mobile phones or similar distractions. “We don’t give them any specific instructions with regards to what they should or shouldn’t do while resting,” Dewar says. “But questionnaires completed at the end of our experiments suggest that most people simply let their minds wander.”

I agree. It's no brainer that repetition helps retention. If you gave your mind a time to think about what you learned, obviously you would retain it more.

I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associations with the new information (coming from my auditory sensory registers), so I context-switch involuntarily every second. Think of process preemption.

Roughly like this:

   t0: hear the word "dog";
       my auditory registers record it

   t1: my brain processes the word "dog";
       I imagine what "dog" looks like
       hear the word "cat" concurrently, goes into registers

   t2: my brain processes the word "cat"
       I imagine what "cat" looks like
       hear the word "lamb" concurrently, goes into registers
   

This works all thanks to the fact our auditory sensory registers can withhold information longer than visual's (and the reason why we tend to forget what we see).

> if they simply provide opportunity to think more about material, which would obviously give an advantage as compared to the people in the studies "controls" that have to learn new information.

The second point I want to make is eyewitness testimony and memory biases. Given enough time, a witness can tell untruth. There is a limit to how long we can keep the "truth" in our brain. Long-term memory is not a perfect storage system. Without rote rehearsal, our memories will decay. During our sleep, some believe (at least this is how I was taught in my class) that the brain will do "garbage collection", basically removing things the brain don't think is important.

Onto the third and the last point. Our brain can develop by forming new neurons (or undevelop skills by killing neurons). When a person becomes deaf after an accident, then his/her speech ability will lose over time. Thanks to our neuroplasticity, we can reverse the change by learning again, though we may not recover 100%. This is happening to me: some of my cognitive functions have stopped functioning well after an accident last summer, I have been trying hard to recover, even though there are some improvements, I don't know how much can recover. In general, I am impaired and disabled.

I just started my neuroscience studies, so I recommend reading on dendrite spines. They are "cute" and play vital role involving memory.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM

* https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm0121...

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X1...