this is the secret to learning anything faster based on neuroscience it's called the gap effect here's how it was discovered they look at people learning a new skill either physical or mental could be jujitsu or skills on a piano at random times a buzzer goes off when that happens they have to take ten seconds and do nothing eyes closed or open doesn't matter just be still and quiet when they look at brain activity during these so-called micro arrests what they find is super cool in the hippocampus and the neocortex both associated with learning and memory what was just learned gets replayed forward and backwards sped up by a factor of twenty so if you're learning something that's twenty seconds long the whole thing gets squeezed down to one second and then played back and forth in your brain repeatedly this accelerates learning people who take these ten second rest periods learn significantly faster than ones who don't kinda crazy that doing nothing can be so powerful