How often should you practice a magic trick?

Gradually spacing out your practice keeps recollection strenuous while shortening the total time it takes to learn and remember a new skill. It sounds backwards, because more practice, closer together, feels like it should work better. But the rest between sessions gives your brain time to process, organize, and catalog new information, and a little forgetting between sessions is what makes the next rehearsal work as hard as it should (Strenuous Recollection).

The evidence is about as solid as it gets in psychology. In 2006, a team led by Nicholas Cepeda reviewed 317 experiments on spacing out practice. The pattern held across them: the same amount of study, spread out, beats the same amount packed together. They also found that the longer you want to remember something, the longer the gaps should be.

Make It Stick makes the same case in plainer language: spaced practice feels slower and less productive than cramming, and it produces learning that lasts far longer. Scott Young puts spacing first among his defenses against forgetting in Ultralearning.

A good deal of the work happens while you sleep. In 2002, Matthew Walker and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School taught people a finger-tapping sequence, then tested them again later. After a night of sleep they were about 20% faster, with no loss of accuracy. After the same number of hours awake, there was no significant improvement.

Nobody practiced in between. The improvement arrived overnight. It could explain the "Eureka effect" that sometimes follows a good night's sleep, when a move that fought you all evening suddenly works at breakfast.

One way to look at it: a long practice session on Sunday gets 1 night of sleep to work with. 7 short sessions across the week get 7.

The schedule follows a trick through its 3 memory phases:

• Foundation. Rehearse daily until you can get through the trick cold, without a warm-up.
• Retention. Stretch the gap a step at a time: weekly, twice a month, monthly, then quarterly.
• Preservation. A couple of rehearsals a year keep the trick where it is.

There are 2 rules for moving between steps. If a rehearsal goes well, the next gap gets longer. If it goes badly, or you miss it entirely, the gap gets shorter again. Moving back just means the trick needs more time at that distance.

Running a trick a few times before a show is a warm-up, and there's nothing wrong with it. It just isn't learning. If a trick only works after you've warmed up, that's a sign it belongs on a shorter interval.

Trickifi runs the calendar so you don't have to. Once you pass a daily Cold Rehearsal, the trick moves into the Retention phase, and each rehearsal you score high enough on pushes the next one further out. Score low, or miss the window, and it moves back in.

Each trick keeps its own schedule, so an opener you've performed for years and a routine you started last week can sit side by side, each at the interval it has earned. In the Preservation phase, a couple of rehearsals a year per trick is enough, which is how you can keep dozens or even hundreds of tricks mastered at once.