Here’s some fascinating and encouraging news to begin the new year: Recent studies from the NIH show that when learning a new activity, taking short breaks helps your brain process the new skill more quickly! Apparently, when we take a brief pause from whatever we’re trying to learn, during that break the brain rapidly processes the new skill, even more rapidly than while we’re doing the activity. In essence, rest strengthens memory formation.
“Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced,” said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., senior investigator at the NIH.
When we practice Qigong, small breaks are built into each class. Those are the times we pause to “feel the qi.” The exercise of holding a ball of qi between our hands serves this purpose in a particularly elegant and powerful way. These moments of wakeful rest are a beautiful example of the “movement within stillness”: although we aren’t actively moving, our body-mind’s vastly sophisticated and intelligent systems are humming, processing, and sparkling away within us.
I’ve suspected something like this must be occurring even before reading this study. It’s a bit of an extrapolation, but often when students return from a vacation, they seem to have improved. I first noticed this with the one-on-one students I worked with intensively over the course of several years. Then, just yesterday during our first class back after the holiday break, everyone looked amazing! Now, of course some of this can be attributed to the fact that it’s particularly energizing to get back to moving after the holidays. But there’s more to it. Once you’ve been training in Qigong or any movement art long enough to improve your alignment, mindfulness, kinesthetic awareness, and ability to relax while moving, those skills will transfer into your daily life. Each time you rise from a chair, or twist to reach for a box on a shelf, you practice and further embed those important foundational skills.
Of course, this NIH study is much more about the immediate processing of information. But isn’t it nice to know how a little bit of yin helps us learn better and faster?
If you’d like to read the study from the NIH, here’s the link, thanks to our qi friend Martha B:
January Millbrook Library Free In-person/Zoom Qigong: Fridays Jan. 9 and 23, 10 - 11am. Please register for this class by contactingMillbrooklibrary.org. The library will send you a reminder a few days ahead of time.
Remember, there are short, free videos available to view and practice with on my website. Simply click on the menu tab for “Videos/ YouTube”, at the top of the home page at www.criscaivano.com
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