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If after watching the communication trinity section, you're thinking it looks great, but you'll never have the time to actually teach each puppy, we have good news for you. It literally only takes a minute to teach a puppy something new. [MUSIC PLAYING] Puppies learn most rapidly when they're given short training sessions with rest periods in between. This is known as distributed learning, and the scientific principles behind it are the same for all dogs of all ages, from puppy to senior citizen. Here's how it works. In many ways, brains are like computers. Think of every response that earns a puppy a reward as a one and every response that does not earn a reward as a zero. As a training session progresses, the puppy starts accumulating ones and zeros in his brain, but things are happening too fast for him to fully sort it out. Much of what he experiences is set aside and spooled in memory to be fully processed when his brain has the leisure to do so. [MUSIC PLAYING] When the puppy's allowed to rest after a learning session, his brain has a chance to do some housekeeping. First, the data in his brain is all sorted out. The one responses, the responses that earned him a reward, tend to be given a permanent place in the brain, while the zeros, the responses that did not earn a reward, tend to be swept out of memory. [MUSIC PLAYING] Second, the neural pathways in his brain rewire themselves to accommodate this new information, making him able to recall and apply it when he needs it. After a good rest session, your puppy emerges with a nice, tidied-up brain, and you'll often notice that he begins a new session with significantly better performance than he ended the previous session. This is the science behind the old adage of sleeping on it. It may seem like the puppy read a training manual while he's napping, but really, it's just his brain having a chance to get organized. [MUSIC PLAYING] The optimum length of training session and rest period will depend on the age, development, and previous training of the individual dog. But as a guideline, we limit our puppies under 12 weeks old to six minutes of total training with approximately a half hour of rest in between. Although these are outside limits, we find between one- and three-minute training sessions with at least 15 minutes of rest in between to be optimal for puppies under five months of age. Even with our adult dogs, we see amazing results with two-minute power training sessions. If you try to do longer training sessions, you might notice that the puppy will at first have increasing correct responses, but as the training session drags on, he may actually get worse and offer more and more incorrect responses. This is known as response fatigue. The neurons that have to fire off in order for the puppy to respond correctly literally get tired, and the puppy's performance starts declining. Shorter sessions, therefore, are more efficient and arguably more motivational. Yeah, good girlie. Wow. [MUSIC PLAYING]