To Learn Something More Quickly, Find Your Difficulty ‘Sweet Spot’
Research suggests that each of us should aim to be wrong a certain percent of the time if we want to absorb new information
Math has never been my strong suit. When I was applying to graduate school a few years ago, thinking about the math section of the GRE left my stomach in anxious knots. (Yes, this is a story about a standardized test, but bear with me.) In a move that was part prudence, part masochism, I signed myself up for a refresher course. To my own shock, found myself actually enjoying the interactive practice tests, which start out easy, but get harder and harder as your accuracy improves.
I learned math more quickly during my GRE prep than I ever did in a traditional classroom. I suspect this had to do with the fact that the practice tests were constantly adapting to make sure that they were just hard enough, but not too hard — a balance that one recent study calls the “sweet spot” for learning.
For the study, published earlier this month in the journal Nature Communications, researchers taught computer neural networks (artificial intelligence systems that loosely mimic animal brains) to do simple tasks like sorting patterns and numbers, paying attention to how the difficulty affected…
