Researchers from University of Edinburgh found that a few minutes of 'wakeful resting' allows information to be absorbed and it works best with verbal information rather than numbers.
Scientists believe that memories are not formed as fast as people think, and taking this 'time out' allows them time to bed in, the Daily Mail reported.
"Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds," said Michaela Dewar from the university.
"Indeed our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week," Dewar was quoted by the paper as saying.
In two experiments, a total of thirty-three adults between the ages of 61 and 87 were told two short stories and told to remember as many details as possible.
Immediately afterward, they were asked to describe what happened in the story. Then they were given a 10-minute delay that consisted either of wakeful resting or playing a spot-the-difference game on the computer.
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During the wakeful resting portion, participants were asked to just rest quietly with their eyes closed in a darkened room for 10 minutes while the experimenter left to 'prepare for the next test'.
It didn't matter what happened while their eyes were closed, only that they were undistracted by anything else and not receiving any new information.
In one study, the participants were asked to recall both stories half an hour later and then a full week later.
Participants remembered much more story material when the story presentation had been followed by a period of wakeful resting.
"There is growing evidence to suggest that the point at which we experience new information is just at a very early stage of memory formation and that further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time," Dewar said.