Learn how your brain replays the things you’ve practiced at 20 times speed; and an engine that uses information as fuel. On your practice breaks, your brain replays memories of your practice session at 20x speed by Kelsey Donk Human brain replays new memories at 20 times the speed during waking rest. (2021). EurekAlert! https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-06/cp-hbr060321.php Buch, E. R., Claudino, L., Quentin, R., Bönstrup, M., & Cohen, L. G. (2021). Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay. Cell Reports, 35(10), 109193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109193 Scientists built an ultrafast engine that they claim uses information as fuel by Briana Brownell Ratner, P. (2021, May 24). Researchers design an engine that uses information as fuel. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/fastest-ever-information-engine World’s fastest information-fuelled engine designed by SFU researchers - University Communications - Simon Fraser University. (2021). www.sfu.ca. http://www.sfu.ca/university-communications/issues-experts/2021/05/world-s-fastest-information-fuelled-engine-designed-by-sfu-resea.html Saha, T. K., Lucero, J. N. E., Ehrich, J., Sivak, D. A., & Bechhoefer, J. (2021). Maximizing power and velocity of an information engine. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(20), e2023356118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023356118 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn how your brain replays the things you’ve practiced at 20 times speed; and an engine that uses information as fuel.
On your practice breaks, your brain replays memories of your practice session at 20x speed by Kelsey Donk
Scientists built an ultrafast engine that they claim uses information as fuel by Briana Brownell
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/brain-replays-memories-at-20x-speed-a-real-maxwells-demon
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn how your brain replays the things you’ve practiced at 20 times speed; and how scientists built an ultrafast engine they say uses information as fuel.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
When you’re practicing a new skill, it’s important to take breaks to give your body a rest. But according to a new study, there’s another benefit to breaks. It turns out that during those breaks, your brain does a fast-forward replay of your practice session. And harnessing that fact could help people learn skills more quickly.
Memory is a huge part of learning something new. After all, studying and practicing would be pointless if you couldn’t remember what you learned. That new information first gets stored in your short-term memory, but it’s only after it moves into your long-term memory that it really becomes useful later on. That process of moving information from short-term to long-term memory is called memory consolidation.
For a long time, research has shown that taking frequent breaks while practicing something new speeds up memory consolidation and improves performance. But researchers weren’t sure how these quick breaks actually helped the brain solidify new skills.
So they set up an experiment. They had thirty participants sit in a brain-scanning device while they practiced typing the numbers 4-1-3-2-4 on a keyboard as fast and accurately as they could for 10 seconds. Then they rested for 10 seconds. Then they typed for 10 seconds. You get the picture. Eventually, the participants were able to type one sequence roughly every second.
While the participants rested, the imaging showed that they were replaying the task in their brains. The replay lasted just 50 milliseconds, which was about 20 times faster than the participants could actually perform the task.
Importantly, the brain scans revealed three times more replays in between practice rounds than after the experiment, which shows how important short breaks really are. They also showed more replays in the first half of the practice rounds than during the second, which suggests that the replays were helping with early learning of the task.
Researchers also found that the people who replayed the task more during breaks also tended to learn the skill better.
This study doesn’t go so far as to say that replaying tasks causes faster, better learning, but it is possible that waking replay has a part to play in learning new skills or consolidating memories.
That could be great news for rehabilitation and physical therapy, among other fields. Taking more frequent breaks might help people recovering from strokes and other brain injuries relearn motor skills and return to normal life more quickly.
So the next time you’re practicing something new, take breaks! It’ll make your practice session even more effective.
There’s a new engine that runs on information as fuel. And no, this is not science fiction — it’s just a new engine designed by a team of Canadian scientists.
How did they do that? It has to do with the second law of thermodynamics, which says the universe moves from an ordered state toward disorder, or entropy, through time. And a demon. Okay, well, a fictional demon.
So, back in 1867, James Maxwell proposed a machine that could potentially violate this law, known as “Maxwell’s Demon”. Here’s how it worked. Imagine a Demon that can operate a trapdoor between two chambers filled with gas. The gas particles randomly move around and bump into one another.
But the Demon has a devilish plan. It wants to separate the gas so that all of the hot, fast-moving particles are in one chamber and all the cold, slow-moving particles are in the other. So, it lets only the fast-moving particles through the door. Eventually, the chamber with the fast-moving particles would be hotter than the chamber with the slow-moving particles and the total entropy would have decreased. It would seem that the Demon violated the second law of thermodynamics.
Then, in 1929, Physicist Leo Szilard realized the Demon was missing one important thing: information.The Demon couldn’t know whether the particles were hot or cold unless it measured their temperature. And that would use energy, which would increase the overall entropy of the system, meaning that it would not violate the second law of thermodynamics.
But Szilard realized that there was a way to turn the Demon’s information into potential energy. Imagine a single gas molecule in one of the two chambers. If the Demon knows which chamber the molecule is in, it can shut the trapdoor to compress the gas, and close a piston in the empty chamber. Then, if it opens the trapdoor again, the gas expands back to equilibrium — and a tiny amount of energy can then be collected by the piston. There you have it: information converted to energy.
The new experiment works in a similar way. The team submerged a micron-scale bead in water. They then trapped it in an “optical tweezer” made using a laser beam. The bead jiggles up and down within these tweezers and the Demon — or, in this case, the research team — continues to monitor its position. When the bead jiggles up by a certain amount, the Demon moves the tweezers up to trap it at a slightly higher position. In this way, the bead continues to store more and more gravitational energy, using only the information about its position. In other words, an information engine.
This current design wasn’t the first, but was a much more effective design. The heavier the bead, the longer it took for the bead to bounce up. The researchers used this trade-off to optimize the amount of energy that could be created. In doing so, they created an engine that generated at least 10 times more energy than the previous designs.
Turns out the Demon succeeded after all.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk and Briana Brownell.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Listen back to this episode at 20 times speed, and let me know if it makes my jokes any funnier. Then, join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!