To Master Test Material, Give Your Brain a Break

When struggling to solve a problem, the brain slips into “focused mode.” The trick, says Barbara Oakley, author of A Mind for Numbers, is zooming back out into “diffuse mode” so that larger neural networks can toss the problem around and, hopefully, come to a solution. Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison did so by taking the briefest of naps; Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, by heading out for a walk. These and other tricks for learning are the subject of Oakley’s book and another—How We Learn, by New York Times science writer Benedict Carey, who writes that forgetting is the greatest ally of learning. (Read an excerpt from A Mind for Numbers here, and see how good you are at learning with Carey’s quiz. Finally, check out call-in guest AnnMarie Thomas’s Squishy Circuits activity.)