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Scientists have found a way to help learn skills faster
- Perixoog 11y agoCurrent Biology - Motor Skills Are Strengthened through Reconsolidation 12 page pdf: http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2045379445/2056784269/mmc2.pdf http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2045379445/2056784269/mmc...
- kgarten 11y agoThanks ... it's really bad practice from news articles to not link to the actual study or cite it. "Scientists found ... " yeah at least they mention the author and the journal.
- mdorazio 11y agoHow would this apply to something like learning to play the piano or guitar? The examples given for sports training seem practical, but I'm having trouble envisioning small variations of a similar type for things like instruments. Maybe varying the size/weight of the piano keys, or fret spacing on a guitar?
- mjt0229 11y agoImagine practicing a scale on the guitar. You could just repeat the scale over and over, but you could also add rhythmic variation, or play two notes up and one note down. Based on the article, it doesn't seem like moving the goalposts (ie, fret spacing) is the critical point, it's just that you don't want to just blindly do the same thing over and over and hope to get better.
- valvar 11y agoWell, my violin teacher used to say that there were three important stages that a musician has to go through - playing badly and being unaware of what is going on, playing well and being unaware of what is going on, and finally, playing well and being aware of what is going on. When you've reached that final stage, you don't just repeatedly play a tune and hope to get better - you play it, hear your mistakes or what you want to change, and then repeat those sections and adjust them until you are content. Blindly repeating patterns is something you should get past relatively soon if you're hoping to get anywhere with an instrument.
- Karunamon 11y agoThat sounds a lot like the 4 stages of competence[1]. Unconscious Incompetence: You don't know that you don't know. (I don't know how to drive a manual) Conscious Incompetence: You know that you don't know, and start learning the skill. (I'm learning how to drive a manual) Conscious Competence: Your skills have improved and you understand them, but there's a lot of manual work involved. (To drive a manual, you do step X, Y, and Z) Unconscious Competence: The skill has been internalized and is automatic. (I know how to drive a manual without thinking about it) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
- valvar 11y agoI'm thinking more along the lines of practicing different scales, arpeggios and pieces each time, and practicing several different things instead of repeatedly practicing a single thing. Unfortunately, though, as an amateur violinist, I can say that this approach is not all that feasible after a certain level. Varying your warm-ups like what scales, arpeggios and etudes you play might be a good idea, but in the end the only really effective way of mastering a piece is to play it over and over, mostly in small sections, until you get it right. If you just scim over it each time, you're probably going to let mistakes slip in and ferment. But maybe changing something less related to the actual activity more in line with what you suggested might also work - lowering and raising the music stand and piano stool or chair, changing instruments or location, etc.
- pinkrooftop 11y agoIf you take the approach of mastering the instrument instead of a piece then scales, arpeggios, and other building blocks become critical. Almost like learning improv jazz violin, before taking on a classical piece
- ZenoArrow 11y agoMastering a musical instrument can be broken down into physical skills and aural skills. Exercises can be useful for physical skills, but aural skills can be practiced without them. Improvising is about being open to where you can go, and ear training of various kinds is going to be far more useful for that than practising the same group of exercises time and time again.
- pinkrooftop 11y agoScales is the key to improv in my experience
- bhrgunatha 11y agoScales are an important and necessary part, but I agree with ZenoArrow - developing aural skills is the key. It opens up so many possibilities. I haven't fully mastered those skills yet (still working on them), but learning just a little is like suddenly having a map while trying to find your way around a city. Before, you stumble around, stopping to ask for directions and taking wrong turns. After, you can plan what you want to do much more easily.
- milesward 11y agoThink 10 minutes on scales, 10 minutes on playing the piece you know best, 10 minutes sight-reading something you've never seen, 10 minutes playing by ear to the radio, and 10 minutes playing a different instrument (or RockBand!). Repeat for 10k hours, and I'll see you at the Grammys ;)
- hyung 11y ago- Adding a metronome, even at very slow tempos, adds good subtle variation. - Starting from different points in the piece also provides a good subtle variation. - Playing the piece at different octaves.
- coldtea 11y ago>The examples given for sports training seem practical, but I'm having trouble envisioning small variations of a similar type for things like instruments. Maybe varying the size/weight of the piano keys, or fret spacing on a guitar? Huh? It's not about changing the instrument. They mean stuff like practicing in different tempos, the same pattern in different scales, playing a piece with different accompaniment styles, playing the piece with open vs barre chords, or with a different strumming pattern, etc.
- tunesmith 11y agoNah, this is already a common part of good practice techniques. When I was 12, I learned Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu, a piece where you have to play four sequential notes in the right hand in the same beat length as playing three notes in the left, over and over again (they call this four-against-three), by doing the following: 1) Practicing right hand alone slowly 2) RH staccato (short punchy notes) 3) RH long-short long-short (so it "swings" kinda like jazz) 4) RH short-long short-long 5) RH short-short-short-long, and all other combinations 6) Same techniques as above, but with the LH, applied to a triple rather than a quad 7) Practicing both hands together, with RH steady but LH a syncopated "wrong" rhythm 8) Both hands together, LH steady but RH a syncopated "wrong" rhythm 9) Gradually speeding up the metronome until 7) and 8) "met in the middle" and it started sounding smooth Later when I learned Beethoven's Appossionata (first movement), there's this section in left hand that is hard and fast, five notes per beat. Really hard if you're not left-handed. My teacher had me learn it by learning the mirror-image inverse in the right hand at the same time - so for instance if you'd play a C# in the left, you'd play an Eb (an octave up) in the right. It sounded like crap, but the end result was like it was my right hand "teaching" my left hand and I was eventually able to nail it.
- lloyd-christmas 11y agoHanons.
- pjdorrell 11y agoDon't buy your child a bicycle: buy him/her _two_ bicycles.
- hurpAdurp 11y agoInstead of the awkward "him/her", try just using "them" to de-genderify your pronouns. The slash looks goofy.
- bhrgunatha 11y agoSingular "they" was the American Dialect Society's word of the year for 2015. http://www.americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they http://www.americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-sing...
- kentosi 11y agoWouldn't that just be grammatically incorrect? Unless you replace "child" with "children" of course ... (Australian English speaker here.)
- Natsu 11y agoEnglish used to allow 'they' to be singular (Shakespeare used this). Some people are coming back to it as acceptable as it's easier than the other solutions.
- sitkack 11y agoI call it The Child and Child. It seems to be doing fine.
- halpme 11y agoHow would this apply to learning a conceptual topic, as opposed to a physical skill?
- bbhill 11y agoI think problem sets in textbooks already do this; you do multiple problems relating in different ways to a lesson and so you learn how to master it in different ways.
- halpme 11y agoThat sounds a lot like deliberate practice, which is an idea that's been around for a while.
- guimarin 11y agowhen trying to learn something, engage with it repeatedly on exponential decay. IE. Index cards. Go through them as many times as it take to learn whatever you are learning. Then perform a 20-30 minute context switch. do again. Now wait 1 hour. Do the cards again. Wait 2 hours. Again. Do this until you review those cards at the week level. You can learn almost anything with very high recall 6-9 months later with this method. edit: Sleep is an extremely important component of this. You must be well rested, and preferably do not ingest significant amounts of alcohol before sleeping as that will mess up short term to long term memory mapping from hippo to pfc.
- eicossa 11y agois there any application or software that helps to do this ? for instance, reading dense technical documentation (like opencv or scikit-learn) or papers ? . i currently try to approximate this process using a hap-hazard combination of emacs, org-mode and the org-drill packages. are there other better ways out there ? . Don't say anki, because anki seems to only be good for memorizing and engaging with material that seems to have a well-defined schema (eg. vocabulary, rules of grammar, etc) but not for applying the scheme you mentioned to documents of arbitrary complexity.
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- gwern 11y agoIf anyone is curious, the psychologists discovered this long ago; it's related to spaced repetition, but in education & sports & psychology, this is known as blocking: you get better skill gain by not massing practice on a single skill, but by regularly rotating through multiple tasks. (So in a baseball study, the players would rotate through batting, throwing, catching etc, instead of spending a long time at each activity.)
- jacobolus 11y agoThis seems to be a different thing than just practicing different activities related to the same sport. These are two functionally similar activities which use slightly different muscle patterns to accomplish, so that the trainee is directly applying their knowledge of the first action to the second, but can’t just do the precise same motion. > “If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation. The modification between sessions needs to be subtle” A better baseball analogy might be practicing catching line drives then practicing catching popups then practicing catching one-bounce throws then practicing catching a lobbed egg. Or maybe practicing batting and then practicing golfing and then practicing kendo swings.
- walking 11y agoIf I'm reading the source article correctly (linked below by Perixoog), it sounds like change was so subtle that the participants themselves weren't even aware of it: "Participants were unaware of this manipulation" "We chose to manipulate sensorimotor variability so that participants were unaware of the fact that there was any change in the task" [1] http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2045379445/2056784269/mmc2.pdf http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2045379445/2056784269/mmc... So not only are the tasks similar, but they're so similar that participants weren't consciously aware that they were doing something different. Wacky They also mention that "participants strengthened skill through the re-exploration of sensorimotor space." I wonder how large an exploration of the sensorimotor space could be while generalizing/improving the original skill. (re batting and kendo). No idea, but interesting article either way
- mavsman 11y agoThis one weird trick that will make you learn things twice as fast.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThis is old news: train your brain guides used to tell people to do this same stuff. Intuition trainers also did it with simulations and such that varied a bit. Those doing it knew it worked due to better performance. Published experiments confirming it is A Good Thing, of course.
- Turbots 11y agoI know kung fu
- agumonkey 11y agoRandom anecdote, take care of your heart. Impaired blood flow will decrease your skills (be it physical, neurological, intellectual) and your ability to grow again.
- bluusteel 11y agoI think this is called varied practice and that the idea has been around for awhile. The book Make It Stick[1] discusses a study that had 8 year olds toss beanbags at a target. For one group, the distance to the target was varied. For another, the distance to the target was fixed. At a later time, both groups were tested and the group that practiced with a variable distance performed better than the fixed distance group. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674729013 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674729013
- hiphopyo 11y agoThere's also Donepezil, a drug similar to the one from the movie Limitless (2011). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2593268/The-drug-helps-adults-learn-fast-children.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2593268/The-d... - Donepezil is used to improve memory function in Alzheimer’s patients - Children learn skills quickly as their brains go through 'critical periods’ - Researchers found donepezil can revert adult brains to these periods - It increases the 'elasticity' of the brain making it capable of learning rapidly - Researchers rewired a visually impaired patient’s brain to process images - The drug works by boosting chemicals in the brain that reduce with age
- ddingus 11y agoI am understanding this to mean the small, but sensible variations, gets at the dynamics of a task better than mere repetition does. Instead of learning to correct toward a given nominal, we get a sense of what nominal is, given an input, essentially.
- anotheryou 11y agoI was really missing this from the article. I'd describe it as "play" to get to know the system you are trying to learn. This knowledge than helps with the specific task. Given the study I assume a different mechanism coming in to play also: If you try to play a musical piece on an instrument teachers will advise you to practice as slow as needed, not to make a single mistake, that could end up being learned. It's like trying to correct yourself on word you mangled up while speaking, you'll be so fixated you immediately make the mistake again and again. This memory effect might have been countered by the variations in the study.
- ddingus 11y agoYes, you hit it on the instrument practice. I struggled with exactly that, and failed on that instrument. Never did quite get the same thing out of it twice, without a lot of focus on that thing. Later, with little formal practice, I would play with a different one. Ended up with some modest skill that remains today.
- etiene 11y agoI've known this for over a decade... My piano teacher instructed me to do that. To learn any piece by heart, never start at the same measure, play voices separately, combine different voices, sing together with it, play it backwards (measure n then measure n-1 + measure n, then measure n-2 + measure n-1 + measure n...), you can do this with bigger sections as well, change tempo, etc. I still remember how to play my 4-voice Bach fugue even though I've stopped playing the piano for years now. I tried this with text and public speaking too and it works. I thought this was widely known...?
- gavazzy 11y agoCan confirm this is widely known within music pedagogy. However, quite a few of my peers thought it was "stupid" and just practiced the same piece over and over, at the same tempo, without ever stopping and working on the hard parts. After several years of music, there was a pronounced difference between those who practiced effectively and those who merely repeated their mistakes. Perhaps a study like this could convince future students that it's worthwhile.
- reed1 11y agoThat's why polygot programming is better I guess.
- anotheryou 11y agoI'd describe at least one of the factors as "play". "Play" to get to know the system you are trying to learn. This knowledge than helps with the specific task. Given the study I assume a different mechanism coming in to play also: If you try to play a musical piece on an instrument teachers will advise you to practice as slow as needed, not to make a single mistake, that could end up being learned. It's like trying to correct yourself on word you mangled up while speaking, you'll be so fixated you immediately make the mistake again and again. This memory effect might have been countered by the variations in the study. (I posted the same thing elsewhere, but as a comment of the furthest down top-level comment I doubt it will be seen there)