Strategies

Here’s an interesting study that’s just been reported: 72 seven- and eight-month-old infants watched video animations of familiar fun items being revealed from behind a set of colorful boxes (see the 3-minute YouTube video). What the researchers found is that the babies reliably lost interest when the video became too predictable – and also when the sequence of events became too unpredictable.

In other words, there’s a level of predictability/complexity that is “just right” (the researchers are calling this the ‘Goldilocks effect’) for learning.

Now it’s true that the way babies operate is not necessarily how we operate. But this finding is consistent with other research suggesting that adult learners find it easier to learn and pay attention to material that is at just the right level of complexity/difficulty.

The findings help explain why some experiments have found that infants reliably prefer familiar objects, while other experiments have found instead a preference for novel items. Because here’s the thing about the ‘right amount’ of surprise or complexity — it’s a function of the context.

And this is just as true for us adults as it is for them.

We live in a world that’s flooded with information and change. Clay Shirky says: “There’s no such thing as information overload — only filter failure.” Brian Solis re-works this as: “information overload is a symptom of our inability to focus on what’s truly important or relevant to who we are as individuals, professionals, and as human beings.”

I think this is simplistic. Maybe that’s just because I’m interested in too many things and they all tie together in different ways, and because I believe, deeply, in the need to cross boundaries. We need specialists, sure, because every subject now has too much information even for a specialist to master. But maybe that’s what computers are going to be for. More than anything else, we need people who can see outside their specialty.

Part of the problem as we get older, I think, is that we expect too much of ourselves. We expect too much of our memory, and we expect too much of our information-processing abilities. Babies know it. Children know it. You take what you can; each taking is a step; on the next step you will take some more. And eventually you will understand it all.

Perhaps it is around adolescence that we get the idea that this isn’t good enough. Taking bites is for children; a grown-up person should be able to read a text/hear a conversation/experience an event and absorb it all. Anything less is a failure. Anything less is a sign that you’re not as smart as others.

Young children drive their parents crazy wanting the same stories read over and over again, but while the stories may seem simple to us, that’s because we’ve forgotten how much we’ve learned. Probably they are learning something new each time (and quite possibly we could learn something from the repetitions too, if we weren’t convinced we already knew it all!).

We don’t talk about the information overload our babies and children suffer, and yet, surely, we should. Aren’t they overloaded with information? When you think about all they must learn … doesn’t that put our own situation in perspective?

You could say they are filtering out what they need, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Because they keep coming back to pick out more. What they’re doing is taking bites. They’re absorbing what they need in small, attainable bites. Eventually they will get through the entire meal (leaving to one side, perhaps, any bits that are gristly or unpalatable).

The researchers of the ‘Goldilocks’ study tell parents they don’t need to worry about providing this ‘just right’ environment for their baby. Just provide a reasonably stimulating environment. The baby will pick up what they need at the time, and ignore the rest.

I think we can learn from this approach. First of all, we need to cultivate an awareness of the complexity of an experience (I’m using this as an umbrella word encompassing everything from written texts to personal events), being aware that any experience must be considered in its context, and that what might appear (on present understanding) to be quite simple might become less so in the light of new knowledge. So the complexity of an event is not a fixed value, but one that reflects your relationship to it at that time. This suggests we need different information-management tools for different levels of complexity (e.g., tagging that enables you to easily pull out items that need repeated experiencing at appropriate occasions).

(Lucky) small children have an advantage (this is not the place to discuss the impact of ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds) — the environment is set up to provide plenty of opportunities to re-experience the information they are absorbing in bites. We are not so fortunate. On the other hand, we have the huge advantage of having far more control over our environment. Babies may use instinct to control their information foraging; we must develop more deliberate skills.

We need to understand that we have different modes of information foraging. There is the wide-eyed, human-curious give-me-more mode — and I don’t think this is a mode to avoid. This wide, superficial mode is an essential part of what makes us human, and it can give us a breadth of understanding that can inform our deeper knowledge of specialist subjects. We may think of this as a recreational mode.

Other modes might include:

• Goal mode: I have a specific question I want answered
• Learning mode: I am looking for information that will help me build expertise in a specific topic
• Research mode: I have expertise in a topic and am looking for information in a specific part of that domain
• Synthesis mode: I have expertise in one topic and want information from other domains that would enrich my expertise and give me new perspectives

Perhaps you can think of more; I would love to hear other suggestions.

I think being consciously aware of what mode you are in, having specific information-seeking and information-management tools for each mode, and having the discipline to stay in the chosen mode, are what we need to navigate the information ocean successfully.

These are some first thoughts. I would welcome comments. This is a subject I would like to develop.

A fascinating article recently appeared in the Guardian, about a woman who found a way to overcome a very particular type of learning disability and has apparently helped a great many children since.

As a child, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young had a brilliant, almost photographic, memory for information she read or heard, but she had no understanding. She managed to progress through school and university through a great deal of very hard work, but she always knew (although it wasn’t recognized) that there was something very wrong with her brain. It wasn’t until she read a book (The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound - Amazon affiliate link) by the famous psychologist Luria that she realized what the problem was. Luria’s case study concerned a soldier who developed mental disabilities after being shot in the head. His disabilities were the same as hers: “he couldn't tell the time from a clock, he couldn't understand bigger and smaller without drawing pictures, he couldn't tell the difference between the sentences ‘The boy chases the dog’ and ‘The dog chases the boy’.”

On the basis of enriched-environment research, she started an intensive program to retrain her brain — 8-10 hours a day. She found it incredibly exhausting, but after 3-4 months, she suddenly ‘got it’. Something had shifted in her brain, and now she could understand verbal information in a way she hadn’t before.

The ‘Arrowsmith Program’ is now available in 35 schools in Canada and the US, and the children who attend them have often, she claims, been misdiagnosed with ADD or ADHD, dyslexia or dysgraphia. She has just published a book about her experience (The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: And Other Inspiring Stories of Pioneering Brain Transformation - Amazon affiliate link).

I can’t, I’m afraid, speak to the effectiveness of her program, because I can’t find any independent research in peer-reviewed journals (this is not to say it doesn’t exist), although there are reports on her own website. But I have no doubt that intensive training in specific skills can produce improvement in specific skills in those with learning disabilities.

There are two specific things that I found interesting. The first is the particular disability that Barbara Arrowsmith-Young suffered from — essentially, it seems, a dysfunction in integrating information.

This disjunct between ‘photographic memory’ and understanding is one I have spoken of before, but it bears repeating, because so many people think that a photographic memory is a desirable ambition, that any failure to remember exactly is a memory failure. But it’s not a failure; the system is operating exactly as it is meant to. Remembering every detail is counter-productive.

I was reminded of this recently when I read about something quite different: an “inexact” computer chip that’s 15 times more efficient, “challenging the industry’s 50-year pursuit of accuracy”. The design improves efficiency by allowing for occasional errors. One way it achieved this was by pruning some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits. Pruning is of course exactly what our brain does as it develops (infancy and childhood is a time of making huge numbers of connections; then as the brain matures, it starts viciously pruning), and to a lesser extent what it does every night as we sleep (only some of the day’s events and new information are consolidated; many more are discarded).

The moral is: forgetting isn’t bad in itself. Memory failure comes rather when we forget what we want or need to remember. Our brain has a number of rules and guidelines to help it work out what to forget and what to remember. But here’s the thing: we can’t expect an automatic system to get it right all the time. We need to provide some direct (conscious) management.

The second thing I was taken with was this list of ‘learning dysfunctions’. I believe this is a much more useful approach than category labels. Of course we like labels, but it has become increasingly obvious that many disorders are umbrella concepts. Those with dyslexia, for example, don’t all have the same dysfunctions, and accordingly, the appropriate treatment shouldn’t be the same. The same is true for ADHD and Alzheimer’s disease, to take two very different examples.

Many of those with dyslexia and ADHD have shown improvement as a result of specific skills training, but at the moment we’re still muddling around, not sure of the training needed (a side-note for those who are interested — Scientific American has a nice article on how ADHD behavioral therapy may be more effective than drugs in long run). So, because there are several different problems all being lumped into a single disorder, research finds it hard to predict who will benefit from what training.

But the day will come, I have no doubt, when we will be able to specify precisely what isn’t working properly in a brain, and match it with an appropriate program that will retrain the brain to compensate for whatever is damaged.

Or — to return to my point about choosing what to forget or remember — the individual (or parent) may choose not to attempt retraining. Not all differences are dysfunctional; some differences have value. When we can specify exactly what is happening in the brain, perhaps we will get a better handle on that too.

In the meantime, there is one important message, and it is, when it comes down to it, my core message, underlying all my books and articles: if you (or a loved one, or someone in your care) has any sort of learning or memory problem, whatever the cause, think very hard about the precise difficulties experienced. Then reflect on how important each one is. Then try and discover the specific skills needed to deal with those difficulties that matter. That will require not only finding suggested exercises to practice, but also some experimentation to find what works for you (because we haven’t yet got to the point where we can work this out, except by trial and error). And then, of course, you need to practice them. A lot.

I’m not saying that this is the answer to everyone’s problems. Sometimes the damage is too extensive, or in just the wrong place (there are hubs in the brain, and obviously damage to a hub is going to be more difficult to work around than damage elsewhere). But even if you can’t fully compensate for damage, there are few instances where specific skills training won’t improve performance.

Sharing what works is one way to help us develop the database needed. So if you have any memory or learning problems, and if you have experienced any improvement for whatever reason, tell us about it!

I talk a lot about how working memory constrains what we can process and remember, but there’s another side to this — long-term memory acts on working memory. That is, indeed, the best way of ‘improving’ your working memory — by organizing and strengthening your long-term memory codes in such a way that large networks of relevant material are readily accessible.

Oddly enough, one of the best ways of watching the effect of long-term memory on working memory is through perception.

Perception is where cognition begins. It’s where memory begins. But here’s the thing: it is only in the very beginning, as a newborn baby, that this perception is pure, uncontaminated by experience.

‘Uncontaminated’ makes it sound bad, but of course the shaping of perception by experience is vital. Otherwise we’d all be looking around wide-eyed, wondering what was going on. So we need to shape our perception.

For example, if we’re searching for a particular object, we have a mental picture of what we’re looking for, and that helps us find it quicker. Such predictive templates have recently been shown to exist for smell as well.

‘Predictive templates’ are the perceptual version of cognitive schemas. I have mentioned schemas before, in the context of expertise and reading scientific text. But schemas aren’t restricted to such intellectual pursuits; we use schemas constantly, every day of our lives. Schemas, or mental models or scripts, are mental representations you’ve formed through your experiences, that tell you what to expect from a given situation. This means we don’t have to think too hard when we come up against a familiar situation; we know what to expect.

That also means that we often don’t notice things that don’t fit in with our expectations.

I could talk about that for some time, but what I want to emphasize today is this point that thought begins with perception — and perception begins with the body.

For example, it probably won’t surprise anyone that an educational program for young children, “Moved by Reading”, has been found to help young elementary school children understand texts and math word problems by getting them to manipulate images on a computer screen in accordance with the story. Such virtual ‘acting out’ helped the children understand what was going on in the story and, in the case of the math problems, significantly reduced their attention to irrelevant information in the text. (You can read the journal article (pdf) on this; those who are registered at Edweek can also read the article that brought this to my notice.)

More surprisingly, at the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, they’ve apparently discovered that different sorts of dancing help people with different sorts of problem-solving. Improvised dance apparently helps with divergent thinking, where there are multiple answers to a problem. Very structured kinds of dance help with convergent thinking, where you’re looking for the single answer to a problem. The researchers also claim that improvised dance can help those with Parkinson's disease improve their divergent thinking skills. (I’m using the words ‘apparently’ and ‘claim’ because I haven’t seen any research papers on this — but I wanted to mention it because it’s a nice idea, and you can read an article about it and listen to the head of the Dance Lab talk about it in a 20-minute video).

We can readily see how acting out text can reveal details that in reading we might gloss over, and it’s only one step from this to accept that gesturing might help us solve problems and remember them (as I’ve reported repeatedly). But the idea that dancing in different ways might affect how we think? Not so easily believed. But in a recent news report, I talked about two experimental studies that demonstrated how moving your hands makes you less inclined to think of abstract solutions to problems (or, conversely, that moving your hands helps you solve problems physically), and holding your hands close to the object of your perception helps you see details, but hinders you from abstracting commonalities.

This idea that the way you hold or move your body can affect what we might term your level of perception — specific detail vs global — is perhaps echoed (am I drawing too long a bow here?) in a recent observation I made regarding face-blindness (prosopagnosia). That it may be, along with perfect pitch and eidetic memory, an example of what happens when your brain can’t abstract the core concept.

Our own personal experience, supported in a recent study of scene perception, indicates that we can’t do both. At any one time you must make the choice: to focus on details, or to focus on the big picture. So this is contextual, but it’s also individual — some people will be more inclined to a detail strategy, others to a global strategy. Interestingly, this may change with age. And also experience.

One aspect of cognitive flexibility is being able to control your use of detail and global perception. This applies across the board, in many different circumstances. You need to think about which type of perception is best in the context.

In the realm of notetaking, for example, (as I discuss in my book Effective notetaking), your goal makes a huge difference to the effectiveness of your notetaking. The more specific the goal, the fewer notes you need take, and the more targeted they are. Generally speaking, also, the more specific your goal, the faster you can read/select.

But of course there’s a downside to being fast and targeted (there’s always a downside to any strategy!) — you are likely to miss information that isn’t what you’re after, but is something you need to know in a different or wider context.

There’s something else interesting about speed of processing: we associate faster processing speeds with higher intelligence, and we associate concentration with faster processing speeds. That is, when we’re concentrating, we can read/work faster. Contrariwise, I believe (though I don’t think there’s any research on this — do tell me if you know of any), if we can force ourselves into a faster mode of operation, our concentration will be better.

So fast is good, but risks missing relevant information — implying that sometimes slow is better. Which leads me to a thought: is another way of looking at Csikszentmihalyi’s famous “flow” the idea that flow is achieved when you get the speed just right? And can you therefore help yourself achieve that flow state through physical means? (Inevitably leading me to think of t’ai ch’i.)

Some thoughts for the day!

We must believe that groups produce better results than individuals — why else do we have so many “teams” in the workplace, and so many meetings. But many of us also, of course, hold the opposite belief: that most meetings are a waste of time; that teams might be better for some tasks (and for other people!), but not for all tasks. So what do we know about the circumstances that make groups better value?

A recent study involving some 700 people, working on a wide variety of tasks in small groups (two to five), found that much of the difference between groups’ performance (specifically, around 40% of the variation in performance) could be explained by a measure called “collective intelligence”.

It was called that (I assume) on the basis that it was such an important factor in predicting performance on such a wide range of tasks (from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments). But the intriguing thing about this collective intelligence is that it didn’t seem to reflect the individual intelligence of the groups’ members. Instead, the most important factor in a group’s collective intelligence appeared to be how well its members worked together.

There were two (or three) factors that seem particularly important for this. The main one is the “social sensitivity” of the members — meaning how well the individuals perceive each others’ emotions. The number of women in the group also enhanced collective intelligence, but this may not be a separate factor — it may simply reflect the tendency for women to be more socially sensitive.

The other factor was the extent to which everyone contributed — groups where one person dominated were less collectively intelligent. This fits in with a review of workplace teams that found that teams that spent time sharing new information performed better overall in their tasks — even though a lot of the information was already known by everyone in the group. (Although it must be added that bringing in new information was even better!). It also fits in with the same review’s finding that teams whose members had more similar backgrounds tended to share more information than those with greater diversity.

That’s a depressing finding, but it’s not insoluble.

The review (which looked at studies totally some 4800 groups, involving over 17,000 people) also found that teams communicate better when they engage in tasks where they are instructed to come up with a correct / best answer rather than a consensual solution.

Previous research (see reports here and here) has suggested that brainstorming actually produces fewer ideas than would be produced by the same individuals working individually, and that groups working together to remember something recall more poorly than the same individuals would working on their own. One big reason for these findings, it is thought, is that hearing other people's ideas disrupts your own retrieval strategy. However, this is less likely to occur in a structured situation, where turns are taken.

So groups can have inhibitory effects (which are apparently worse when the information being recalled is more complex), and it seems likely that is one of the problems that social sensitivity helps fight against. And indeed, previous research has indicated that, when the meeting is unstructured, with everyone chipping in as they feel like it, the specificity of the suggestions is important — with this being affected by how well the group members know each other. (If turns are taken, on the other hand, it is waiting time that’s important.)

Another recent report (which I reported on a few weeks ago, which is what triggered this post), found that although two people working together can make better decisions than either one could make alone, this is only true when the participants were able to accurately judge their level of confidence in their information. If one of them is working off inaccurate information and doesn’t realize that it is inaccurate, then (unsurprisingly!) the one with accurate information is better off without him.

Again, we can surmise that a group where members know each other well is one where they have a good understanding of the confidence they can put in each other’s judgments and claims.

Perhaps relatedly, another study indicates that problems can be exacerbated when information is shared, if the people have different viewpoints. People mentally organize information in different ways, and cues that help one person recall may inhibit another.

So where does all this leave us?

How effective a group is depends a lot on how attuned its members are to each other’s emotions and capabilities. Information sharing is a positive process that enhances group productivity even when the information is already familiar to members, and therefore strategies to encourage information sharing are useful.

There are three classes of strategies that could be used:

• Providing structure to the discussions (e.g. taking turns, setting time limits, having a moderator that encourages suggestions to be specific and novel)
• Providing instruction in how to become more socially sensitive (e.g. learning about physical cues to emotion)
• Encouraging informal conversation and “team-building” exercises that help team members become more familiar with each other (bearing in mind that the point of such exercises is to help members become more aware of each other’s emotions and capabilities, and designing them accordingly).

The first of these strategies is most important for groups who have come together for a specific occasion, or only meet rarely. The second of these is useful for individuals who are (as most everyone is!) going to sometimes work collaboratively — that is, it is not dependent on a particular group. The third class of strategies is useful for long-term groups.

In all these cases, such strategies are most needed when a group contains more diverse members, who are not well-known to each other.

There is also a fourth class of strategy, that relates to assessing the effectiveness of group collaboration for particular tasks. For example, the difficulty or complexity of the task is an important factor — more complex tasks are more efficiently learned or processed by groups, while low-complexity tasks are better left to individuals. But greater complexity also requires a group that works well together.

Type of task is another likely factor. For example, organizational or memory retrieval tasks may be best left to individuals or small, similarly-inclined groups in the early stages, because our ways of approaching these tasks is quite idiosyncratic and can be hampered by contrary approaches. Of course, diversity is needed at a later stage to ensure thoroughness and/or wide applicability.

I recently reported on a study showing how the gestures people made in describing how they solved a problem (the Tower of Hanoi) changed the way they remembered the game. These findings add to other research demonstrating that gestures make thought concrete and can help us understand and remember abstract concepts better.

For example, two experiments of children in late third and early fourth grade, who made mistakes in solving math problems, have found that children told to move their hands when explaining how they’d solve a problem were four times as likely to manually express correct new ways to solve problems as children given no instructions. Even though they didn’t give the right answer, their gestures revealed an implicit knowledge of mathematical ideas, and the second experiment showed that gesturing set them up to benefit from subsequent instruction.

And in a demonstration of improved memory, an earlier study had participants watch someone narrating three cartoons. Sometimes the narrator used hand gestures and at other times they did not. The participants were then asked to recall the story. The study found that when the narrator used gestures as well as speech the participants were more likely to accurately remember what actually happened in the story rather than change it in some way.

In another study, in which 40 children and 36 adults were asked to remember a list of letters (adults) or words (children) while explaining how they solved a math problem, both groups remembered significantly more items when they gestured during their math explanations than when they did not gesture.

It’s thought that gesturing helps memory and understanding by lightening the load on working memory while you’re thinking of what to say. Gestures use up visuospatial working memory rather than verbal memory, so essentially what you’re doing is moving part of the information in one limited working memory space into another working memory space (and brain region).

Gesturing begins at an early age, first with pointing and then with more complex gestures. It is interesting to note that several advances in cognitive abilities are displayed first in gesture before later being expressed in speech. Moreover, the early use of gesture is associated with later verbal skill.

For example, research from Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues has found that toddlers (14 months), studied during an hour and a half of play with their parents, used gestures more if they were from better-educated families, and this correlated with significantly greater vocabulary at 4 ½. On average, toddlers from well-educated families used gestures to convey 24 different meanings, while those from less-educated families used gestures to convey only 13. Better-educated parents also used more gestures when interacting with their children.

Another interesting study by the same researchers showed that the number of different meanings conveyed in gesture at 18 months predicted vocabulary at 42 months, while the number of gesture+speech combinations, particularly those conveying sentence-like ideas, predicted sentence complexity.

Some months ago, I read an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about parents communicating with their pre-verbal infants using sign language. I was greatly taken with this idea. Though it sounds, at first blush, to be part of the whole flashcards-for-babies movement, it is something quite different (I do think you need to be very judicious in the ‘hothousing’ of children; there’s more to making a person than stuffing them with knowledge like a foie gras goose). The development of verbal skills requires physical development and control that is beyond babies, but we shouldn’t assume their inability to articulate words means they don’t have the mental capacity for thought.

Nor is there any evidence that teaching them simple signs delays or impedes their verbal development. Indeed, it may help it. It may also help their social development. There’s a lot of frustration in not being able to communicate — surely eliminating, or at least reducing, that frustration is going to have positive effects.

Now this is speculation. At this point we only have anecdotal reports, no research. But we can point to the positive effects of bilingualism to tell us learning two languages is beneficial rather than a hindrance (although children growing up in a truly bilingual household may be a few weeks later in starting to speak), and we know that children’s language skills improve the more time parents spend (positively) interacting with them, and, as we have just discussed, early skill with gestures is associated with better verbal skills later on.

Caregivers of young children who are interested in this can go to: https://www.babysignlanguage.com/

I don’t often talk about motor or skill memory — that is, the memory we use when we type or drive a car or play the piano. It’s one of the more mysterious domains of memory. We all know, of course, that this is a particularly durable kind of memory. It’s like riding a bicycle, we say — meaning that it’s something we’re not likely to have forgotten, something that will come back to us very readily, even if it’s been a very long time since we last used the skill.

For several decades there’s been argument over where motor memory is created. Now at last the dispute has apparently been settled, in favor of both contenders. What we needed to clarify the evidence was to realize that short-term motor memory is a quite different animal from long-term motor memory, and the two are created in different places.

The differences between short- and long-term motor memory have important implications, so let’s take a look at them.

First of all, it appears that short-term motor memory is created in the Purkinje cells of the cerebellar cortex, while long-term motor memory is transferred to the vestibular nucleus (axons from the Purkinje cells extend from the cerebellum to the vestibular nucleus in the medulla oblongata.

A similar process occurs of course in other types of memory. Most memory (for experiences, for information) is created in the hippocampus, and later passed on to regions in the cerebral cortex for long-term storage. However, that process of consolidation and transfer takes weeks. Motor memory moves from short-term to long-term much more quickly — within as little as a few hours, in some cases, or a few days at most.

There’s another important way in which motor memory differs from ‘ordinary’ memory. Again, it’s not qualitatively different, but an extension of the normal process. We don’t usually remember everything. Long-term memory is more a memory of gist than precision. Details are lost; what we remember for the most part are the broad strokes on the canvas. Similarly (though rather more markedly perhaps), short-term motor memory is quickly lost, passing on only the rough shape of the process to long-term memory.

For example, in the mouse experiments that demonstrated all this, the mice were taught to follow the movement of an object by moving their eyes in a particular way. With practice they got better at this particular eye movement, and if they practiced the task on a daily basis for several days, they were able to maintain this skill. It had been established in long-term memory.

However, this is a simple skill. When monkeys were taught a more complex skill — to follow a moving ball as its speed increases for a fifth to a tenth of a second — although they usually mastered the task quite quickly, it was also forgotten just as quickly. The researchers say such “sophisticated” motor memory is easily lost in just ten to 15 minutes.

A more human example is how a baseball batter can learn to hit a curve ball after the movement of the ball has been observed several times and memorized. It’s an advantage to pick this information up quickly, but the price seems to be that it is also forgotten quickly.

Riding a bicycle is the archetypal example of the durability of motor memory, but there’s also always a caveat: with just a little practice, we say, you’ll pick it up again. But you need that practice, and to get as skilled as you were in your heyday, you need more practice. Motor memory may be durable, but it’s only the broad outlines of the procedure that are ‘locked in’.

Of course, what constitutes the ‘broad outlines’ is clearly something that must change with practice. A concert pianist who’s been in retirement for five years and someone who learned the piano as a child are not starting off on the same foot! The ‘broad outlines’ the concert pianist has salted away must be considerably more sophisticated than those of the childhood pianist. It would be interesting to see the differences between experts and novices explored.

But in the meantime, there are two useful lessons we can take from these studies. The first is the need to brush up your skills before expecting them to be at their best (the researchers suggest that even professional musicians, accustomed to playing every day, need to ‘remind’ themselves of their skill before a concert). The second is one connected to the speed with which short-term motor memory transfers to long-term memory.

The researchers found that the animals learned more quickly when their training was broken into shorter intervals with breaks — for example, dividing an hour-long training session into four 15-minute exercises with intervals of 30 minutes between them. For this to be true, however, the cerebellar cortex needed to be active. This implies that something happens in this part of the brain during periods of inactivity that’s important for creating long-term memory. I’m reminded here of other recent research pointing to the importance of “quiet time” for consolidating new learning.

None of this contradicts what we already know about how to learn and practice a skill, but it does add to our understanding and reinforces the idea that it’s better to practice a skill regularly in small bites, rather than in lengthy sessions (I’m not denouncing the long sessions a musician, say, puts in on a daily basis. But the recommendation would be not to practice one specific thing for too long at one go — better to move on to something else, and, repeatedly, come back to it.)

For more about how to practice, check out Learning a new skill, Spacing your learning and Acquiring expertise through deliberate practice