Don't just learn—overlearn"Why do I have to keep practicing? I
know it already!”
That’s the familiar wail of a child seated at the piano or in front of
the multiplication table (or, for that matter, of an adult taking a
tennis lesson). Cognitive science has a persuasive retort: We don’t just
need to learn a task in order to perform it well; we need to
overlearn it. Decades of research have shown that superior performance requires practicing
beyond
the point of mastery. The perfect execution of a piano sonata or a
tennis serve doesn’t mark the end of practice; it signals that the
crucial part of the session is just getting underway.
Evidence of why this is so was provided by a study published recently in the
Journal of Neuroscience.
Assistant professor Alaa Ahmed and two of her colleagues in the
integrative physiology department at the University of Colorado-Boulder
asked study subjects to move a cursor on a screen by manipulating a
robotic arm. As they did so, the researchers measured the participants’
energy expenditure by analyzing how much oxygen they inhaled and how
much carbon dioxide they breathed out. When the subjects first tackled
the exercise, they used up a lot of metabolic power, but this decreased
as their skill improved. By the end of the learning process, the amount
of effort they expended to carry out the task had declined about 20
percent from when they started.
Whenever we learn to make a new movement, Ahmed explains, we form and
then update an internal model—a “sensorimotor map”—which our nervous
system uses to predict our muscles’ motions and the resistance they will
encounter. As that internal model is refined over time, we’re able to
cut down on unnecessary movements and eliminate wasted energy.
Over the course of a practice session, the subjects in Ahmed’s study
were becoming more efficient in their muscle activity. But that wasn’t
the whole story. Energy expenditures continued to decrease even after
the decline in muscle activity had stabilized. In fact, Ahmed and her
coauthors report, this is when the greatest reductions in metabolic
power were observed—during the very time when it looks to an observer,
and to the participant herself, as if “nothing is happening.”
What’s going on here? Ahmed theorizes that even after participants had
fine-tuned their muscle movements, the neural processes controlling the
movements continued to grow more efficient. The brain uses up energy,
too, and through overlearning it can get by on less. These gains in
mental efficiency free up resources for other tasks: infusing the music
you’re playing with greater emotion and passion, for example, or keeping
closer track of your opponent’s moves on the other side of the tennis
court. Less effort in one domain means more energy available to others.
While Ahmed’s paper didn’t address the application of overlearning to
the classroom or the workplace, other studies have demonstrated that for
a wide range of academic and professional activities, overlearning
reduces the amount of mental effort required, leading to better
performance—especially under high-stakes conditions. In fact, research
on the "audience effect" shows that once we've overlearned a complex
task, we actually perform it
better when other people are
watching. When we haven't achieved the reduction of mental effort that
comes with overlearning, however, the additional stress of an audience
makes stumbles more likely.
“The message from this study is that in order to perform with less
effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems the task has been
learned,” says Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued
practice beyond any visible changes in performance.” In other words:
You’re getting better and better, even when you can’t tell you’re
improving—a thought to keep you going through those long hours of
practice.
I love to hear from readers. Please email me at annie@anniemurphypaul.com. You can also visit my website, follow me on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!
