[mathattack]

I'm not sure I buy this. Wouldn't this suggest that natural athletes are better students? My limited sample size suggests that most of the best students I've known have not been athletes. Most have been musicians, though. I admit this could be correlation rather than causality.

I fully admit that teasing out correlation and causality is very difficult in situations like this.

[lcedp]

Meaning if you want get better at math... practice math, not crosswords and not running. Crosswords make you better (primarily) at crosswords. Running - at running. But the idea is that math + physical activity suppose to make your better (at math inclusively) then math + crosswords.

[mathattack]

I do buy this. It would be interesting to see them quantify math * 2 versus math + running.

[ncphillips]

It's been done, and math + running wins. Check out Tony Schwartz the Power of Full Engagement. In it he talks about how you can't just go go go at the thing you want to get good at, you have to take breaks and do completely unrelated things, like running. If you don't, you'll burn out.

[mathattack]

This makes intuitive sense. One of the best bug-fighting techniques is walking away for a little bit.

[flagnog]

way back in the dark ages, before the Playstation and XBox and Nintendo, I conducted my own empirical studies using coin-operated arcade games. I found that after a couple of hours, my reflexes plateaued, then degraded. I had to go do something else for a couple of hours before I could come back and do better.

[rmk2]

Another really easy way: I have a simply memory game on my phone, 6x4 fields. If it is too late or if I am tired, I will make more mistakes and take longer to memorise things. On the other hand, I can turn and solve it much more quickly when I am fresh and well-rested. Also, if I play a number of them at a time, they start to run together, again resulting in worse results.

[dagw]

I wouldn't be surprised if math * 1 beats math * 2 for reasonable levels of math. There is only so much math your brain can absorb in a day before you start losing focus, making mistakes and generally stops being able to think efficiently.

[mathattack]

Playing the devil's advocate... I admit there are diminishing returns, but would they really be negative?

Let's say the first hour is 100% productive, the 2nd is 60%. Perhaps the third is 30% and the 4th 20%? But would they really undo the good of hours one and two?

The research quoted in a lot of the Deliberate Practice literature suggests we can only focus intensely for 4 hours a day. Then it's a question of wasted time, or harmful time.

[Someone]

In the limit, I think most people would agree there are diminishing returns. It's better to spend that 20th hour each day sleeping than studying.

So, I do think there is a limit for consciously doing hard math. Subconsciously, however, who knows what one's brain is doing? There's plenty of anecdotes about working hard on a problem for hours without apparent progress and then, suddenly, having the breakthrough insight during a walk or in bed, supposedly during a break of working on the problem. Famous anecdotes are Archimedes in bath and Kekule's dream about snakes and benzene.

Now, chances are these guys were still thinking of the problem (one advantage of theoretical work is that you can combine it with most low-effort activities) and nobody who gets such an epiphany knows whether just keeping churning would have led to the same result, possibly earlier, but I think that there is some truth in this. Just as running for 16 hours a day is not the best training for any race, it is good to have breaks from doing extensive math.

[lolcraft]

It could, in mental work. You could forget things.

Also, in my experience, real understanding of mathematical concepts comes to me after I've studied it, when I'm thinking about the matter in the background while doing other things. It's plausible that, if I were to overextend myself, I'd lose focus and not assimilate that much later.

[dagw]

My unscientific gut feeling based on personal experience is that is harmful. After a few hours you need to step back and give your brain time to digest and store what is has studied. If you don't give it that time then not only won't you be able to learn new things, but you won't later be able to recall things you already studied.

[FootballMuse]

Perhaps they do, but I wouldn't restrict it to just being "better students" or not.

"elite athletes...perform better than the rest of us in yet another way. These athletes excel...in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information -- cognitive abilities that are important on and off the court." [1]

[1]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130318151634.ht...

[mathattack]

This seems more intuitive. Better athletes being quick on their feet figuratively as well as literally. This (and confidence) may be a reason that athletes make good salespeople. And it could explain why so many are traders.

I've seen much less as research professors or computer programmers. This could also be because the time commitments required in school for these topics is inconsistent with what's required to do sports competitively.

I'm not saying that exercise is bad. I'm positive that it's good. It's just my perception that those who exercise more in their youth tended not to be the best students.

[nicholassmith]

"It's just my perception that those who exercise more in their youth tended not to be the best students."

There's also the perception when you're younger (or at least distinctly for me and the people I grew up with), that being smart was 'boring' and being sporty was better, so they wouldn't apply themselves in lessons because it wasn't cool. I imagine a lot of them were plenty smart, but they might not have let on.

[mathattack]

Some of us nerds thought staying inside was more fun. Why waste all that time playing basketball when you could get ahead in the chemistry lab?

[nicholassmith]

As someone who was distinctly non-sporty I can't say I disagree, reading was far more enjoyable than running around in the cold kicking a ball.

[candre717]

The article said nothing about playing music but rather listening to music. The difference is like saying I can learn through osmosis as opposed to I can learn through deliberate study and practice.

If the article actually compared the benefits of fitness to the benefits of playing music - now that could speak to your question.

[mmuro]

It does:

  What about playing an instrument? Don’t you have to use right and left brain for a stringed instrument?

  Yes. That has clear cognitive functions that do crossover. Especially learning to play and read the music at the same time. But exercise is number one, diet number two and then social interaction. These are the important things for brain function.

[agumonkey]

In my little experience music requires many layers of unintuitive abstractions, that, when reached, give you that feeling not very far from the one when you get your aha! moment in mathematics, physics or any revelation~.

edit: maybe being good at both is a sign of an innate skill for abstraction, or maybe it's another way for a student to dive into a subject and grow new abstractions and reinforce his brain.

[mathattack]

This is a topic I've been getting very interested in lately. The correlation between music and math/technology success is high. I used to think it was that "disciplined people who like to be inside do both".

Now I think there may be some causality. Learning music is an intro to binary math. (2 half notes in a whole note. Two quarter notes in a half note.)

I haven't seen a good empirical study to try and split this apart.

[agumonkey]

The time subdivision is barely the tip of the visible surface to me[1]. The music itself, the superimposed flows of time relationships and frequency relationships (melody, rhythm, harmony), is something very wide and when you're finally able to parse and follow along it's a very soothing mental experience. It's really separating a whole into different views, and recombining them (almost) on the fly, not very different to data transformation. Also, in my case, the conservation of momentum in sticks, when trying to play jazz drum parts was really close to physics. You can't sustain complex and fast movement like these if you don't think deeply about your limb/joints and in more abstract ways and when you do so, it flips everything upside down (you almost rotate your sticks backward)

Music is invisible at first, the journey between unconscious appreciation and the 'parsing' stage is long, and full of counter intuitive realizations, which to me, is the same whatever domain your try to understand.

Another parallel is the way we interface with these. There's the remote long round trip way and the direct tangible way. For computers : large systems requiring pauses in your knowledge acquisition, think ~minutes build times (this is the main view on computers, lisp OSes and smalltalk browsers are unknown to many) vs REPLs. In music there's music theory[1], lots of wasteful (borderline absurd) ceremony and delay before reaching to the music itself, and just following along, failing and trying again (here I think the most used one is the direct, you buy an instrument and "play" without real understanding, opposite of computers).

Hoping I wasn't too blurry.

[1] Have you seen Chris Ford Functional Composition talk ? https://www.google.com/search?q=chris+ford+functional+compos... (youtube/skillsmater hosted) He manage to layer music theory ideas in a very simple manner in one hour, with direct rendering of what they are. Much more efficient than what I could experience or see in music classes younger (I understand that kid psychology is different especially in groups). It's really not very profound and actually it won't teach you music, just reference ideas needed to then impregnate the whole subject through your won learning process (I believe it's a 10000hour thing).

[jcl]

It suggests that regular exercisers are better students, not that better athletes are. In particular, just because some exercise is good, it doesn't necessarily mean more is better.

[daraul]

The article does also point out that 'specific' games aren't apt to increase your brain function, which I took to imply that the idea that any one type of game is not the key.

In that regard, it would also be similar to the exercise comparison in that any single exercise is likely to have very limited impact, but a rounded exercise routine provides much stronger benefits.

[dagw]

Based on my equally limited sample size (based largely on looking around while working on my Masters in math) I disagree with you findings. Lots of people in the math departments where physically active, certainly more so than where musical (although a there was a fair bit of overlap).

[aplusbi]

Student athletes have less time and energy to devote to school work. Speaking from personal experience, it's pretty hard to do homework when you have 2-3 hours of practice after school everyday. First, you lose 2-3 hours of time every day and second you get home exhausted.

[mpg33]

I don't think the article is stating that athletes are smarter....but that exercise is good for the brain. From what I have noticed after exercising, especially cardio-related exercise, I tend feel better and am able to concentrate better than usual.

[mhurron]

A healthy body promotes a healthy mind. Basically if you want your stuff to work right, you need to keep it in good working order.

[001sky]

student=/=intelligence

Fallacy right there.