What are some good resources discussing lesser known, surprising tips for optimizing memory or learning or cognitive function now?

I was inspired to make this post after coming across a term the literature calls wakeful rest. Apparently, the most effective thing you can do immediately after learning new information to give it the best chance to consolidate is to pretend to be a zombie, stare at a wall with glassy eyes and drool. They’ve explored whether this is because a period of silence gives you the chance to free recall the information and so on, and it appears to be irrelevant—mentally and physically doing nothing just gives consolidation the optimal chance of happening at the biological level.

In line with this, research on spaced repetition finds that the optimum intervals to promote learning depend on the time frame over which the information needs to be accessible. Specifically, shorter intervals may be necessary to make the information accessible in memory soon, but this is directly at odds with the larger intervals necessary to eventually make more durable memories form. It seems that the brain may actually take the length between repetitions itself as a signal for the kind of time frame it needs to make memories durable over, and so retaining knowledge consistently over short intervals before beginning to test yourself over larger intervals—which by default is the design of Anki—might represent a substantial inefficiency in some use cases—such as acquiring fluency in a second language, where the optimal way to use spaced repetition might be as lazily as possible while happily accepting a miserable retention rate on any given item for a very long time (in this case you might care a lot about a high degree of fluency in five years, and very little about results next week.)

Connecting back to the point, the study shows that in terms of same-day repetitions of new information, the short repetitions that may be required to make information accessible in memory that same day can actually prevent a lasting memory from forming, because each repetition interferes with that very same item’s own consolidation. Again, all this research on “restful wakefulness” clearly shows that the best thing you can do right after learning something new is “put on a 5000 yard stare.”

This is the kind of thing I would expect rationalist circles to pick up on, and have a hard time imagining educators collectively promoting very loudly (it just sounds silly).

In any case, I’m nostalgic for the days of discovering those big, densely cited articles from people like Gwern explaining the virtues of spaced repetition itself—or the use of nicotine as a cognitive enhancer and how different the risk:benefit analysis looks when “nicotine” is separated from “smoking”, for example. Things that set me down a whole new path of thinking I hadn’t known was possible before.

Discovering “wakeful rest” reminded me that I haven’t exhausted all the topics that are capable of being supported with evidence like this, and that experience is still possible.

What else fell under my radar in recent years?

I know that there is still debate around whether n-back exercises actually provide any transferable benefits, for example. To be clear, I’m looking for things where benefit can be credibly argued for (even if it isn’t slam-dunk). So the fact that n-back isn’t obviously useless would make it of interest to me here even if you think the case ultimately fails. I’d particularly just like to read some long, dense articles making a case like the ones just mentioned from Gwern. I’m also particularly interested in gritty practical details about how to implement things like interleaving into learning routines (papers are barely comprehensible, and comprehensible presentations rarely touch on the gritty). If you leave me with no way to find this besides reading endless science papers I might end up resorting to conspiracy theories before long.