What you're describing here is really what Ericsson refers to when he talks about 'deliberate practice' (from the 10 000 hours meme). You correctly recognized

What you're describing here is really what Ericsson refers to when he talks about 'deliberate practice' (from the 10 000 hours meme). You correctly recognized that instead of doing more laps some of your time was better spent on deep analysis. If we stick with the racing analogy I think what the article talks about is that you would've seen solid gains if you had tried to run a single lap perfectly, stopped, stayed in your car, and just relaxed while your subconscious got some time to process everything that just happened, without your bombarding it with new information. If you were to follow the instructions to the letter you'd hang out for a time equivalent to your lap time, but they left it as an open question if this mechanic scales beyond the 10s repetitions used in the study. I hope they do more of the studies because the required time of rest could plausibly scale in different ways: 1. Your subconscious can only remember so much stuff to replay and learn from while resting so a break beyond X isn't beneficial. 2. The rest time needed is linear with the stimulus. 3. Long action sequences are such a rich source that the subconscious can mine them for a long time. Beneficial rest time scales exponentially.