What always surprises me is how "sleep" is the ingredient I need here. Yes repetition helps. But space out the repetition with sleep and "woah! i get it!" is often uttered. Obviously there's so much written about sleep as some kind of RAM to SSD offloading step, but it never ceases to amaze me when it happens so well.
back
4 comments
Yeah, or just leaving whatever it is you're trying to learn for your subconscious to process while you do other stuff.
I've found myself having a lot easier time to learn difficult new concepts by (somewhat counterintuitively) stop trying to learn it for a week or two, then come back to it, and suddenly it's a lot easier to grasp, even if I haven't consciously thought about it since I left it.
I've had concepts click in my head literally years after studying them. I have no idea why. I assume I was exposed to tangentially related information at some point, then an old thought bubbles up and it suddenly makes sense.
> What always surprises me is how "sleep" is the ingredient I need here. Yes repetition helps. But space out the repetition with sleep and "woah! i get it!" is often uttered.
I really relate to this. In fact, a lot of times, when working on a difficult problem, I’ll intentionally go take a nap when I feel stuck, and more often than not, I’ll wake up feeling like the problem is much easier than I thought before my nap. I can’t explain why it works so well—it just does!
OP here: that is an excellent point! Of the eight read-throughs, four were on Friday night, then I had dreams involving some kind of TRON-like vector spaces, and at brunch on Saturday things seemed to start gelling. The four extra read-throughs were to crystallise that intuition to a level that I felt I could start writing it up. I'm 100% sure the sleep was what built some kind of intuition at a pre-linguistic stage that I could build on.
This becomes very obvious to one's self if you learn an instrument or another mechanical/procedural thing. For example, cramming 4 hours into guitar is less useful than 1 hour over 4 days cause of sleep. Sometimes I will struggle with something for quite a bit towards the end of a practice session, and then I will get it right on the first try in my next session on the following day. Hell, there are so many times when I go to my guitar teacher and I tell him "yeah so i practiced this part of the assignment over the past week and I could never figure it out" and then I try to show him the issue and I play it mostly correctly to my surprise.
With something like learning a language, problem solving skills, a code base, new maths, or wtv, it is less apparent because the mind can delude itself, and it is much harder to delude yourself with actual physical movements. You either do it, or you don't...