TRANSCRIPT
Okay, welcome to another Brainjo Bite. So, in today’s episode, we are going to answer the question, Why do we practice? Why do we practice the banjo? Why do we practice anything that we want to get better at? It may seem like an obvious question, but it’s also the most fundamental question of all, and so, super important.
And as you’ll see, as we explore this topic in this episode, the more clearly we understand the goal of practice, the more effective we can be at getting the most out of it. Broadly speaking, we might say that the purpose of practice is just to get better, right? But, what actually has to occur in order for that to happen?
What exactly is it that makes us more capable at something tomorrow than we are today? What even makes all that possible? Many of you out there may know, especially those of you who follow Brainjo, that it has something to do with changing our brain. So yes, in order for us to get better at anything, And so a more specific way to phrase why do we practice is to say to stimulate our brain to change.
And we’ve already improved the answer by doing that. Now that we know what it is that enables us to improve, we can focus directly on understanding that particular process. So the only reason we’re able to learn anything, including complex skills like playing a musical instrument is by changing our brains.
And this is why understanding how to learn is really about understanding how to stimulate brain change and how to steer that change in the direction that we desire. And as I’ll discuss in this episode. Viewing the goal of practice as stimulating brain change is the best way to ensure that our practice is productive rather than unproductive or even counterproductive.
Now, before we dig in further I just want to let you know that by request, I have made all of the brainjobite Episodes into a single podcast feed which you can find by just searching Brainjo bites And I’ll put a link in the video description to it as well So if you want to listen to all 35 prior episodes you can As well as you’ll be able to listen to new episodes as they come out in podcast form if you enjoy doing so.
So you should be able to find that on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you use. Okay, back to the episode. One of the first studies that illustrated how we practiced or learned had a major impact on our results and hinted at what was happening in the brain to enable progress was done all the way back in 1913.
This study involved third grade students who were being drilled on addition facts. One group was drilled twice a day for five days and the other was drilled once a day for 10 days. Same amount of practice time overall. But one was spaced out over 10 days and the other over five days. And then they assessed how each group performed.
So what was the result? The group that spaced it out over 10 days learned the addition facts much, much better. Not because they’re better at math, right? But because of how they practiced. So just like music, getting good at math is also not about being born good at math, but about how you learn it.
Another study published in 1978. tested four groups of British postal workers on a typing task that was used in mail sorting. And in this case, they divided the groups according to number of sessions. So either one session a day or two sessions a day of practice, as well as the length of the session, either one hour or two hours.
So you had four different groups in all with kind of the most concentrated being two sessions per day for two hours, right over 15 days. And the other extreme being one hour. once a day over 60 days. But again, the total practice time in all these groups was held constant. What did they find? Learning was most effective when the practice was given one hour a day for 60 days, and the worst group was the one that was doing two two hour sessions for 15 days.
This phenomenon, this finding has been replicated many, many times over the years, consistently showing the same thing in all domains of learning, which is that we get far better results from spacing learning over time than we do by trying to concentrate it over short periods. And it’s not even close.
So, for example, if you were to ask if it’s better to practice once a week for four hours a day, or twice a week for 30 minutes, so much less total time. I’d say 30 minutes twice a week, hands down. So what’s causing this? Why is it that one way of practicing with spacing it out is so much more effective than concentrating it in a short amount of time?
So there’s another study published in 2002 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. that gives a clue about what’s happening here. And in this particular study, the researchers used a finger to thumb opposition task where subjects were asked to tap a particular sequence of finger movements as quickly and accurately as possible.
So, you know, movements very much like the sorts of things we might do when playing a musical instrument. And they took 52 healthy young subjects and they were trained on the task, either in the evening, Or in the morning, and then they were retested after eight hours. And in some groups, that eight hour interval included sleep, and in some groups, that eight hour interval didn’t include sleep.
What they found was that the subjects whose eight hour interval had included sleep got much, much better than the subjects whose eight hour interval didn’t. So exact same amount of time between their training and their testing. Yet, if that amount of time included sleep, they performed much, much better.
And again, this is another finding that has been replicated many times. Now our goal when we’re learning any skill is to move it from being effortful, conscious, and unskilled. To being unconscious, effortless, and skillful. And again, the only way we do this is by stimulating brain change so that our brain builds dedicated networks that can execute these automatic skills.
And we do this by practicing repeatedly, but here’s a crucial point that’s illustrated by that study. And that is. That the changes in the brain that enable the short term improvements that we might see in a single practice session are entirely different than the changes in the brain that actually enable and lead to long term improvement.
In other words, when we’re practicing our instrument, we may experience some improvements in our performance over the course of that session. However, the changes in the brain that are causing that short term improvement. are temporary. And based on our current understanding, they involved short lived changes in physiology, like altering the strength of synapses, largely driven by chemical processes, like modulating the release of neurotransmitters and changing the activation states of receptors on the synapses.
So these are all temporary and reversible chemical changes that lead to these short term improvements. In that case, we’re essentially pushing our brain, to the limit of what it’s currently capable of, given its current structure and existing connections. But again, the key is that those changes that enable short term improvements don’t yield any lasting changes.
That’s because the only way that our practice makes us better in the future is if it stimulates structural changes in the brain that produce lasting changes in our synapses, not these short term chemical ones. And those lasting structural changes This true plastic remodeling happens almost entirely during sleep.
This is why the subjects who sleep are doing much better is because they’re getting that structural remodeling that’s what leads to future improvements and what actually expands our capabilities. On the other hand, The group that didn’t sleep didn’t experience any structural remodeling, so didn’t experience any improvement in their capabilities.
Now, learning a new skill not only involves lasting changes at the cellular level with changes in the strength of synapses it also involves complete changes at the level of neural networks. So neural networks are these groups of interconnected neurons that are dedicated to processing certain kinds of information.
They’ve been trained to do that. And studies of beginners and experts in various domains of music and sports show that when they’re executing the same skills, the regions of the brains that are active are very different. Beginners have lots of activation in areas that we know to be involved with attention and cognitive control.
So areas like the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex. While in experts, the primary areas that are active that aren’t active in beginners are subcortical areas, areas beneath the cortex like the basal ganglia and cerebellum that are responsible for these automated behaviors. So what we see with repeated practice is that the parts of the brain that control our music making efforts are entirely different.
And this is really one of the coolest things about the brain that enables us to get better at anything, which is the better we get at something, the less of our brain is required to execute it. And that’s because we form dedicated neural networks that can operate automatically without any conscious control.
And again, the point here is that this huge shift in regional brain activity that occurs with repeated practice also shows us that the goal of praxis has everything to do with trying to stimulate these profound changes in the brain that occur over days, weeks, and even years. And none of which happened while we’re practicing, which is why getting better at practicing and learning is entirely about understanding how to best stimulate those changes.
This was kind of the fundamental aha moment that I had. many years ago that led me to completely change how I went about practicing and learning, and allowed me to learn multiple instruments with very little free time and what ultimately led to all of Brainjo, which is about applying these lessons of neuroplasticity to how we learn.
Because these exist in every brain, and it’s the reason why Anyone can learn to play music at any age and learn to play it well. And understanding this process is the key to realizing your potential in any endeavor. And I can almost guarantee that your potential is probably way bigger than you currently realize.
In the end, again, all that matters is whether we’ve triggered brain change. And our goal with practice is not to get better right then and there. but rather to stimulate change and steer it in the direction we desire. So here’s a graphic that illustrates the concept that we’ve been talking about visually.
So within each practice session, we might see our performance improve a bit, sometimes more than others. But we also see our performance improving in between sessions, provided that we have stimulated change and steered it in the direction we want. And the critical point being the brain changes that are enabling these long term improvements.
are entirely different than the ones that are enabling these short term improvements. And that’s why the goal of practice is not to improve our performance in that session. Our goal is to stimulate neuroplasticity. That’s where we’re orienting our efforts around. And once you realize this, then understanding how to improve at playing the banjo, or anything else, becomes a question of how to stimulate the brain to change.
In episode six, I talked about the three ingredients for an effective practice session, and that’s a great place to start for understanding how to stimulate the kind of brain change that we want. In the next episode, I’m going to dig a little deeper about how to ensure that we’re setting appropriate goals during our practice sessions.
And remember that you can now catch these Brainjo Byte episodes either on the YouTube channel or on the new Brainjo Bite podcast feed that’s now available and includes all of the back episodes. Thank you for watching this Brainjo Byte. To catch future episodes, hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell if you haven’t already done so.
You can also hear these episodes on the Brainjo Jam podcast. And you’ll find a link to that in the video description. Also, if you’d like to boost your brain health and function with neuroscience based musical instruction for banjo, ukulele, fiddle, and piano, head over to brainjoe. academy.