Managing pauses when we learn is an important skill nobody talks about. Below is a recommended superlearner strategy inspired by a discussion on our udemy course. Recently there was a very discussion on udemy (below) regarding small pauses we have when we learn. My personal opinion that we should use these pauses as one would use negative space. Therefore I will call these small pauses “negative time”.
Some little known facts
First of all let us understand what constants of time we are talking about.
| Phenomenon | Duration | Usage in superlearning |
| Microsleep | between 0.5 sec and 30 sec | analyze the section we just read |
| Page turn | around 1 sec | rest… |
| Analyze image | ~0.5 sec | prereading |
| Saccade | 0.02 sec | read the text |
| Saccadic masking | 0.01 sec | we “Go blind” and create/modify marker |
These numbers were first measured using a device called tachistoscope
You can get some more cool numbers regarding this sort of mechanical vision training here.
Do we go blind?
There are some computations showing that at least 40 min per day we spend in blindness, but our memory fills in the gaps using some cool trickery. These saccadic lapses probably cannot be controlled. Other times we consciously choose to close our eyes to get better understanding of the text or to reduce strain on our body. These microsleeps should not be confused with short 5-min breaks we take for “Pomodoro time” in order to be efficient during the day. In fact, we spend much more time not reading than we spend reading, and this is perfectly OK. When I speed up my reading above 1000wpm I notice that my comprehension starts to drop, so that comprehension x speed stays approximately constant.
Why do we need so much “time off”?
Our body and our brain were built for tracking animals in african bushes and not for speedreading “War and piece”. Therefore we do need some clever hacks for the brain to adapt to the new way of information consumption. The brain is hard-wired to track one object for a long time and not to jump between objects every 10 msec. The extra strain is above the brain’s power to process the information, and the brain starts to miss stuff. The extra rest allows to use your brain with maximal efficiency.
What is the recommended strategy?
We use 10msec saccadic mask for prepare-read-analyze cycle. At the end of each paragraph we take a longer 0.5sec break to fix the visual marker, generate its links and prepare for the next paragraph. At the end of each page we take another 1sec to day-dream and rest our eyes. At the end of each section (approximately 15 pages) we take several min to analyze what we just read and how we can use it in our life.
Below is the discussion that inspired the post:
Isabelle Turla: Time management of pauses
I would like to have a clarification between micro pauses and long pause. I have no doubt that longer pauses are consciously done, but what about short time pauses? Doesn’t the eye naturally pauses between a paragraph/page and the other (we’re talking about fractions of seconds) or is it something I have to be ‘conscious’ about? I mean is it possible to review markers in fractions of seconds?
I understand I may come from a bit of a skeptical perspective – certainly because I haven’t tried short pauses yet – but the main point of the question is to have a better understanding of what exactly I should focus on to improve in my training sessions on short pauses.
A second point: if a paragraph is interrupted by a page shift, should I first finish the paragraph instead of pausing at all costs at the end of the page? Because I normally would finish the paragraph for the sake of understanding.
Dr. Lev Gold
I kind of want to write a post about it based on omg-facts. Basically you go blind for several milliseconds and you day-dream markers during that time. This sounds surreal, but works… You do not consciously cause saccade jumps – it happens since your visual angle is limited and you want to minimize overlap between focus points.
Regarding the broken paragraph: you pause consciously at the end of the paragraph/section (logical unit) not page (physical unit). However, the physical act of turning page generates a pause which you can effectively use. Personally I use it to micro-rest (turn brain functions down for couple of milliseconds). See e.g. microsleep.
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