Second interpretation: suspending study to perform unrelated activities will result in better recall of the material later.
This is the spacing effect.
See also
- On the symbiosis of remembering, forgetting, and learning — the spacing effect is formalised there: context change during the gap induces forgetting which paradoxically enhances learning; “desirable difficulties” are what make the interruption productive
- Daily Zettelkasten process, fleeting notes rewritten to atomic — the daily process uses spacing implicitly: you encounter an idea, capture it, return to it later to rewrite; the gap between capture and rewrite is the spacing effect in practice
- I risultati arrivano dopo il plateau del potenziale latente — the spacing effect is the micro-level version of the plateau: learning accumulates invisibly during the gaps; the recall improvement only becomes visible when you return to the material