Brain Science and Learning
A constant tug-of-war is going on in our brains. Information goes in and the brain has to determine which pieces get to stay or go. In other words, which inputs get moved from short-term memory to long-term memory. Although there is much to be understood about the specific mechanisms for this, we know that repetition is a key component of moving short-term memories into long-term ones.
My interest in brain science and learning stems from my own previous difficulties with memorizing music. And my science background makes me way too interested in the hows and whys that I can get lost for hours digging into journal articles about the topic.
Shinichi Suzuki, the founder of the Talent Education movement and developer of the Suzuki Violin Method books, is known for saying “Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill.” He was arguing for the importance of repetition for long-term memory acquisition.
When you present your brain with a new skill and don’t practice it or continue to develop it, you will loose what you learned and not develop ability. When we learn new violin skills, we want to move those into long-term memory so that we can develop our playing ability and musical sensitivity. Without repetition, we will not progress very quickly. Cue in daily practice. It is essential!
Furthermore, research suggests that it’s also important to vary the stimulus that is going into the brain to make it “stick”. If the same stimulus is presented to the brain over and over in the same way, it stops going into long-term memory. Vary the stimulus a little, and the information sticks. This is where a well-trained teacher comes in. The teacher will use their experience with the violin to identify where you need to work more and provide multiple exercises to repeat a new skill in different ways. Practice these different exercises! Attend group lessons where you will review the learned material in a different location and with peers!
After having my second daughter, I noticed that my memory got a lot worse. I couldn’t remember people’s names anymore and I forgot appointments. I also wasn’t sleeping as much - staying up later to get ready for the next day, finish cleaning up, planning Girl Scout meetings, and being a busy mom. I remembered a piece of information that I picked up at a medical conference about neurology: during sleep our brain consolidates the experiences of the day into memory. So it got me thinking that by skipping out on sleep, I wasn’t able to move as many experiences from the day into long-term memory storage. I seemed to be missing out by not having an adequate sleep/wake cycle. This underscores the importance of a daily cycle in our brains.
I also remembered cram sessions in high school and college - where I tried to cram lots of information into my brain right before an exam. I retained enough of it for a short time to answer questions correctly on an exam, but a week later the information was lost. This is like having a lesson on new material and then not practicing it all week. You’ll show up at your next lesson not having made progress or remembering what you learned.
If you take a lesson and then practice for 2 hours the next day and not again until the next lesson, you won’t retain the information as well as if you had practiced it for 20 minutes each day after the lesson. This all relates back to the importance of a daily cycle in our brains. Just as our brains need sleep at regular intervals, we also need to spread out our practice among those sleep/wake intervals.
So this leaves us with several important take-aways:
Repetition is critical for moving knowledge into long-term memory. This includes repetition of listening to recordings.
Varied types of stimulus is important to make it stick. Hence all the different but related exercises in your lessons.
Daily practice is more powerful than cram sessions.
Sleep is also important for putting your daily practice into long-term memory. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep so that your brain has time to do something with all those experiences of the day.
Happy practicing!
