Suze

“studies show that “deep sleep,” which is concentrated in the first half of the night, is most valuable for retaining hard facts—names, dates, formulas, concepts. If you’re preparing for a test that’s heavy on retention (foreign vocabulary, names and dates, chemical structures), it’s better to hit the sack at your usual time, get that full dose of deep sleep, and roll out of bed early for a quick review.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“The definition of a mathematician is a person who carries around the concept in their head for long enough that, one day, they sit down and realize that it’s familiar.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Studies in animals have found direct evidence of “crosstalk” between distinct memory-related organs (the hippocampus and the neocortex, described in chapter 1) during sleep, as if the brain is reviewing, and storing, details of the most important events of the day—and integrating the new material with the old.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Zeigarnik’s studies on interruption revealed a couple of the mind’s intrinsic biases, or built-in instincts, when it comes to goals. The first is that the act of starting work on an assignment often gives that job the psychological weight of a goal, even if it’s meaningless. (The people in her studies were doing things like sculpting a dog from a lump of clay, for heaven’s sake; they got nothing out of it but the satisfaction of finishing.) The second is that interrupting yourself when absorbed in an assignment extends its life in memory and—according to her experiments—pushes it to the top of your mental to-do list.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens