It seems to me that even if, for example, I don’t play a game of Chess for several months, nevertheless, when I come back to the game, I am better than I was before. It’s almost as though I had been practicing during the intervening time–except I wasn’t.
I am wondering whether this is something anyone has noticed before, or whether I am probably the victim of some confirmation bias or something. Have researchers looked into this kind of phenomenon at all?
-FrL-
How are you defining “better”? If you mean you win more games, unless you are playing against a computer (set to the same level as before), it seems more likely that your opponents have got worse.
I would be fascinated to know the process if “unconscious practice” has been demonstrated.
I can only share personal experience, but I have noticed similar things with certain strategy-related tasks. If I’m away from it for a time, I notice when I return that I’m better than I was previously. My perception is that when I’ve got my head down working on the problem, the most challenging or annoying aspects of it take undue prominence, and I lose focus on the smaller details that might factor into the solution. After going away for a few days or a week, all the factors involved have about the same weight. I still retain the overall understanding of how the system works but I’ve “forgotten” that I thought factor A was the key to everything, or factor B made the entire system insoluble. Seeing the whole system without those previous biases, I’m better able to solve it.
I posit that it is sleep that enables the brain to process and apply the lessons learned and store them into memory where it is ‘indexed’ and cross referenced. (Yeah, I’m a layman…)
When my twins were 3-1/2 they finally ‘got’ the hang of riding a bicycle. We had been putting them on the bikes and they would sort of sit on them while we held them, but were unable to balance. One day they figured it out and we practiced for about an hour. They were very excited and managed to cycle quite well. The next day we went back out and it was like they had been riding for a year already. The difference between the time when they stopped on Saturday and started again on Sunday appeared that they had been practicing for months. It seemed that the sleep that they got had allowed their brain to process and understand all the different information that they had picked up the day before.
Now when my boss comes by to wake me up at my desk, I tell her that I am trying to process the information I had been studying in an effort to become more efficient. 
There has been some study done (but I don’t have a cite) of mental rehearsals as training, even for physical tasks. Some people claim they can “practice” a musical instrument, for example, by imagining it in their heads. The parts of the brain that are stimulated in such a way are the same as the parts stimulated during actual physical practice.
However, regardless of any of that, I can’t say that the residual effects would last over time measured in months.
Are you spending these months thinking about chess a lot?
I find that the same phenomenon applies to me with regards to golf. The longer I’m away from my clubs, the better I do when I get back to them. This is probably due to a combination of two things: I’ve forgotten the nine hundred things I usually try to remember during a swing, so I just swing the club; and I’m coming back with much lower expectations.
In fact, what triggered my writing the OP was an experience playing chess against the computer. Windows Vista comes with a program called “Chess Titans” which has difficulty ratings of 1 through 10. Several months ago, I could beat level 3 handily, and found level 4 almost impossible to beat. At that point, I stopped playing (not out of frustration–I just had gotten the chess bug out of my system 
). Then two days ago I started playing again–and am beating level four, not every time, but very reliably. I don’t have numbers or anything, so this is little more than an anecdote about an individual’s impression. But that’s exactly why I asked what I did in the OP–to see if there’s any research relevant to the impression.
-FrL-
I once had to play a piece of music for a concert where I didn’t get a chance to ‘practice’ beforehand, but I did have the sheet music. So I practiced it in my head. I played a lot better than I would have if I had not done the ‘practice’.
I can’t say I think a “several months” gap in trying something, and being magically better at it makes sense to me.
I do find that when playing an instrument, if I practice a difficult passage over and over and can’t quite play it, if I take a break for a few days and then try it again its not nearly so difficult as before. But I’m talking 2-5 days, not months.
No that’s just the thing–it hardly crossed my mind at all.
The only other area in which I’ve had the same impression (of getting better without having played for quite a long time) is another game–Go. Same deal there.
Perhaps related is the way I will often stop working on my academic stuff altogether for a few weeks, out of frustration with the way things are (not) going. Then when I return to it, things seem to just pour out and click together with far fewer problems. However, that may be the effect of necessity born of deadlines… Now that I’ve entered a phase of academic study in which there are no longer any explicit deadlines, it will be interesting to see if this continues to happen.
-FrL-
I experience the same thing with my fencing. If I have missed practice a couple of weeks I usually do quite well. At least for a while until I start remembering all the stuff I am supposed to do (Is my stance good? How about the guard? etc etc).
How can I be the first one to mention the Tetris effect?
Heh, thanks, I didn’t know that had a name. I get this with Chess (during my Chess phases) all the time–If I see a group of people standing around I start seeing them as being able to “capture” each other as though they were bishops and knights and so on.
Strangely, I play Go much more often and with much more dedication, yet I’ve never had a “Go hallucination” that I can remember.
-FrL-
As a fellow academic, I can say without hesitation that this is true. When I finish an article, I always let it sit for a week or so and then re-read it before I send it to a journal. Actually, it’s ideal to let it sit for a few months, but that’s not really feasible in the academic world. When I have been forced to set a project aside for a period of months, I have come back to it with a set of fresh eyes and a new objectivity that allowed me to see flaws that were invisible to me before, and make the project much much stronger.
but, just because you dream about chess that doesn’t mean you get better at actually playing it*. also, the anecdotes posted so far are all about taking a break and getting back on the task with a fresh mind, rather than anything like ‘practising without practising’ in the OP.
I dunno–we still don’t really know exactly what sleep is for and it is a possibility that we spend that time to organize the neural connections that we’ve made during the day (or something). I do almost everything better after a little nap following a long period of doing that particular thing and that’s why I have an almost nonfunctional internal clock. I’ll practice something on the guitar for a couple hours, take a nap, and come back nailing that one run I was stuck on.
I think this is related.
When I decided to tile our kitchen backsplash - first tile work ever - I thought about it for months first. I imagined all the various details I’d have to figure out. I took the Tile Shop class and incorporated what I learned into my thinking. When I finally did it, it went perfectly with nary a hitch. It was as if I’d been tiling for years.
I’ve heard before that some folks have to rehearse something in their minds before they feel like they can try it, but when they do – piece o’cake.
I used to play raquetball with a coworker during lunch. This went on nearly every workday for about 2 years.
He taught me and after I was trained and ‘up to snuff’ we would ping pong back and forth on who won the majority of the games.
The weird thing was that he would consisently beat me for 3 weeks…then the following Monday I would smoke him badly…and would continue to smoke him for 1-3 weeks. Then, all of a sudden, he would match me or do better than me.
We came to the conclusion that learning was not linear but happened in ‘discontinuties’…and we also noticed that these almost always happened on a Monday (after a 3 day break of not playing)
This experience leads me to believe the OP, that we do ‘practice’ when we aren’t playing.
FWIW, there’s a short Wikipedia article on Incubation with three unlinked references.
Here’s an excerpt:
But, in Frylock’s case, there was an interval of several months.
And, I found this: Incubation effect:
Conversely, the pianist Horowitz is credited with saying: “If I don’t practice for a day, I can tell. If I don’t practice for three days, the audience can tell.”
It seems to me, though, that physical skills are learned (and maintained) differently from “purely mental” skills.
Whenever I would play videogames as a child, sometimes I would get stuck. If I took a break until the next day, usually I would easily figure out what to do.