02/13/2025
Ever wonder why some people seem to learn faster than others? Is it just natural ability? Or something else? A study of birds (what?!) actually provides some intriguing clues.
How so?
Well, it’s often said that practice doesn’t make perfect, and only “perfect” practice makes perfect.
So does this mean that we should try to be as accurate as possible from Day 1? Or could a bit of floundering early on be a good thing?
Research has found that young songbirds have more variability (aka errors 😅) in their singing than adult songbirds. And when the part of their brains that promotes variability is deactivated, they do sing more consistently - but this comes with a reduction in motor learning ability.
A team of Harvard researchers (Wu et al., 2014) were curious about this, and wondered if motor movement variability in the early stages of learning might help to explain why some people learn faster than others.
They created an experiment where participants had to copy a curved figure without being able to see their hand.
At first, everyone was off target - but some folks’ drawings were more irregular than others.
Over the course of hundreds of trials, everyone’s accuracy improved.
But the participants who started off with the most erratic performance, actually improved their accuracy faster than the folks whose initial performance was more consistent!
The researchers did a follow-up study where they nudged participants’ hands off course on purpose. And these forced errors led to faster learning of the correct motion too!
What?! Why do more mistakes seem to lead to faster learning?
I think it’s a bit like playing the board game Battleship. Taking a bunch of random shots all across the playing grid may look random at first - but it enables you to figure out where to focus your efforts when you get a hit.
Likewise, if I’m trying to learn how to do downbow staccato, instead of experimenting within a really narrow range of options, that sort-of-but-not-really work, it may be more efficient to try a wide range of things, some of which may not work at all, but others of which might lead to a breakthrough.
Don’t just allow yourself to make mistakes w***y nilly while playing through something mindlessly, of course. But do see what happens when you give yourself permission to experiment with different approaches and make exploratory mistakes, to more quickly find out which avenues are promising, and which ones aren’t!
Click through for all the nerdy details:
https://bulletproofmusician.com/perfect-shmerfect-the-stage-of-practicing-when-more-mistakes-is-better-for-learning/
