Need a study break to refresh? Maybe not, say Stanford researchers

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/october/willpower-resource-study-101410.html

by Brashman • 16 years ago

60 29 16 years ago

news.stanford.edu

Jach• 16 years ago

I'd like to see more research into this, but perhaps they can try it out on young children who haven't yet formed solid beliefs about the nature of willpower (or even contemplated it for that matter). You can even teach groups of them one theory or another as separate variables to agnosticism. I still believe willpower is a limited resource but I'd bet people's beliefs about it can lead to underestimating the limit. (Self-fulfilling prophecies play in too.)

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

What can I say, sometimes by 6AM my edge is considerably dulled, and a bit of a break can help fight off total exhaustion.

There's also writer's block-ish occasions where you keep staring at one problem and it's like beating your head on a brick wall, but if you step away and have a cup of tea and come back, that tough problem unravels itself in front of you.

I've also used the "I need a break" when I know that I'm simply out of juice for the day, and not going to make any more progress (particularly when I have something else heavy on my mind). It's not a break, I don't come back to it for at least a day, but it lets me walk away without feeling like a failure.

akjetma• 16 years ago

I've spent hours looking at simple statics problems that I know I should be able to solve in fifteen minutes, but just can't for whatever reason. It's like I've gotten on the wrong mental track early on and can only move further along that track or backwards. I'll give up for the moment to go eat or see some friends or just make contact with the outside world for an hour or so and during that time, the answer presents itself without much effort. I can then come back and redo the problem within 20 minutes.

I wonder, though, if these epiphanies could have happened without the hour long struggle preceding it. Leaving a problem, it feels as if my mind is untangling itself and organizing this mess of thoughts.

What I would really like to see some research on is the mental barrier between myself and starting the work in the first place. I'm looking at it right now... :|

nkassis• 16 years ago

Well I don't think the article is speaking about infinite energy here. If you are truly tired, you will need sleep but some people claim needing a break every 10-15 minutes of studying. That's the kind of stuff the article seems to talk about.

I know I have that problem, I'll loose focus easily. I can work out 5-6 lines of code and start drifting off. But when things are working out good, I can focus on it for hours just spurting out code. I love those moments. The point is, you still need sleep but procrastinating on HN every 20 minutes is a bad thing (Talking to myself here ;p)

fylox2• 16 years ago

I still think that frequent breaks are important as they help change thinking patterns.

Hates_• 16 years ago

Is that a good example of what the article states though? "The belief in it is what influences your behavior."

fylox2• 16 years ago

No, I don't think so. I was referring to emptying your short term memory so that unwanted thoughts don't disturb your thinking.

gjm11• 16 years ago

It looks to me as if what the study shows is not that willpower is not, after all, a limited resource but thinking of your willpower as a limited resource makes you have less of it. That's quite interesting (though not, I'd have thought, a big surprise) but not nearly as interesting as it would be if they'd actually shown that it's only thinking of willpower as limited that limits it.

noglorp• 16 years ago

Practice makes perfect.

dools• 16 years ago

Funnily enough, I actually take a nap sometimes when I can't figure out the solution to a problem or I'm going around in circles.

Perhaps it's not realy sleep, but more often than not I wake up with the solution, or at least more ready to tackle the solution.

I've also found almost ubiquitously that whatever had me completely confounded the night before is a hell of a lot easier to work out in the morning.

Perhaps it's just me but I find that sleep for me is a natural reaction to mental stress, and I always feel better afterwards.

kirvyteo• 16 years ago

Hey me too! It happen on more than one occasion so I know it can't be coincidental. Very often, I will get stuck in debugging a programming problem and after spending hours on it, I give up and take a nap. When I wake up either the next day or hours later, the solution presents itself after working on it for a couple of minutes. It is like a nap reboots our brains (there are lots of articles about sleep and synapses).

mironathetin• 16 years ago

It think these are two different things.

Our brains can go on working on the problem even if we take a rest. If we rest with a the problem in our head, we are actually still focused. Probably, relaxing and letting the brain do its job without forcing it into one direction, often results in a good solution. Same with me, btw.

The study, as I have understood it, is more about giving up with a problem. You give up faster, if you think your resources are limited. It is more the contrast between either you relax in order to solve a problem, or have some beers with your friends talking about soccer and thus escape.

lmx• 16 years ago

I find that after throwing myself at a problem too long, I have a hard time approaching it differently from how I've been approaching it.

Sleep seems to reset my mind. If I approach the same problem after waking up, I come up with a fresh perspective.

On the other hand, if I'm "in the zone" before I go to sleep, I wake up and it's gone.

I think that also explains my tendency to stay up till 7AM... need to take advantage of the productivity boost while it lasts.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

I thought I'd read that you need sleep to learn. So practising your musical instrument for hours doesn't actually make you better until after you've slept and the brain has had a chance to process the input in some manner.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

It's tempting to draw a sports/body analogy. Repetition sets up your body for change. Rest and recovery (including sleep) is when you actually change.

Nemisis7654• 16 years ago

So, if I just BELIEVED that I could keep studying last night for my algorithms exam today, I could have stayed up all night and had a good study session? I wish I had believed that...

nooneelse• 16 years ago

Not sleeping is counter productive to the goal of learning and retaining information.

norswap• 16 years ago

<<"If you think of willpower as something that's biologically limited, you're more likely to be tired when you perform a difficult task," said Veronika Job, the paper's lead author. "But if you think of willpower as something that is not easily depleted, you can go on and on.">>

This really bothered me. Maybe if you think that willpower is not easy depleted, it is because you have more of it than the people who think it is.

This being said, I personnaly believe that if willpower is limited, it can at least be trained to seem like it isn't.

godawful• 16 years ago

I agree.

Another quotation from the article:

"They also found that leading up to final exam week, students who bought into the limited resource theory ate junk food 24 percent more often than those who believed they had more control in resisting temptation. The limited resource believers also procrastinated 35 percent more than the other group."

Perhaps people with poor self-control, who would eat junk food and procrastinate anyway, are more prone to believe that willpower is biologically limited. This saves them from having to take responsibility for their negative behaviour.

If that were the case, the causality would run in the opposite direction.

jessriedel2• 16 years ago

They covered that objection in the paper, which is available free on the website of one of the authors: http://www.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Publications_files/Job...

In study #2, they manipulated people's beliefs about willpower by administering a "push poll", and then tested willpower depletion.

kd0amg• 16 years ago

In study #2, they manipulated people's beliefs about willpower by administering a "push poll", and then tested willpower depletion.

How did they determine how well the push poll influenced that belief? How did they ensure it didn't work better on those who already had less willpower?

utoku• 16 years ago

Sometimes willpower is the only thing you have when others say you don't.

GHFigs• 16 years ago

The article sort of pits this study and theory of ego depletion as mutually incompatible, but I think that's probably an exaggeration, either by the author of the article or the authors of the paper. That beliefs can influence ego depletion is not a new finding, nor is it inconsistent with there being a physiological basis.

It doesn't even really sound like they are addressing the theory itself but some particular implication. For instance, the belief that you need to take frequent breaks while studying does not follow directly from the belief that self-regulation is a limited resource.

Personally, as a "believer" of the latter I find the former contradictory: it is exactly what I would not do. In my view, since self-regulation is limited, taking frequent breaks is foolish because means more occasions at which you're forced to self-regulate.

I don't think I'm alone in finding that it requires significantly less willpower to continue a task already in progress than it does to re-initiate an interrupted task. Starting (and re-starting) is always the hard part. I only break when it is patently obvious that the task has already been interrupted. Purposefully taking additional breaks seems like an absurdly premature optimization extremely likely to backfire. And yet, from the sound of it, that's what they advised one group to do. Does this mean I secretly believe in unlimited willpower?

webwright• 16 years ago

"It doesn't even really sound like they are addressing the theory itself but some particular implication."

Agreed. This is just another priming study-- NOT a willpower study. Here's another:

"But the priming effect does not just affect our behavior. It can also, incredibly, have significant effects on our actual performance. In another study cited by Gladwell, two groups of students were asked to answer forty-two questions from the game Trivial Pursuit. But first, one group was first asked to sit and think about professors, the other to think about soccer hooligans. And the difference was dramatic: an average of 55.6% of the questions were answered correctly by the first group, while only 42.6% were answered correctly by the second. How can these results be explained? Can priming somehow temporarily infuse the brain with an expanded store of facts? Obviously not. Instead, what seems to be happening is that encouraging people to "think smart" briefly increases mental qualities like their ability to focus, their sense of recall, and their ability to quickly and correctly integrate diverse pieces of information. In other words, priming does not make us more intelligent, but it does briefly make us better at using the intelligence we already have." [1]

The scarier one is about race:

"The psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half..."

1: grabbed from http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/01/priming-the-mind.html

metamemetics• 16 years ago

> "But if you think of willpower as something that is not easily depleted, you can go on and on."

That's the problem. Going on and on and on. Usually when it comes to any complex task, going on and on and on is a BAD thing. Forcing yourself to take breaks at a set interval makes you realize and optimize what it is you have actually been spending time on. And assess the next direction to take.

Working without taking breaks is like jamming down the accelerator without steering! You need to do both if you hope to do anything more complex than travelling in a straight line.

"Willpower" is a bit fuzzy and may not be a limited resource, but attentional capacity and working memory most certainly are.

Lewisham• 16 years ago

Yeah, the article has nothing to say about the effectiveness of the work being done, just that you are "working". I can bang my head against a problem all day long, but I'll find the answer in the shower.

Work smarter, not harder, right?

klodolph• 16 years ago

I like the driving analogy. It seems that whenever I'm working on a tough programming problem, if I decide to go for a walk I'll get a "eureka" moment within a couple minutes of going outside.

There's a disturbing tendency for the eureka moment to be, "Aha! I don't even need to write this program in the first place."

stcredzero• 16 years ago

Study breaks are not about replenishing willpower. They are about giving the brain some quiet time to organize the newly acquired information. Apparently, mental activity interferes with this organization process. I remember covering this 20 years ago in my psych classes. Researchers actually had one experimental group that reviewed an outline during their "break," another that took a nap, and another that was sedated. The sedated group actually retained the most information!

Now this is such common knowledge, it's hard to find the original research with a Google search. This makes me suspicious. Anyone have a reference?

Need a study break to refresh? Maybe not, say Stanford researchers

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