5. Desirable Difficulty

If Deliberate Practice is the most important over-arching process in Superlearning, then Desirable Difficulty * As presented in the research paper “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning” by Bjork, E. L. and Bjork, R. A. (2011) Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society. is where the rubber meets the road. As you read a moment ago about adding a “Reflect” step, you might have felt a bit uncertain: how do you actually know what “experiment” to try next, to address whatever problem has come to light? Or what if you’re coasting along and can’t really spot any obvious issues to “fix” during the Reflect step?

The concept of Desirable Difficulty is a simple one: everything we could try in the practice room exists on a spectrum from “so easy you won’t learn anything” through to “so hard you don’t have a chance”. Somewhere on that spectrum is a “just right” zone, which we might call the “Goldilocks Zone”, where you’re pushing your brain just enough to maximise its learning potential.

And here’s the clever bit. Instead of simply playing everything “by the book” and stumbling around among the mistakes we happen to make, we can intentionally introduce additional challenges (Desirable Difficulty) which both engage the brain more fully, and uncover hidden problem-spots which might otherwise have been hard to recognise.

This lets us go from a semi-passive learning experience, where we’re just hoping problems come to light and we can come up with ideas to fix them, to a learning experience you get to actively drive forwards yourself, introducing just the right challenges to essentially force your brain to fully learn what you want it to, as rapidly as possible.

As well as a set of specific techniques you’ll learn about below, Desirable Difficulty can be seen as a shift in attitude from “I hope everything will be okay when I play this” to “let’s go seek out all the possible problems and fix them.”

Mistakes As Friends

Imagine having a friend that will always be there to support you in being the best you can be. Believe it or not, that’s what mistakes can be for your music practice.

You may have been raised to think mistakes in music are something to be embarrassed about. It might even be combined in your head with the talent myth i.e. “If I was naturally good at music I wouldn’t make so many mistakes.”

This mindset has two major negative ramifications:

1. We get discouraged, letting mistakes sap our musical enthusiasm, which harms our momentum and scuppers our consistency with practicing.
2. We tend to want to gloss over mistakes, and just rush on and play something we’re more capable with. This cheats us of the learning and progress which that mistake was offering us.

For now, at least inside our practice room, it’s time to flip our relationship with mistakes on its head.

Mistakes tell us where we need to focus our attention. They are an infallible guidance system as we Plan-Play-Reflect our way through our practice journey.

They also tell us a lot about our emotional reactions, and teach us where we can shore up and build a true Growth Mindset to accelerate our Superlearning.

Our best and most immersive learning experiences come when we’re making mistakes—even if during live performances, mistakes are not nearly as desirable!

The good news is that the more we embrace and even enjoy our mistakes while practicing, and the more we dissolve the strict distinction between the two (more on that in Chapter 18: Performance), the fewer mistakes we’ll make when performing. What’s more, if we do make a mistake in performance, we’ll be much better equipped to handle it with poise and grace.

When you start seeing mistakes as opportunities and you have a set of tools for tackling them effectively, you’ll find that you start almost looking forward to the next mistake you make, knowing it’s your next step forwards towards success.

When we change our relationship with mistakes, practice looks more like this:

As you start approaching mistakes this way, with Deliberate Practice, you’ll find yourself appreciating how mistakes really are your friends. Our end goal may well be to perform without any mistakes, but finding mistakes and addressing them head-on in the practice room is exactly how to achieve that goal most quickly and effectively.

The Goldilocks Zone of Learning

Our brains love a challenge! That’s why we can learn more when we make things harder on ourselves. On the other hand, being overwhelmed sends us into fight-or-flight mode which shuts down the learning process.

So the key for Superlearning is to find that “Goldilocks Zone” of Desirable Difficulty.

As mentioned above, Desirable Difficulty is a general principle and can be leveraged in many ways. Anything you do to keep yourself in that sweet spot, where you’re generating enough “grist for the mill” to make the Reflect step of Deliberate Practice valuable will be effective.

However, there is one particular technique called Contextual Interference, which is like a powertool for generating Desirable Difficulty on-demand.

To understand what “interfering” with “context” might mean, we need to first become more aware of our context when practicing music.

Context

Our goal when practicing a musical task is to get our brains to form the new neural pathways which enable us to succeed with that task. If we’re learning to play a new piece of music, you can think of this as your brain’s “mental representation” of how to play that piece successfully.

Any time we make a mistake or struggle to play the piece correctly, that’s an indicator that something is not yet as it should be in our mental representation of how to play the piece.

Here’s the rub: when we’re practicing music, we aren’t operating in a pristine laboratory environment where we get to just feed in perfect data to a perfect system and produce the perfect mental representation right away.

In fact, the process is utterly drenched in what we might call context.

We can distinguish between outer and inner context:

• Outer context means everything that’s going on around us as we practice. This includes our bodies, our instruments, our chair, the sheet music or devices that we’re looking at for notation, the wall that we face, the pictures on that wall, the room where we sit, how we sit or stand, sounds from the next room or the street, time of day, etc. Believe it or not, all of these will have some effect on how well the brain manages to “encode” the information we’re trying to pass into it, as well as creating “cues” that it relies on to help bring the required memories forth.
• Inner context is about what’s going on inside us. Thoughts, emotions, focus, reactions, distractions, enjoyment (or lack of it), audiation, judgements, etc. Again, all these things will influence the speed and accuracy with which the brain turns our experiences of playing music into new neural pathways.

How the brain learns is a deep, complex process, which any neuroscience researcher would admit we still only partially understand. However, the influence of context is clear, and the research has revealed a fascinating opportunity…

One might think that the fastest route to get the brain to form the ideal mental representation would be to make our input as pristine as possible, to reduce or eliminate context, or at least make it so consistent that it shouldn’t bias the information we’re feeding into the brain.

But here’s the big counter-intuitive finding from the research: if we intentionally manipulate our context, and feed the brain a wider variety of experiences, this actually helps the brain to form that ideal mental representation faster.

You can think of this as how carrying out a variety of experiments can be more instructive than just doing the same experiment repeatedly. Or how if the human body is never exposed to cold, germs, or physical strain, it actually makes your health very fragile and prone to illnesses—whereas introducing those “challenges” help the body to become strong and robust against dangers and harm.

Intentionally manipulating our context for the sake of faster, more successful learning is called Contextual Interference.

Contextual Interference

We’ll explore three forms of Contextual Interference you can start using to accelerate your music learning: Inner and Outer Context, Musical Context, and Creative Contextual Interference.

A. Inner and Outer Context

Above we shared various examples of Inner Context and Outer Context. All of these influence how your brain learns, and so manipulating any of these can provide helpful new stimulation.

Here’s a wonderfully easy way to try it out. I picked this up from Mars Gelfo, creator of the popular Modacity practice-tracking app. We were discussing Contextual Interference, and he said one of the easiest and most basic ways to experience its effects is to simply change where you practice.

If you can, move to a different room. Or simply face a different direction to normal. You could also sit if you usually stand, or stand if you usually sit.

If you play piano or a similar non-movable instrument, you can instead do something to change the visual context around you. For example, if you usually play with the lid down you can open it up. Or you can change the picture hanging above the piano. Or drape an interesting piece of fabric over the top, or add a row of small stuffed animals… Have fun and use your imagination!

Carry out your practice session as normal. You’ll probably notice your brain is just a little bit more alert and engaged. It might feel a bit distracting. There might be strange changes to the tone or sound of your instrument. You might notice some thoughts or emotions coming up which don’t usually arise for you. You may make some odd mistakes you don’t usually make—hooray, more grist for the mill!

Remember that this is a subset of the principle of Deliberate Practice, so you want to try the experiment above in a cycle of Plan-Play-Reflect. Once you complete your practice session in the new location, be sure to reflect on how it went, and anything you learned or might want to do differently next time. For example, did this generate a desirable level of difficulty? If it was too challenging, maybe next time you don’t change room, you just face a different direction. If it was too easy and there wasn’t much effect, maybe next time you try standing on one leg, change location every five minutes, or have some background music playing that doesn’t match what you’re trying to practice.

I love this exercise both for how simple and easy it is to do, and because of how much it reveals about the difficulties we have with musical performance.

We’ll explore this more fully in Chapter 18: Performance, but for now I just wanted to bring your attention to it. If you find yourself having odd thoughts, or making new mistakes after simply moving to a different location, you can probably see why practicing at home and then performing up on a stage somewhere can be so challenging, and why it can be so hard to perform the music as well on stage as we did in the practice room.

Hopefully you’re also starting to see the great value in this kind of intentional contextual interference, for building a more robust ability to play the music as you intended.

You can be very methodical with how you vary Inner and Outer Context, or you can simply make it a habit to introduce a small degree of chaos to your music practice!

It often reminds me of that famous Frank Sinatra line, which I think sums it up well:

If you can play a piece reliably well, even after you’ve just run up a flight of stairs, sat down with an instrument you’ve just been loaned, in a room full of strangers, and found one page of the sheet music missing, you’ll know you’re ready for anything!

B. Musical Context

As well as the inner and outer contexts explored above, we can also make effective changes in the context of the music itself.

This is perhaps the strangest and most counter-intuitive part of Superlearning. Even if our goal is to play the music exactly as written, we can actually get there dramatically faster by practicing playing it in a variety of other ways. We intentionally change the music itself, and practice playing those altered versions—and nevertheless, it feeds the same learning process in the brain which will ultimately converge on the “ideal” mental representation that lets us play it successfully as written.

A very simple example would be to try playing a piece starting from a randomly-chosen measure, rather than always from start to finish. You might be surprised how challenging this can be! If our mental representation has always relied on that flow from measure to following measure, forcing our brain to start in the middle can really throw a spanner in the works. Playing a single measure at a time, jumping around the piece, can seem like a nonsensical exercise—but by interfering with the musical context in this way you actually develop a far more deep and robust mental representation of the whole piece.

Another commonly-used method is to change the rhythms of a passage. You’re still playing all the same note pitches as before, so your fingering sequence on the instrument stays the same—but you’re playing around with the timing of each note. This forces the brain to really focus on the notes and finger movements with fresh attention.

For example, supposing our goal was to play a straight C Major scale:

We might try alternating longer (marked “L”) and shorter (marked “S”) notes:

And then shorter and longer:

These kinds of rhythms are known as “dotted rhythms” after way the notation which describes them uses dots to show the note durations being extended.

The “reverse dotted rhythms” (where the shorter note comes first in each pair) is a particular favourite of Gregg Goodhart, who has found it’s one of the most reliable types of Contextual Interference, to get a musician directly into what we call the Goldilocks Zone of Desirable Difficulty.

The scale example above started from a series of notes all with equal duration, but this can be applied to any music.

There are a couple of interesting things that you’ll notice when you try this. Firstly, it often brings to light some underlying issues. The “new” mistakes you make typically aren’t random ones that only belong to this altered version of the music. Often they are actually present in the normal version too. So bringing out those mistakes gives you the chance to correct them.

The second thing you’ll notice is that even if you don’t consciously apply Deliberate Practice to “new mistakes” in the altered version, simply practicing that altered version and then returning to playing the music normally (i.e. as written) tends to produce progress.

Keep in mind our earlier principle of “Not Finishing”. When you’re playing these variations, you don’t need to practice them until you can play them perfectly. In fact, it’s better not to! Aim for about 80% correct, and then return to playing it as written.

The Many Faces of Contextual Interference

Contextual Interference is only effective when it produces Desirable Difficulty. For example, if you always do dotted rhythms, and you get really good at them, they stop working. That’s why it’s helpful to develop a wide toolkit of Contextual Interference techniques.

Almost any variation you come up with to alter the music slightly can be an effective form of Musical Contextual Interference, and as we’ll be exploring below, that can become a great creative practice in itself.

Here are some specific suggestions for ways you can try playing a tricky passage you’re working on:

• Backwards (yes, really!)
• Upside down (if playing from sheet music you can literally turn it upside-down)
• With different articulations or playing techniques (specific to your instrument)
• Exploring even more rhythmic patterns (use arbitrary patterns, or swap rhythm and pitches across pieces)
• Changing the dynamics (loud to soft, etc.)
• Changing instruments (different models of your instrument or even a whole different instrument)
• Combined with various outer contexts such as changed body position and location
• Combined with various inner contexts such as intentional thoughts and emotions (even “negative” ones like frustration or anger, to produce more difficulty)

These may seem crazy to consider, and sound crazy to your ears. And it will seem weird at first to go through all that effort to make the music sound so different from the way you want it to sound in the end.

But each time we make one of these changes, especially if it produces the right level of Desirable Difficulty, we are also allowing our brains to explore the music in different ways, with different focus of attention. And though it seems counter-intuitive, this actually results in more efficient and robust encoding of the music in our brains, enabling that end goal of successfully playing the music at tempo, as written.

C. Creative Contextual Interference

As the list above demonstrates, there is no limit to the number of creative Contextual Interference variations and combinations you can come up with! You might find it helpful to keep in mind the 4-Dimensional Active Listening framework from Chapter 5: Active Listening, and any insights or ideas you glean from your Active Listening practice to find new ideas for Contextual Interference.

It can be liberating to bridge from the nuts-and-bolts of Contextual Interference as described above, to the more creative and expressive musicality exercises we’ll explore in the next section, by thinking in terms of “Creative Contextual Interference”.

Once you know that anything which produces Desirable Difficulty will actually help your brain to learn faster, it’s much easier to allow time and space for creative experimentation in the practice room. Creativity no longer needs to feel like a distraction, or some additional thing you’re trying to practice. Creative exploration can be integrated directly into working on tricky sections in pieces you’re trying to master.

So I would recommend treating Contextual Interference as a creative process, not just a practice exercise. That means listening as you play, and forming your own aesthetic judgements about what sounds “good” or what you like. You might just surprise yourself!

When you incorporate your creativity in this way, it’s a double win: your Superlearning becomes more enjoyable, almost a game, and the resulting progress in learning is boosted even further.