Our exploration into Superlearning here at Musical U really took off when we started collaborating with “The Learning Coach” Gregg Goodhart, and one saying of his that I often come back to is this:
“The brain doesn’t learn the way we think it learns.”
Gregg Goodhart
This is really the central insight for everything relating to Superlearning: that so many of the ideas and methods we’ve inherited for music practice are based on fundamental misunderstandings and wrong assumptions about how to get our brain to learn new information and skills.
Fortunately, the scientific research which revealed that has also identified how the brain does learn most effectively, and specific techniques you can use to keep your brain in its optimal learning mode.
How The Brain Doesn’t Learn
The human brain requires a tremendous amount of energy to run. Up to 20% of the whole body’s energy use, in fact! So it has evolved to conserve energy whenever possible.
One upshot of this is that when our brain decides that our current activity doesn’t require much thought or attention, parts of the brain literally shut down.
For example, if we choose a task that is not challenging enough, our brain may well decide to withdraw energy from the parts which don’t seem necessary to produce the desired result. To go through the motions for a task “on autopilot” requires far less energy than when we try a new task for the first time.
You’re probably already seeing the big implication here for music practice.
Most of us have been taught to repeatedly play the same piece of music over and over again, and call that “practicing”. At the end of a practice session with a great number of these “massed repetitions”, we may even see some improvement and think we’ve succeeded in our learning efforts. Then the next day comes and our skill level has dropped back down, and we wonder why yesterday’s improvement didn’t “stick”.
Research has shown that our brains essentially become bored with this kind of “massed repetition” and shut down the deep learning processes. This means that we might be spending 90% of our practice time carrying out repetitions which don’t trigger any further learning in the brain at all!
On the other hand, novel or challenging activities stimulate a much higher level of brain activity, and thus a higher level of learning. Almost all of the musical Superlearning techniques you’ll discover in this chapter can be seen as ways to keep our brains awake, excited, and fully engaged—and that’s what enables learning to occur most rapidly and effectively.
The Power of “Not Finishing”
Here’s one simple example of how the brain doesn’t learn the way we think it does. Most of us have been taught that it’s good to complete the tasks we take on during a practice session. For example, if you’re working on playing a certain section of a piece, try to get it to the point of being able to play through it correctly by the end of the session.
One counter-intuitive truth from the world of Superlearning is that actually it can be more efficient to not finish the task at hand.
When we don’t finish something, it creates a kind of “open loop” in our brains. A problem which has not been solved. This causes our brain to keep working on the task in the background, even when we’re not consciously aware, trying to solve that problem and close that loop.
So we are quite literally recruiting more parts of our brains into the learning process over a longer period, even after our official practice time has come to an end.
This is amplified even further when we factor in the significance of sleep on learning. During sleep the brain performs various house-keeping tasks including consolidating memories and processing the events of the day into new neural pathways for the future. When we go to sleep with an “open loop” or two (for example, the muscle movements required to finger a certain passage of notes), our brain can actually make progress on those tasks during the night.
“The primary purpose of practice is to tell our brains what to do when we’re sleeping.”
Dr. Josh Turknett, neuroscientist-turned-banjo-instructor.
You can give this a try yourself, by simply choosing to stop working on something during practice when you feel you’ve got it about 80% correct rather than 100% correct. It may help to remind yourself of this task (e.g. by listening to, audiating, or mentally playing the section of music) right before going to bed. See if the next time you sit down to practice you’re still at that 80% correct level or lower… or if, in fact, your brain has managed to bring about some improvement in between. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!