8 ms·
Overlearning hyperstabilizes a skill by making processing inhibitory-dominant
- vezycash 10y agoPractice doesn't make perfect. Rather, practice makes Permanent - locks it in. And perfect practice makes perfect. Practicing the wrong way is like having a bad habit. The habit (practice) is bad but it locks in nonetheless. Perfect Practice To reach perfection, care has to be taking when practicing to encode things the right way. Good coaches accomplish this by: 1. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully slow rate to make errors more noticeable 2. Chunking - breaking down the skill into smaller components and practicing these chunks separately. E.g. tearing music notes into pieces and practicing the notes separately Books: Little Book of Talent, The Talent Code
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mr_luc 10y agoI'd like to piggyback on this to also call out, for people interested in this sort of thing, that this hyper-stabilization or mastery training (which is like developing muscle memory, maybe literally in the case of musicians learning a new piece or technique), is very different from general learning. See "Make It Stick" and the studies referenced in it regarding "desirable difficulties" that help create strong connections; coaches, teachers and learners mostly express preference for controlled, topical, less-confusing practice, but their preference is usually wrong as measured by performance (in sports and classroom contexts, anyway), whereas mixed-up practice that feels harder, and variations on that like trying to solve things before being taught the correct way, show better results.
- rememberberry 10y agoAny other good literature on this, or learning in general?
- mr_luc 10y agoI have a few favorites, but by and large I got those favorites from from Make It Stick, which I've reread a few times now. It's the best view-from-10k feet (written by 3 learning/memory researchers) I could have hoped for in a field with so much significant work being done, and the footnotes are a nice map to that world. I got interested in learning science from reading about the SuperMemo guy about 10 years ago, and there were some HN discussions where people were saying "this is cool, are there any other really solid learning effects, like spaced reps, that we know about?," and I think it was from HN that I learned about some of Bjork's stuff (one of the fathers of desirable difficulty, https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/robert-a-bjork-publications/ https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/robert-a-bjork-publications/). But I got the chance to learn more when researching for some training software I wrote in 2014, which was when Make It Stick was published; it was really helpful.
- rhapsodic 10y ago> Any other good literature on this, or learning in general? As another commentter mentioned, "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle is excellent. Applying the principles it discussed made my musical practice an order of magnitude more effective than it had been previously.
- mikekchar 10y agoTake a look at the wikipedia articles for Desirable Difficulties and Spacing Effect. Spacing and Interleaving was the hot topic in research the last time I looked (about 5 years ago). Note that "spacing" is different than "spaced repetition". There are quite a few papers linked to the Wikipedia articles, though, very unfortunately the "desirable difficulties" page only lists the original papers. If you google around, you should be able to find quite a few more. Keep in mind that most of the research in this area is psychological. It is often very difficult to build good studies. On top of that, many papers have pretty poor statistics in them, so take whatever you read with a grain of salt. It's very, very easy to suffer from confirmation bias because there are a lot of studies and many of them are not great. You can pick your conclusion and build an impressive looking list of references. Just be a bit careful of that when you are going through the review literature.
- rasz_pl 10y agoWax on Wax off.
- stcredzero 10y ago1. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully slow rate to make errors more noticeable You have to be careful with this as well. There are some musicians who do this, but can only play at the practice speed. (So be sure to speed things up, and vary things. You'll have true mastery if you can morph what you've practiced.) It's also good to listen to recordings of yourself and of model musicians as a means of feedback. 2. Chunking - breaking down the skill into smaller components Care has to be taken with this as well. I've encountered musicians who have chunked ornaments in traditional music, but have practiced so much, that they consistently replay the ornament at their practice tempo, regardless of the tempo being played at the moment. Music is a game of continual contextual awareness. There is a powerful analogy with programming here.
- lettergram 10y agoOne of the tricks Ive worked with, is practicing something slow and chunked three times in a row perfectly. If you fail you start over, I.e. you may play it perfectly twice, but third time you fail, you start over. Then once you do a small chunked section slowly perfectly (say 8 measures), you then try at regular speed until you do it three times perfectly. Then you try playing two chunks (say 16 measures) the same way, constantly building. For reference, I had a full ride to multiple universities for my music. So at least for me it worked well this way.
- stcredzero 10y agoI've never been in a university music program, but I've gotten lessons from various people who have, including the director of my college early music group, so I've been introduced to and have implemented quite a bit of that kind of practice. For traditional music, you need to add variation by rhythmic emphasis as well. Just because something is called a "hornpipe" or a "fling," this doesn't entirely specify the rhythm, beyond the time signature that has been most often used to notate that particular kind of dance. (And it doesn't always even get you that far, actually.) The first note is probably emphasized by giving it a bit more time to varying degrees, and there might be other subtle changes to give it more or less or a different feeling of "swing." To be a very good traditional musician, one needs to listen to and adapt to these changes/variations.
- b1gtuna 10y ago"perfect practice makes perfect" - wow this comes as a revelation to me. Never realized how important it is to do it right - something very obvious but struck me by surprise when you put it this way.
- bluGill 10y agoIt is more complex than that though. Imperfect practice is just fine so long as you recognize in practice what you are doing wrong and try to correct it. I often practice a musical piece wrong, I try again and again, each time trying to correct something, but somehow one correction breaks something else. The next day I come back and I'm much better because even though none of my practices was perfect. Repeat a few times [hundreds in some cases] and I can play perfectly.
- brilliantcode 10y agoThe piano is such a good illustration. For decades I didn't give a shit about proper posture and when things started to get really fast as they do in rachmaninoff's Moment Musicaux No.4, I finally realized my bad habit was holding me back. Now I practice it at a super slow level and slowly build it.... I think it's a great philosophy to have in mind...practice doesn't make perfect but a perfect practice makes perfect.
- CamperBob2 10y ago1. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully slow rate to make errors more noticeable Interesting to contrast this advice with the HN story from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570892 In that document, several authorities point out that learning Morse code by listening to characters being sent at a painfully slow rate is actually counterproductive -- as in, the worst possible way to go about it. You never learn what the characters really sound like if you do that. Is there an analogous effect at work when learning a new musical instrument?
- ecopoesis 10y agoI think with Morse code there's something else going on. Listening for the "dah-dits" like beginners do at 5-10 wpm is was impossible for me. The only way I learned was to listen to fast, 20 wpm repetition of letters while I wrote them down. Basically I forced the Morse sounds into the hearing part of my brain as alternative sounds for letters. As an interesting side effect, I can't read Morse code (written like -.-. .--) easily. I'm also terrible at sending it.
- sundvor 10y agoInteresting. I found on mountain bike riding, after a few crashes one of which broke my wrist I realised my skill level wasn't what it needed to be. Slowed it right down, did some skills courses, focusing on basics, keeping different areas of focus in mind at different times - and before I knew it, was going faster and safer than I was before I started having my crashes. I've had some breaks away from the riding but even then I find that the techniques come back quickly. So yeah seems like learning how to do things properly certainly has a lot of merit.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y agoAnother important aspect of chunking that imoroves the efficiency of learning is to not practice for extended periods without taking a break. This is one of the foundations of the Pomodoro technique
- YZF 10y agoBased on many years of martial arts practice and two years of guitar practice I'd also add: - You need to challenge yourself to move the needle. If it's so slow that it's too easy you're not accomplishing that. - Sometimes too slow is more difficult. - There are some aspects of training where it doesn't matter if you make errors. E.g. strength or flexibility can be developed while making mistakes and without those you can't actually execute the proper technique anyways. I think the trick is to try to avoid locking in the error by switching to other practices. - Some physical skills are speed sensitive, i.e. the slow doesn't transfer to the fast. - It can help speeding things up to the point where you make mistakes just to get speed up, and then coming back to normal speed. That F barre chord is still driving me crazy though with any technique I try to throw at it ;)
- derefr 10y agoSo it sounds like they're saying that overlearning is what takes us from from "oh, huh, I was wrong" on encountering new evidence, to instead saying "no way, the evidence has to be wrong."
- sageikosa 10y agoI think it's more like: I am so right I don't need to know anything else.
- davesque 10y agoI think that's way too high level. It seems to me that this paper is discussing learning at the level of memorization or motor skills. I would think that behaviors like egoism can't be reliably connected to something at this level.
- jerf 10y agoYou beat me by just a bit. The connection to higher level behaviors is a tempting one, and at least worthy of research, but due to their greater complexity and the way that inhibition and stimulation have less obvious connections to behaviors at higher levels of neural complexity (as the complexity of the neural system goes up you get fun combinations like "inhibition of inhibition" and "stimulation of inhibition" and all kinds of arbitrarily complicated things), I wouldn't leap to conclusions about that.
- derefr 10y agoI wasn't quite trying to communicate egoism; more what the mental process (you could say "subconscious flinch reaction", but that doesn't capture the "physiological-ness" of what's happening) to encountering the kind of contradictory information that the brain "learns" from. That is, new information that contradicts your knowledge usually triggers focused attention (i.e. NMDA activation) in order to facilitate learning. However, overlearning can make the same information be discounted as irrelevant (i.e. a GABAergic signal of "it's okay, I don't need to figure that out.") Explaining at a high level exactly what that "it's okay, don't pay attention to that" signal is rationalized as in conscious experience, is a whole different thing.
- RangerScience 10y agoHoly shit. It this what over-fit looks like for humans (as compared to neural nets)?
- megiddo 10y agoNo, that results in false classification. This is saying that overtraining prevents revision of existing skills, as if the learning process is interrupted.
- pps43 10y agoNot really. With over-fitting, performance goes down, not just plateaues.
- jpiabrantes 10y agoMore like learning rate decay. Learning rate is now zero.
- curuinor 10y agoGerd Gigerenzer is the author you want for looking at overfit in human beings. Sworn life enemy of the Kahneman and Tversky collaboration, and vice versa(Kahneman actually put in a few disses in his Nobel prize ceremony aimed pretty much at him...).
- fundingshovel 10y agoIs there an free copy of the article not just the abstract?
- ryen 10y agoCurious how overlearning influences political beliefs, and if a subject is less likely to alter their belief system based on living in an "echo chamber" and constant re-enforcement of those beliefs.
- probablyfiction 10y agoThere's growing evidence that political beliefs are linked to self-image more than factual evidence, which is why arguing over the facts of an issue often winds up causing both sides to double-down on what they already believe to be true and generally accomplishes nothing.
- Malice 10y agoSource please?
- edblarney 10y agoI can't speak for his source. But I have encountered this: I dated a bunch of girls from OKC a couple of years ago. Many of them claimed they were 'Buddhist' on their profiles. I'm very interested in religion, and thought it was odd so many claimed to be this, when clearly it was not of their 'ethnic origin'. When I talked to them about it, none of them knew anything about Buddhism beyond 'The Dalai Lama' and a few platitudes. They had never read a full book. Knew next to nothing of Buddhist theology. Never been to a Temple. Had no practices, holidays, knew nothing of the various forms of Buddhism (some of them are pretty hard-core and not what we think of in the West) etc.. So in reality, they 'thought positively of the pop-culture Buddhist image' and what that image meant for themselves, and how it projected onto others. And that's about it - but they were not remotely 'Buddhist' in any tangible way. My point is people often 'identify with some idea' - but those ideas, and even their understanding of the more formalized idea, can be essentially fictional - or rather, they are used to 'paint a picture of their self identity', and possibly nothing more.
- brilliantcode 10y agoit almost sounds like a long winded way of describing "brainwashing" and "propaganda".
- malanj 10y agoIf you can't get past nature's paywall, and want more detail... https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/01/overlearn https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/01/overlearn tldr: Task: detect which one of the two successively presented images had a patterned orientation and which depicted just unstructured noise. A first group practiced the task for eight blocks, waited 30 minutes, and then trained for eight blocks on a new similar task. The next day they were tested on both tasks to assess what they learned. The other group did the same thing, except that they overlearned the first task for 16 blocks of training. On the next day’s tests, the first group performed quite poorly on the first task compared to the pre-test. Meanwhile the overlearning group showed strong performance on the first task, but no significant improvement on the second. Regular learning subjects were vulnerable to interference by the second task (as expected) but overlearners were not.
- waynecolvin 10y agoHow then do you forget, after this overlearning already occurred? EDIT: Someone says "If you can't get past nature's paywall,"
- striking 10y agoStop practicing wrong, take some time to forget, and start over later.
- waynecolvin 10y agoI was actually thinking about veterins returning to civillian life at the time, but maybe you're right.
- deepakkarki 10y agoSci-hub link for the paywalled paper : http://sci-hub.cc/10.1038/nn.4490 http://sci-hub.cc/10.1038/nn.4490