(TIME.com) -- Forget brain-training exercises, 12-hour shifts
and those long, uninterrupted, caffeine-fueled study binges.
When you really need new information to sink in, you can't skimp
on taking breaks, new research suggests. That's the message from
a study by psychologists and neuroscientists at the University
of Edinburgh, in Scotland, who asked a small group of normally
aging elderly men and women to recall as many details as
possible from two stories they were told. Following one of the
stories (but not always the same one for all the participants),
the men and women were instructed to relax, take a brief break
and close their eyes for 10 minutes in a dark room. Following
the other story, those same participants were instead distracted
with a new task, spotting the differences between pairs of
nearly identical images. Overall, the study participants
remembered many more details of whichever story they heard
before they were told to rest — and their striking memory boost
persisted even a full week out a