Regarding “ability to learn”: Ebbinghaus (famous for discovering forgetting curves which lead to Anki) showed that amount you learn is proportional to the amount of time you spend learning it; L(t) = at . Increasing “ability to learn” could be thought of like the constant of proportionality, a.
Obviously, there’s values of time, t, for which this breaks down. I don’t have the academic citations, but a professor I once had (who I trust) said that your brain’s ability to learn can be saturated and marginal time spent learning won’t help until you sleep.
However, I am aware of Walker et al. (2002) (pdf), which shows that you don’t show improvements from practice until you sleep. In hierarchical situations, where every new thing you learn depends on something you’ve already learned, this implies you should sleep in between every new thing you learn. This effect is separate from distributed practice, which you should do anyway.
I found the Doidge book therapeutic.
Regarding “ability to learn”: Ebbinghaus (famous for discovering forgetting curves which lead to Anki) showed that amount you learn is proportional to the amount of time you spend learning it; L(t) = at . Increasing “ability to learn” could be thought of like the constant of proportionality, a.
Learning = acquiring and retaining knowledge or skills. This definition comes from a book written by cognitive scientists coming off a decade of researching optimal learning recommended by Robin Hanson, which is also worth reading.
Obviously, there’s values of time, t, for which this breaks down. I don’t have the academic citations, but a professor I once had (who I trust) said that your brain’s ability to learn can be saturated and marginal time spent learning won’t help until you sleep.
However, I am aware of Walker et al. (2002) (pdf), which shows that you don’t show improvements from practice until you sleep. In hierarchical situations, where every new thing you learn depends on something you’ve already learned, this implies you should sleep in between every new thing you learn. This effect is separate from distributed practice, which you should do anyway.