The Value of Repetition - The Magic of Myelin
Don’t you wish that you could play through something just once, and then be able to play it perfectly from there after? If only!! 😫
Of course we all know that repetition is an essential part of getting really good at basically anything. From music to sport, reading and writing, and everything else you can think of, you have to repeat things many, many times in order to develop your skills and improve.
But what is happening when we repeat a skill over and over?
To find this out we’ll have to take a closer look at how our brain works, and what’s going on when we get practicing.
Your brain is an amazingly sophisticated super-computer, made up of a combination of grey and white matter. 🧠 The grey parts are your neuron cells, and you’ve got around 86 billion of the little guys up there! 😲 When different parts of the brain communicate and coordinate with each other, they send an electrical signal down the nerves and spinal cord into various parts of the body. This creates the movements in order for us to play our instruments effectively and accurately. Obviously these impulses are highly refined and very specific, but this accuracy is made possible by the white matter in our brain.
The white matter is called myelin, a fatty tissue that coats much of the long arms that extend out of our neuron cells, kind of like the insulation around an electrical cable. These long arms are called axons, and carry an electrical charge from one neuron to the next in the chain, like a domino effect. What scientists have found is that when the axon is coated in more myelin, the nerve signals are able to travel much faster and stronger along the neural pathway. Basically this means that myelin turns your brain signals from a dial-up internet speed, to super-fast broadband! This means that you are able to perform skills with much greater accuracy and precision than ever before.
So the big question is how do you get more myelin in your brain?
No surprises here…through REPETITION!
One simple example is writing out your own name by hand. My 5 year old daughter has just started learning to write at school, so her first efforts at spelling “Ella” were pretty interesting to say the least! But through practising multiple times each day, she is now able to spell it correctly and legibly. Soon she will be able to link the letters together and make it look even better. Eventually she won’t even need to think when writing out her name, it will just happen automatically, just as it does for you or I.
What her practice is doing is helping the brain coordinate itself and become optimised for the skill of writing. This coats more and more layers of myelin around the nerve axons in a process called myelination. The more we practice the same skill, the more myelination occurs, and the smoother, more natural and efficient the skill becomes.
But there’s one very important point about myelination – your brain doesn’t choose the most efficient pathways to myelinate, it strengthens the pathways that are simply repeated the most! If you practice poor technique or do not correct your mistakes, then your brain will strengthen those same pathways to make them habits. As many of us already know, unwanted habits are hard to get rid of, so we have to correct errors as soon as possible in order to myelinate the more efficient neural pathways.
So remember: practice doesn’t make perfect,
ONLY PERFECT PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT!
Here’s a fantastic TedEd video by Don Greene and Annie Bosler about “How to practice effectively…for just about anything.”
It not only covers myelination, but also some really useful practice strategies to help you in your preparation. Greene and Bosler define effective practice as “Consistent, intensely focused, and targets content or weaknesses that lie at the edge of one’s current abilities.”
Their practice suggestions include:
• Focus on the task at hand and remove potential distractions from your practice space.
• Start out slowly, making sure that what you are playing is correct. Then gradually increase the speed of repetitions.
• Frequent repetitions with regular practice breaks are common habits of elite performers.
• Visualise in vivid detail of what you want to play, without your instrument. This also strengthens neural pathways and enhances skill development.
If you are interested in learning more about myelin and skill acquisition, I’d recommend checking out The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. It’s a great book and not a difficult read. It’s also one that opened my eyes to a lot of new information that helped fuel my learning and curiosity. Hope it has the same impact for you too! 😊👍