debunking

Given the need to want to study a specific topic efficiently, we can do numerous searches for the best technique to achieve itespecially those of us who are students. At first, science and education have maintained an almost unbreakable dogma: for a brain to associate two events and learn, constant repetition is the key. but now nuances have been added. What we do. Nowadays, it can be a study technique to stay up all night with coffee in hand trying to cram an entire syllabus intensely in a short period of time. This way, we only see the syllabus once and never again. But this is not the best study, reading or productivity technique in general. An evolution. For decades, classical learning models, such as those based on traditional reinforcement learning, assumed that the more times you are exposed to a stimulus followed by a reward (or hit), the faster you learn. However, a revolutionary study from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), led by researcher and published recently in Nature Neuroscience has shown that we were looking at the problem backwards. And we saw it the other way around because the important thing in study is not how many times we expose ourselves to new knowledge, but the time that has passed between two temporal moments in which we have begun to study a concept. And this is precisely what tools such as the famous flashcards that appear in the educational field with increasing force take advantage of. What has been seen? The research team in this case carried out experiments with mice where dopamine was measured that freed your brain, pointing to the fact that the learning rate scales proportionally with the time interval between rewards, and not with the number of trials. To understand it easily, if a mouse has a long interval between two stimuli, it needs much fewer repetitions for its brain to release the dopamine necessary to consolidate what it has learned. This is why we see how the brain optimizes learning based on the total time invested in a spaced manner, making quick and repetitive bursts of study very ineffective. Because? We already know that spacing out study is best for our memory, but… Why does this happen? Here science tells us that dopamine acts as a very specific teaching signal in our brain circuits. In this way, when learning something new, dopamine updates our “predictions” retrospectively. When we try to understand why our memory works this way, we see that too much dopamine during intensive initial learning can even impair early memory consolidation, causing us to be so overwhelmed that we retain nothing. But when it has time to act, it has the ability to strengthen the synapses to establish knowledge in our long-term memory. Simply put, if we don’t let the brain rest between repetitions, the neurochemical consolidation processes are not allowed to do their job. In real life. As we have been repeating, this is the scientific basis that establishes the bases of the study focused on flashcards or even in well-known applications such as Duolingo to learn languages. These systems take advantage of spaced repetition to maximize the retention in memory of the new knowledge they are faced with. And in case evidence is missing, a study done on medical students has shown that using double-spaced repetition techniques compared to single-spaced or traditional intensive study increases long-term knowledge retention drastically, since 62% retention is achieved, while before the study 52% was retained. Images | sq lim In Xataka | People who go to the library to study do not do it for show: science is clear that it is very productive