- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. [instrumental music] - I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm
a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at
Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of
my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer
information about science and science related tools
to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the
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raises organic grass fed and grass-finished certified humane meats. I eat meat about once a day. I'm neither pure carnivore,
nor am I a vegetarian. Obviously I eat meat. The way I eat is I tend
to fast until about noon and then I have my first meal which generally consists
of a piece of beef. It's either ground beef or a steak. I like ribeyes, I like flat
irons, these kinds of things and a small salad,
sometimes a large salad. And then throughout the
day, I generally am low carb until the evening when
I eat pasta and rice and things of that sort. Eating that way is what
optimizes my levels of alertness and optimizes my sleep. I've talked about this on
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and use the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also brought
to us by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an
all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been using Athletic Greens
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the five free travel packs and a year supply of
the vitamin D3 and K2, That's athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer. This month on the Huberman Lab Podcast, we're talking all about
physical performance. So that means athletic
performance, recreational exercise, weightlifting, running, swimming, yoga, skills and skill learning. Today, we're going to talk about and focus on skill learning. We are going to focus on how
to learn skills more quickly in particular motor skills. This will also translate to things like musical skills and
playing instruments, but we're mainly going to
focus on physical movements of the body that extend beyond the hands like just playing the piano or the fingers like playing the guitar. But everything we're going to talk about will also serve the formation
and the consolidation and the performance of
other types of skills. So if you're interested
in how to perform better, whether or not it's dance or yoga or even something that's
just very repetitive like running or swimming, this
podcast episode is for you. We're going to go deep into
the science of skill learning. And we are going to talk
about very specific protocols that the science points
to and has verified, allow you to learn more
quickly to embed that learning so that you remember it and
to be able to build up skills more quickly than you would otherwise. We are also going to touch on a few things that I get asked about a
lot, but fortunately recently I've had the time to go
deep into the literature, extract the data for you and
that's mental visualization. How does visualizing a
particular skill or practice serve the learning and
or the consolidation of that practice. It turns out there are some
absolutely striking protocols that one can use, striking
meaning they allow you to learn faster and they
allow you to remember how to do things more quickly and better than if you were not doing
this mental rehearsal. But the pattern of mental rehearsal and when you do that mental rehearsal turns out to be vitally important. So I'm excited for today's episode. We're going to share a lot
of information with you and they're going to be a
lot of very simple takeaways. So let's get started. Before we get into the
topic of skill learning and tools for accelerating skill learning, I want to briefly revisit
the topic of temperature which was covered in the last episode and just highlight a
few things and clear up some misunderstandings. So last episode talked
about these incredible data from my colleague, Craig
Heller's lab at Stanford. He's in the department of biology, showing that cooling the
palms in particular ways and at particular times can allow athletes or just recreational
exercisers to do more pull-ups, dips, bench presses per
unit time, to run further, to cycle further and to
feel better doing it. There really are incredible
data that are anchored in the biology of the vascular
system, the blood supply and how it's involved in cooling us. Many of you, dozens of you in fact said, "Wait a second, you gave us
a protocol in this episode "which says that we should
cool our palms periodically "throughout exercise in order
to be able to do more work. "But on the episode, before
that on growth hormone "and thyroid hormone, you
said that heating up the body "is good for release of growth hormone." And I just want to clarify
that both things are true. These are two separate protocols. You should always warm
up before you exercise. That warmup will not increase
your body temperature or the muscle temperature to the point where it's going to
diminish your work capacity, that it's going to harm your performance. The cooling of the palms,
which is really just a route to cool your core in an efficient way, the most efficient way, in fact is about improving performance. Heating up the body with exercise and focusing on heat
increases or using sauna for heat increases is geared
toward growth hormone release, which is a separate matter. So you can do both of these protocols but you would want to do
them at separate times. So just to make this very concrete before I move on to today's topic. If you're interested in doing more work, being able to do more sets
and reps per unit time and feel better doing it or to run further or to cycle further, then
cooling the palms periodically as I described in the previous episode is going to be the way to go. If you're interested in
getting growth hormone release, well then hot sauna. And I offered some other tools
if you don't have a sauna in the episode on growth
hormone and thyroid hormone is going to be the way to go. So those are separate protocols. You can include them
in your fitness regime and your training regime,
but you do want to do them at separate times. And as a last point about this, I also mentioned that
caffeine can either help or hinder performance
depending on whether or not you're caffeine adapted
because of the ways that caffeine impacts body temperature and all sorts of things like
vasodilation and constriction. It's very simple. If you enjoy caffeine before your workouts and you're accustomed to
caffeine, meaning you drink it three or five times or more a week. 100 to 300 milligrams this
is a typical daily dose of caffeine. Some of you are ingesting more, some less. If you do that regularly, well, then it's going to be
just fine to ingest caffeine before you train. It's not going to impact
your body temperature and your vasodilation or constriction in ways that will hinder you. However, if you're not
a regular caffeine user and you're thinking, "Oh, I'm
going to drink a cup of coffee "and get this huge
performance enhancing effect." Well, that's not going to happen. Chances are it's going
to lead to increases in body temperature and changes
in the way that blood flow is happening in your
body, and in particular on these palmer surfaces and in your face that is going to likely
diminish performance. So if you enjoy caffeine
and you're accustomed to it, so-called caffeine adapted,
enjoy it before your training. If you regularly, excuse
me, if you do not regularly use caffeine, then you probably
do not want to view caffeine as a performance enhancing tool. And while we're on the topic of tools and because this is a month
on athletic performance and exercise and physical skill learning, I want to offer an additional tool that I've certainly found
useful, which is how to relieve the so-called side stitch or side cramp when running or swimming. This actually relates to respiration and to the nervous system
and it is not a cramp. If you've ever been out
running and you felt like you had a pain on your side, that pain could be any number of things, but what feels like cramping of your side is actually due to what's
called collateralization of the phrenic nerve which
is a lot harder to say than a side cramp or a side stitch. But here's the situation. You have a set of nerves, which
is called the phrenic nerve P-H-R-E-N-I-C. The phrenic nerve, which
extends down from your brainstem essentially, this region to your diaphragm to control your breathing. It has a collateral,
meaning it has a branch just like the branch on a tree
that innovates your liver. And if you are not
breathing deeply enough, what can happen is you can
get what's called sometimes a referenced pain. Reference pain is probably
going to be familiar to any of you have ever read about how to recognize heart attack. People have heart attacks
will sometimes have pain on one side of their body, the left arm, sometimes people that have
pain in a part of their back or suddenly also get
pain in their shoulder or part of their face. This has to do with the fact
that many of our nerves branch, meaning they're collateralized to different organs and areas of the body. And the way those nerves
are woven together, it's often the case that
if we disrupt the pattern of firing of electrical activity in one of those nerve branches that the other ones are affected too. The side stitch, the pain
in your side as often because of the contractions
of the diaphragm because of the way you're
breathing while you're exercising, running, or swimming or biking. And as a consequence, you
feel pain in your side but that's not a cramp. The way to relieve it is very simple. You do the physiological
side that I've talked about in previous episodes of
the podcast and elsewhere which has a double
inhale through the nose, very deep and then a long exhale. And you might want to repeat
that two or three times. Typically that will
relieve the side stitch because of the way that it
changes the firing patterns of the phrenic nerve. So the side stitch is
annoying, it's painful, sometimes we think we're dehydrated and you might be dehydrated. But oftentimes it's just
that we're breathing in a way that causes some
referenced pain of the liver. We call it a side stitch or a side cramp, and you can relieve it very easily through the double inhale, long exhale. That pattern done two or three times, often you can continue
to engage in the exercise while you do the double inhale exhale, and it will just relieve itself that way. So give it a try if you
experience the side stitch. Some people I know are also
doing the double inhale, long exhale during long
continuous bouts of exercise. I actually do this when I run. We have decent data
although these are still unpublished data that that can engage a kind of regular cadence
of heart rate variability. So there are a number of reasons
why this physiological side can be useful, but it
certainly can be useful for relieving the side stitch
or so-called side cramp. Let's talk about the
acquisition of new skills. These could be skills such as
a golf swing or a tennis swing or you're shooting free throws
or you're learning to dance or you're learning an instrument. I'm mainly going to focus
on athletic performance. There are basically two types of skills. Open loop and closed loop. Open loop skills are
skills where you perform some sort of motor
action and then you wait and you get immediate feedback as to whether or not it
was done correctly or not. A good example will be
throwing darts at a dartboard. So if you throw the dart, you get feedback about whether or not you hit the bullseye, you're off the dart board,
or you're some other location on the dart board, that's open loop. Closed loop would be something
that's more continuous. So let's say you're a
runner and you're starting to do some speed work and some sprints. And you're running and
you can kind of feel whether or not you're running correctly, or maybe even have a coach
and they're correcting your stride or you're trying
to do some sort of skill, like a hopscotch skill,
which maybe you're doing the ladder work where you're stepping between designated spaces on the ground. That's closed loop because as you go, you can adjust your behavior
and you can adjust the distance of your steps, or you
can adjust your speed or you can adjust your
posture and you are able to essentially do more
practice per unit time but you're getting feedback
on a moment to moment basis. So you have open loop and closed loop. And just to make this very clear, open loop would be
practicing your tennis serve. So let's say that you set a target on the other side of the net. You throw the ball up
and you hit the ball, it goes over that's open-loop. You'll know whether or
not you were in the court, you were on the location you wanted to hit or close to it or not, that's open loop. Closed loop would be if
you're in a regular can. So maybe you're learning a swim stroke, or maybe you're trying to
learn a particular rhythm on the drum. So maybe you're trying to
learn a particular beat. I'm not very musical, so I'm
not going to embarrass myself by giving an example of
this, although later I will, where you're trying to get
a particular rhythm down. And if you're not getting it,
you can adjust in real time and try and catch up or slow
down or speed up, et cetera. So hopefully you'll understand
open loop and closed loop. You should always know before
you try and learn a skill, whether or not it's
open loop or closed loop and I'll return to why
that's important shortly. But if you want to learn something, ask is it open loop or closed loop. There are essentially three
components of any skill that involves motor movement. And those are sensory
perception, actually perceiving what you are doing and
what's happening around you. So what you see, what you hear, sometimes you're paying
attention to what you're doing specifically like the
trajectory of your arm or how you're moving your feet. If you're learning to dance,
sometimes you're more focused on something that's
happening outside of you, like you're listening
for something in music or you're paying attention to the way your partner
is moving, et cetera. So there's sensory input. Then there are the actual movements. So they're the movements
of your limbs and body. And then there's something
called proprioception and proprioception is often discussed as kind of a sixth sense of
knowing where your limbs are in relation to your body. So proprioception is vitally important. If I reached down and pick
up this pen and pick it up, I'm not thinking about
where the pen in my hand is relative to my body, but
proprioceptively, I'm aware of it at kind of a six sense
deeper subconscious level. I can also make myself
aware of where my limbs are. And typically when we learn,
we are placing more focus on proprioception than we do ordinarily. So if I get up from this
chair and I happen to walk out of the room, I don't
think about where my feet are landing relative to one another. But if my leg had fallen asleep because I had been leaning on
one of the nerves of my leg or something like that, and my
leg feels all tingly or numb. I and you, if this were to happen to you, would immediately notice a shift in gait. It would feel strange,
I'd have to pay attention to how I'm stepping. And the reason is I'm not getting any proprioceptive feedback. Now, skill learning has a
lot of other dimensions too, but those are the main ones
that we're going to focus on. So just to remind you,
you need to know open loop or closed loop and you need
to know whether or not, excuse me, you need to know
that there's sensory perception what you're paying attention to, movements themselves and proprioception. And there's one other important
thing that you need to know which is that movement
of any kind is generated from one, two or three sources
within your nervous system, within your brain and body. These are central pattern generators which are sometimes called
CSPGs, excuse me, CPGSs, CSPGs are something entirely
different in biology. CPGSs, this just goes to
show that I have a module. CSPGs are chondroid and
sulfate proteoglycans. They have nothing to do with this topic. CPGSs are central pattern
generators or CPGs, they're sometimes called. These CPGs are in your
spinal cord, mine and yours, different ones and they
generate repetitive movements. So if you're walking, if you're
running, if you're cycling, if you're breathing,
which presumably you are and you're doing that in a
regular rhythmic cadence, central pattern generators
are controlling that movement. After you learn how to
walk, run, swim, cycle, do anything really, much
of the work is handed off to the central pattern generators. And there were experiments that were done in the 60s, 70s and 80s
that actually looked at decerebrate animals and
even decerebrate humans. These are humans and animals
that lack a cerebral cortex. They lack much of the brain
and yet they can engage in what's called a fictive movement. So it sounds like a kind
of barbaric experiment. I'm glad I wasn't the
one to have to do them but this is the stuff of
neuroscience textbooks that cats or dogs or mice that
have their neocortex removed put them on a treadmill,
they'll walk just fine. And they will adjust their
speed of walking just fine even though they basically
lack all their thinking and decision-making brain. And it turns out humans that have, unfortunately, massive
strokes to their cortex and lack any neocortex but preserve the central pattern generators
will also walk just fine, even though they lack any of
the other stuff in the brain. So these CPGs or CPGSs are amazing, and they control a lot of
our already learned behavior. When you're really good at something, CPGs are controlling a
lot of that behavior. And that's true also for a golf swing. Even if it's not really repetitive, somebody who's really good
at golf it's going to, I guess you call it a T. You put the ball on the T. I show with my knowledge of golf. I've only done mini golf, frankly, but someday maybe I'll learn how to golf, but you set the golf ball down and swing, set the golf ball down, swing. Central pattern generators
are going to handle a lot of that. If I were to go to the golf course. Stanford has a beautiful golf course. If I were to go out there
and put a ball on the T, my central pattern generators
would not be involved in that at all. The moment I bring the club back to swing, it's going to engage other things. And the other things
that's going to engage because I don't know
that behavior now or then is upper motor neurons. We have motor neurons in our cortex, in our neocortex that
control deliberate action. And those are the ones
that you're engaging when you are learning. Those are the ones that
you have to pay attention in order to engage. And that's what's happening, for instance, if I decide I'm going to
reach down and pick up my pen, which I rarely think about,
but now I'm thinking about it and I'm going to do this
in a very deliberate way. I'm going to grab with
these two fingers and lift. My upper motor neurons are now involved. So upper motor neurons are very important because a little bit later in the episode when we talk about how
to use visualization in order to accelerate skill learning, it's going to leverage
these upper motor neurons in very particular ways. So we have CPGs for rhythmic movement, upper motor neurons for
deliberate unlearned movements or movements that we are
in the process of learning. And then we have what are
called lower motor neurons. Lower motor neurons are
the ones in our spinal cord that send little wires out to our muscles which actually caused the
firing of those muscle fibers. So the way to think
about this as you've got upper motor neurons which talk to CPGs and the lower motor neurons. So it's really simple. And now, you know most
everything there is to know about the neural pathways
controlling movement, at least for sake of this discussion. So anytime we learn
something, we have to decide what to place our sensory perception on, meaning what are we going to focus on. That's critical if
you're listening to this and you're the type of person
who likes taking notes, this should be the
second question you ask. Remember the first question
is, is it open loop or closed loop? The second question should be, what should I focus my attention
on, auditory attention, visual attention or proprioception. Should I focus on where my
limbs are relative to my body or should I focus on the outcome? This is a critical distinction. You can decide to learn
how to do a golf swing or learn how to shoot free throws or learn how to dance tango and decide that you are going to focus on the movements of your partner or the positions of your feet. You maybe are going to look at them, maybe you're going to sense them. You're going to actually
feel where they are, or maybe you're going
to sense the position and posture of your body,
which is more proprioception. So you have to allocate your attention. And I'm going to tell you how
to allocate your attention best in order to learn faster. So these are the sorts of
decisions that you have to make. Fortunately for you,
you don't have to think about whether or not you're going to use your upper motor neurons
and your lower motor neurons or not, because if you don't
know how to do something, you're automatically going to engage your upper motor neurons. And if you do, then
you're not going to use your upper motor neurons. You're mainly going to rely
on central pattern generators. You are always using
your lower motor neurons to move muscle. So we can really simplify things now. I've given you a lot of
information but we can simplify it. Basically open loop or closed
loop, that's one question and what am I going to focus on? And then your neurology
will take care of the rest. So now I want to talk about
realistic expectations. Somewhere in Hollywood presumably, it got embedded in somebody's mind that instant skill
acquisition was possible, that you could take a particular pill or you could touch a particular object or you could have a wand wave over you and you would suddenly have a skill. And so that is the result
of Hollywood at all. It doesn't exist, at least not in reality. And I love movies, but
it simply doesn't exist. Then the self-help literature
created another rule called the 10,000 hours rule. And frankly, that doesn't
really match the literature, at least the scientific literature either. I like it because it implies
that learning takes time, which is more accurate
than the Hollywood at all instant skill acquisition rule, which isn't really a rule, it's a myth. But the 10,000 hours rule
overlook something crucial, which is that it's not about hours, it's about repetitions. Now, of course there's a
relationship between time and repetitions, but there
are some beautiful experiments that point to the fact
that by simple adjustment of what you are focused
on as you attempt to learn a new skill, you can adjust
the number of repetitions that you do, you adjust
your motivation for learning and you can vastly accelerate learning. Some of you may recognize
this by its internet name, which is not a scientific term, which is the super Mario effect. There's actually a quite
good video on YouTube describing the super Mario effect. I think it was a YouTuber
who has I think a background in science and he did an
interesting experiment. And I'll talk about his experiment first and then I will talk
about the neurobiology that supports the result that he got. The super Mario effect relates to the game super Mario brothers, but
you'll see why at the end. But basically what they did
was they had 50,000 subjects, which is a enormous number
of subjects learn a program, essentially taking words
from a computer program or the commands for a computer program that were kind of clustered
in a column on the right. So these are the sorts of
things that computer programmers will be familiar with
but other people won't. And those commands are essentially, they essentially translate
to things like go forward. And then if it's a right
hand turn in the maze, then go right and continue
until you hit a choice point, et cetera. So it's a bunch of instructions,
but the job of the subjects in these experiments were to
organize those instructions in a particular way that
would allow a little cursor to move through the main successfully. So basically the goal was,
or at least what the subjects were told is that anyone can
learn to computer program. And if somebody can just
organize the instructions in the right way, then they can program this little cursor to move
through amaze, very simple. And yet, if you don't have any background in computer programming,
or even if you do, it takes some skill. You have to know what commands to give in what particular order. And they made that very easy. You could just assemble them in a list over onto the right. So people started doing this. Now there were two groups and
some one half of the subjects, if they got it wrong, meaning
they entered a command and the cursor would move
and it was the wrong command for this little cursor
to move through the maze, they saw a signal jump up
on their screen that said, that did not work, please try again. That's it, if they put
in the wrong command or is in the wrong sequence,
it'll say that did not work please try again. And then the subjects would
reorganize the instructions and then the little cursor would continue. And if they got it wrong again, it would say that does not
work, please try again. The other half of the subjects,
if they got something wrong were told you just lost five
points, please continue. So, that's the only
difference in the feedback that they got. Now I have to confess,
I would have predicted based on my knowledge
of dopamine circuitry and reward contingency
and epinephrin and stress and motivated learning. And this other thing that we've been told in many many books on behavioral economics and in the self-help literature, which is that people will work much harder to prevent losing something than they will to gain something, that
you hear all the time. And it turns out that that's
not at all what happened. If they looked at the
success rate of the subjects, what they found was that
the subjects that were told that did not work, please try
again, had a 68% success rate. 68% of them went on to
successfully program this cursor moving through the maze. Whereas the ones that were
told you lost five points had a 52% success rate, which
is a significant difference. But the source of the success
or the lack of success is really interesting. The subjects that were
told that did not work, please try again, tried many,
many more times per unit time. In other words, they made
more attempts at programming this thing to allow this cursor
to move through the maze. Whereas the people that were
told you lost five points gave up earlier or gave up entirely. Okay, so let's just step back from this because to me, this was very surprising. It violates a lot of things that I'd heard in the kind of popular culture
or the self-help literature that people will work much
harder to avoid losing something than they will to gain something. And it didn't really fit
with what I understood about reward contingencies and dopamine, but it did fit well with
another set of experiments that I'm very familiar with from the neuroscience literature. And I'll give you the punchline first. And then we're going to
take what these data mean and we're going to talk
about a learning protocol that you can use that will
allow you to learn skills faster by willingly participating
in more repetitions of the skill learning,
meaning you will want to do more repetitions even
if you're getting it wrong some or most of the time. So the experiment that
I want to tell you about is called the tube test. And this is generally done in mice, although it's sometimes been done in rats and it has a lot of
parallels to some things that you've probably
seen and experienced even in human life, in regular
life, maybe even in your life. So here's the experiment. You take two rats, you put
them in a tube or two mice, you put them in a tube. And mice and rats, they don't
like to share the same tube. So what they'll do is they'll
start pushing each other back and forth, back and forth. Sooner or later, one of the rats or mice pushes the other one out. The one that got pushed out is the loser, the one that gets the tube is the winner. Now you take the winner, you
give it a new competitor. And what you find is that the mouse or rat that won previously has a much higher than chance probability of
winning the second time. In other words, winning
before leads to winning again. And the reverse is also true. If you take the loser
and you put that loser in with another mouse,
fresh mouse, new mouse, the loser typically will lose
at much greater probability than chance. And this is not related to
differences in strength or size or testosterone or any other things that might leap to mind
as explanations for this because those were all controlled for. Now that results have been
known about for decades. But three years ago, there
was a paper published in the Journal Science,
phenomenal journal. It's one of the three apex journals, that examined the brain area
that's involved in this. Turns out a particular
area of the frontal cortex for those of you that want to know. And they did a simple experiment
where the experimenters increased or decreased the
activity of this brain area in the prefrontal cortex, little sub region of
the prefrontal cortex. And what they found is if they
stimulated this brain area, a mouse or rat, regardless
of whether or not it had been a winner or loser before, became a winner every single time. And they showed that if
they blocked the activity of this brain area,
regardless of whether or not the mouse or rat had
been a winner or loser, it became a loser every single time. And this translated to other scenarios, other competitive scenarios
where they'd put a bunch of mice or rats in a kind of cool chamber, they'd have a little
heat lamp in the corner and mice like heat. And there was only enough
space for one mouse to be under the heat. And the one that had won in the tube test or that had the brain area stimulated always got the nice warm spot. So what is this magic brain
area, what is it doing? Well, the reason I'm
bringing this up today and the reason I'm
bringing it up on the heels of the super Mario effect
is that stimulation of this brain area had a very simple and very important effect, which was, it led to more
forward steps, more repetitions, more effort, but not in terms
of sheer might and will, not digging deeper, just more
repetitions per unit time. And the losers had fewer
repetitions per unit time. So the super Mario effect,
this online experiment and the tube test, which has been done by various labs and
repeated again and again point to a simple but very important rule, which is neither the 10,000 hours rule nor the magic wand Hollywood
version of learning. But rather the
neuro-biological explanation for learning a skill
is you want to perform as many repetitions per unit
time, as you possibly can. At least when you're first
trying to learn a skill. I want to repeat that, you want
to perform as many repetitions as you possibly can at least
when you're first trying to learn a skill. Now that might sound like
a duh, it just more reps, but it's not so obvious. There's no reason why more repetitions should necessarily lead to faster learning because you could also say,
well, more repetitions, you can make more errors and those errors would
lead to poor performance like misstepping a number of times. And in these cases, there's
very little feedback. It's not like every time
the rat pushes forward or moves back that it is sensing, oh I'm winning, I'm losing,
I'm winning, I'm losing on a micro level. It probably does that as it
starts to push the other one out the rat or mouse probably
thinks, "I'm winning." And as it's backing up, it
probably thinks, "I'm losing." As you play the game,
the super Mario game, you are told, nope, that didn't work. Nope, that didn't work, please try again. But the important thing
is that the winners are always generating more
repetitions per unit time. It's just a repeat of
performance, repeat of performance even if there are errors. And that points to
something vitally important, which is reps are important
but making error reps is also important. In fact, it might be the
most important factor. So let's talk about errors and
why those solve the problem of what to focus on. Because as I said earlier, if
you want to learn something, you need to know if it's
open loop or closed loop and you need to know what to focus on, where to place your perception. And that seems like a tough task but errors will tell you
exactly what to focus on. So let's talk about errors and
why you can leverage errors to accelerate skill learning. Okay, so we've established that performing the maximum number of
repetitions per training session is going to be advantageous. And that might seem obvious
but there's a shadowy side to that, which is, well why
would I want to just repeat the same thing over and over
again if I'm getting it wrong, 90% of the time. And the reason is that
the errors actually cue your nervous system to two things; one to error correction and
the other is it opens the door or the window for neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain
and nervous system's ability to change in response to experience, essentially to custom modify itself in order to perform anything better. We did an entire month on neuroplasticity and I talked a little bit about errors and why they're important. Now we're going to make this very concrete and operationalize it,
make it very actionable. There was a paper that
was published in 2021 from Norman at all. This is a very important paper. It was published in the Journal Neuron which is a cell press
journal, excellent journal. The title of the paper
gives it away essentially, which is post error
recruitment of frontal sensory cortical projections promotes attention. Now, what that says is that
when you make an error, it causes an activation of the brain areas that anchor your attention. Remember we need perception, attention, which they're essentially the same thing. We need proprioception
and we need the upper and lower motor neurons to
communicate in the proper ways. And this vital question is
what to pay attention to. Errors tell your nervous system that something needs to change. So if you are performing a task or a skill like you're learning how to
dance and you're stepping on the other person's
toes or you're fumbling or you're not getting it right, those errors are opening the
possibility for plasticity. If you walk away at that point, you've made the exact wrong choice. Unless the errors are somehow
hazardous to your health or somebody else's wellbeing,
you want to continue to engage at a high repetition rate. That's really where the
learning is possible. Without errors, the brain
is not in a position to change itself. Errors actually cue the
frontal cortex networks, what we call top-down processing
and the neuromodulators, things like dopamine and
acetylcholine and epinephrin that will allow for plasticity. So while the super Mario experiment, the maze experiment was only
focused on generating errors, telling people that wasn't
right, please try again or that wasn't right,
you lost five points. The key distinction is
that the errors themselves cued people to the fact that they needed to change something. So if you're trying to learn a new skill and you're screwing up and
you're making mistakes, the more mistakes you
make, the more plastic your brain becomes such
that when you get it right, that correct pattern will be
rewarded and consolidated. And you can trust that it will because the performance
of something correctly is associated with the release of this neuromodulator dopamine. Dopamine is involved in
craving and motivation. It's involved in a lot of things, but it's also involved in learning. We will do an entire episode
on dopamine and learning but because some of you
are probably wondering, this does not mean that just
increasing your dopamine levels before learning will
allow you to learn faster. In fact, increasing your
dopamine levels before learning using pharmacology will actually reduce what's called the signal to noise. It will make these increases in dopamine that pop up in your brain that
suddenly make you realize, "Oh, I got that one right." It will make those smaller relative to the background levels of dopamine. You want a big spike in
dopamine when you perform a motor pattern correctly and
you want to make lots of errors, many, many repetitions of errors in order to get to that
correct performance. Now, if you're like most
people you're going to do this in a way that's somewhat random. Meaning let's say it's a tennis serve. I can't play tennis, I think I've probably played tennis twice. So if I throw the ball
up in the air and hit it, I'm going to get it wrong
and probably hit the net, then it hit the net. Then I'll probably go too long then I'll probably go over the fence. At some point, I like to
think I'll get it correct. The dopamine signal for that
is going to be quite big and I'll think, "Okay,
what did I do there? "I actually don't know, I
wasn't paying attention. "What I was paying attention
to is whether or not "the ball went to the correct location "on the opposite side of the net." Remember it's an open loop move, so I don't actually know
what I did correctly. But your nervous system
will take care of that provided I in this case
complete more and more and more repetitions. Now, if I were to just elevate
my basil level of dopamine by taking, I don't know,
1500 milligrams L tyrasine or something, that would
be bad because the increase in dopamine would actually be much lower. We would say the delta is smaller. The signal to noise is smaller if my overall levels of
dopamine are very, very high. So I'm actually going to learn less well. So for skill learning,
motor skill learning, increasing your dopamine levels
prior is not a good idea. It might help with motivation
to get to the learning but it's not going to improve
the plasticity process itself and it's likely to hinder it. And so that's very important. So these errors cue the brain
that something was wrong and they open up the
possibility for plasticity. It's what sometimes
called the framing effect, it frames what's important. And so I think this is a
shift that we've heard about, growth mindset which is the
incredible discovery and theory and practice of my colleague,
Carol Dweck at Stanford. This is distinct from that. This isn't about motivation to learn, this is about how you actually learn. So the key is designate a
particular block of time that you are going to perform repetitions. So maybe that's 30 minutes,
maybe that's an hour. Work for time and then try and perform the maximum number of repetitions
that you can do safely for you and others per unit time. That's going to be the best
way to approach learning for most sessions. I will talk about other
things that one can do, but making errors is key. And this isn't a motivational speech. I'm not saying, "Oh, go make errors, "errors are good for you. "You have to fail in order to win." No, you have to fail in order
to open up the possibility of plasticity, but you
have to fail many times within the same session. And those failures will cue your attention to the appropriate sensory events. Now, sometimes we're working with a coach. And so this is a shout
out to all the coaches, thank you for doing what you do. However, there needs to be at least what the scientific literature say. There needs to be a period
of each training session whereby the athlete or
the person of any kind can simply pay attention to their errors without their attention
being cued to something else. A really well-trained coach will say, "Oh, your elbows swinging too high, "or you're not gripping the racket "in the appropriate way," et cetera. They can see things that
the practitioner can't see. And of course that's
the vitally important. But the practitioner also needs to use this error recognition signal, they need to basically focus on something and the errors are going to
tell them what to focus on. So put simply there needs
to be a period of time in which it's just
repetition after repetition, after repetition. I think many people including coaches are afraid that bad
habits will get ingrained. And while indeed that's possible, it's very important
that these errors occur in order to cue the attentional systems and to open the door for plasticity. So if I'm told, "Look, I'm
standing a little wide, "I need to tighten up
my stance a little bit." Great, but then I need to
generate many repetitions from that tighten stance. So if I'm constantly being
cued from the outside about what I'm incorrectly, that's not going to be as efficient. So for some people,
these learning sessions might be 10 minutes, for some
people, it might be an hour. Whatever you can allocate
because your lifestyles will vary in your whether or not you're a professional
athlete, et cetera will vary. You want to get the maximum
number of repetitions in and you want to make errors. That's allowing for plasticity. So science points to the fact that there's a particular
sequencing of learning sessions that will allow you to learn faster and to retain the skill learning and involves doing exactly
as I just described, which is getting as many
repetitions as you can in the learning session,
paying attention to the errors that you make. And then the rewards
that will be generated, again, these are neurochemical rewards from the successful
performance of a movement or the approximate successful performance. So maybe you get the golf
swing better but not perfect, but that's still going to be rewarded with this neurochemical mechanism. And then after the session, you need to do something very specific which is nothing. That's right. There are beautiful
data describing neurons in our hippocampus, this
area of our brain involved in the consolidation of new memories. Those data points to
the fact that in sleep, there's a replay of
the sequence of neurons that were involved in certain
behaviors the previous day and sometimes the
previous day before that. However, there are also data that show that after a skill learning session, any kind of motor movement
provided you're not bringing in a lot more additional new sensory stimuli, there's a replay of the motor sequence that you performed correctly
and there's an elimination of the motor sequences that
you performed incorrectly and they are run backward in time. So to be very clear about
this, if I were to learn a new skill or navigate a new city or let's just stay with the motor skill, let's say the free-throw or a
golf swing or a tennis serve, dance move, novice. So I'm still going to
make a lot of errors, don't get it perfectly, but maybe I get a little bit better or I perform it correctly
three times out of 1000. And it sounds like something I might do and there I'm probably
being generous to myself. After I finished the training session, if I do nothing, I'm not focused on some additional learning. I'm not bringing a lot of
sensory information in. If I just sit there and close my eyes for five to 10 minutes, even one minute, the brain starts to
replay the motor sequence corresponding to the
correct pattern movement, but it plays that sequence backward. Now why it plays it
backward, we don't know. If I were to wait until
sleep or regardless of when I sleep later that night, the sequence will be replayed forwards in the proper sequence. Immediately afterward
it's played a backward for reasons that are still unclear. But the replay of that sequence backwards appears to be important
for the consolidation of the skill learning. Now, this is important because many people are finishing their jujitsu class or they're finishing their yoga class or they're finishing their dance class or they're finishing some skill learning and then they're immediately
devoting their attention to something else. You hear a lot about visualization and we are going to talk
about visualization. But in the kind of obsession with the idea that we can learn things,
just sitting there with our eyes closed without
having to perform a movement, we've overlooked something
perhaps even more important or at least equally important, which is after skill
learning, after putting effort into something, sitting
quietly with the eyes closed for one to five to 10
minutes allows the brain to replay the sequence in a
way that appears important for the more rapid consolidation
of the motor sequence of the pattern and to
accelerated learning. If you'd like to learn more about this, this is not work that I was involved in, I want to be very clear. There's an excellent paper
that covers this and much more for those of you that really
want to dive deep on this and we will dive deeper in a moment. This is a review that was
published in the Journal Neuron, excellent journal. Many of the papers that I'm referring to were covered in this
review which is titled, Neuroplasticity Subserving
Motor Skill Learning by Dayan D-A-Y-A-N, I hope I'm not
butchering the pronunciation and Cohen, by Leonard Cohen, but not the Leonard Cohen
most of us are familiar with, the musician, Leonard Cohen. Dayan and Cohen, neuroplasticity subserving motor skill learning. And this was published in
2011, but there've been a number of updates and the
literature that I've described in other portions of today's episode come from the more recent literature such as the more recent 2021 paper. So you have this basic learning session and then a period of time afterwards in which the brain can
rehearse what it just did. We hear so much about mental rehearsal and we always think about mental rehearsal as the thing you do before you
train or instead of training. But this is rehearsal
that's done afterward where the brain is just automatically scripting through the sequence. And for some reason,
that's still not clear as to why this would be
the case it runs backward. Then in sleep, it runs forwards
and certainly absolutely, sleep and quality sleep of
the appropriate duration, et cetera is going to be important for learning of all kinds,
including skill learning. We did an entire four episodes on sleep and how to get better at sleeping. Those are the episodes
back in January episodes, essentially one, two, three, and four and maybe even episode
five, I don't recall. But you can go there to find out all about how to get better at sleeping. Now there are other
training sessions involved. I'm not going to learn
the perfect golf swing or the tennis serve or how
to dance in one session and I doubt you will either. So the question is when to come back and what to do when you come
back to the training set. Now, first of all, this
principle of errors queuing attention and
opening the opportunity for plasticity, that's
never going to change. That's going to be true for
somebody who is hyper skilled who's even has mastery or even
virtuosity in a given skill. Remember, when you're
unskilled at something, uncertainty is very high. As you become more
skilled, certainty goes up. Then eventually you
achieve levels of mastery where certainty is very
very high about your ability to perform, yours certainty
en that of other people. And then there's this fourth
category of virtuosity where somebody, maybe
you invites uncertainty back into the practice because
only with that uncertainty, can you express your
full range of abilities which you aren't even aware of until uncertainty comes into the picture. I happened to have the great privilege of being friends with Laird
Hamilton, the big wave surfer who's phenomenal. I don't surf, I certainly
don't surf with Laird, but he, and another guy that
he starts with Luca Patua, these guys, they're virtuosos at surfing. They don't just want the
wave that they can master, they want uncertainty. They're at the point in their practice where when uncertainty
shows up like a wave that's either so big or is
moving in a particular way that it brings an element
of uncertainty for them about what they're going to
do that they recognize that as the opportunity to perform better than they would otherwise. So they're actually trying
to eliminate uncertainty. At the beginning of learning any skill and as we approach from
uncertain to skilled to mastery, we want to reduce uncertainty. And that's really what the
nervous system is doing, it's trying to eliminate
errors and hone in on the correct trajectories. If you perform a lot of repetitions and then you use a
period immediately after, we don't really have a name for this, maybe someone will come up with it and put it in the comment section if you're on YouTube, if you're
watching this on YouTube, a name for this post
learning kind of idle time for the brain. The brain is an idol at
all, it's actually scripting all these things in reverse
that allow for deeper learning and more quick learning. But if we fill that with other things, if we are focused on our
phones or we're focused on learning something else, we're focusing on our performance, that's not going to serve us well, it's at least it's not going to
serve the skill learning well. So please, if you're interested
in more rapid skill learning try introducing these sessions,
they can be quite powerful. And then on subsequent sessions, presumably after a night's sleep or maybe you're doing two sessions a day, although two sessions a
day is going to be a lot for most people, unless
you're a professional or a high-level athlete,
the subsequent sessions are where you get to express the gains of the previous session,
where you get to perform well, presumably more often
even if it's just subtle. Sometimes there'll be a
decrease in performance, but most often you're
going to perform better on subsequent and subsequent
training sessions. And there is the opportunity
to devote attention in very specific ways, not
just let the errors inform you where to place your attention,
but rather to direct your perception to particular
elements of the movement in order to accelerate learning further. So to be very clear,
'cause I know many of you are interested in concrete protocols. It's not just that you
would only let errors cue your attention on the first session. You might do that for one
session or five sessions, is going to depend. But once you're familiar with something and you're performing it
well every once in a while, you're accomplishing it
better every once in a while, then you can start to cue your attention in very deliberate ways. And the question therefore becomes what to cue your attention to. And the good news is it doesn't matter. There is a beautiful set of
experiments that have been done looking at sequences of keys
being played on a piano. This is work that was published
just a couple of years ago. There are actually several papers now that are focused on this. One of them was published in 2018. This is from Claudia Lappe
and colleagues, L-A-P-P-E. She's done some really nice
work, which talks about the influence of pitch feedback on learning of motor
timing and sequencing. And this was done with piano but it carries over to
athletic performance as well. So I'm going to describe the study to you, but before I describe it,
what is so interesting about this study that I
want you to know about is that it turns out it
doesn't matter so much what you pay attention to
during the learning sequence provided it's something
related to the motor behavior that you're performing. That seems incredible. I'm not good at a tennis serve. So if I've done let's say
a thousand repetitions of the tennis serve. Maybe I got it right three to 10 times. Now I'm being even more
generous with myself. And I do this post-training session where I let my brain idle
and I get some good sleep and I come back and now I
start generating errors again, presumably or hopefully fewer errors, but I decide I'm going to cue my attention to something very specific,
like maybe how tightly I'm holding the racket
or maybe it's my stance, or maybe it's whether or not
I rotate my right shoulder in as I hit the ball across. And I'm making this up,
again I don't play tennis. Turns out that it as long
as it's the same thing throughout the session,
learning is accelerated. And I'll explain why this
make sense in a moment. But just to be really clear,
you can and one should use your powers of attention
to direct your attention to particular aspects of a motor movement once you're familiar with the
general theme of the movement. But what you pay attention
to exactly is not important. What's important is that you pay attention to one specific thing. So what Claudia Lappe
and colleagues showed was that if people are trying
to learn a sequence of keys on the piano, there are
multiple forms of feedback. There are error signals if for instance, they hear a piece of music
and then they're told to press the keys in a particular sequence and the noise that comes
out, the sound that comes out of the piano does not sound
like the song they just heard. So instead of, and here, forgive me because I'm neither
musical, nor can I sing. But instead of dah, dah
dah, dah, they hear that, dah, dah dah, dah and then instead when they play. If it were me, it sounds something like, dah, dah dah [indistinct],
it wouldn't sound right. It wouldn't sound right, because
I likely got the sequence wrong, or I was pressing
too hard on the keys or too lightly on the keys, et cetera. What they showed was if
they just instruct people about the correct sequence
to press on the keys, it actually doesn't matter
what sound comes back, provided it's the correct
sound or it's the same sound. All right, so here's the experiment. They had people press on these keys and it was a typical
piano and it generated the particular sequence of
sounds that would be generated by pressing the keys on the piano. Or they modified the keyboard
in this case or piano such that when people pressed on the keys, a random tone different tones were played each time they pressed on the keys. So it sounded crazy,
it sounded like noise, but the motor sequence was the same. Or they had a single tone
that was played every time they pressed a key and the
job or the task of the subject was just oppressed the keys
in the proper sequence. So instead of dunt,
dunt, dunt, dunt, dunt, it it was just dunt,
dunt, dunt, dunt, dunt. Instead of dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, it's dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's even hard for me to
say it in even a tone, but you get the idea. So a singular tone, just
think a doorbell being rung with each press of the key
will be really annoying. But it turns out that the
rate to motor learning was the same, whether or not
they were getting feedback that was accurate to the keys of the piano or whether or not it was a constant tone. Performance was terrible
and the rates of learning were terrible if they were
getting random tones back. So what this means is that
learning to play the piano at least at these early stages is really just about
generating the motor commands. It's not about paying
attention to the sound that's coming out of the piano. And this makes sense because
when we are beginners, we are trying to focus our
attention on the things that we can control. And if you think about this,
if you conceptualize this, pressing the keys on the
piano and paying attention to the sounds that are
coming out are two things. So what this means is
that as you get deeper and deeper into a practice, focusing purely on the motor
execution can be beneficial. Now, this is going to be harder to do with open loop type things
where you're getting feedback. I guess a good example of open loop would be the attempt at a back flip. If you get it wrong, you
will immediately know, if you get it right,
you'll immediately know. Please don't go out and
try and do a back flip on the solid ground,
or even on a trampoline if you don't know what you're doing because very likely you'll get it wrong and you'll get injured. But if it's something that is closed loop where you can repeat again and
again, and again and again, that is advantageous
because you can perform many many repetitions and
you can start to focus or learn to focus your attention just on the pattern of movement. In other words, you can
learn to play the piano just as fast or maybe even faster by just focusing on the
sequence that you are moving your digits, your fingers
and not the feedback. Now, I'm sure there are
music teachers out there and piano teachers that are screaming, "No you're going to ruin the practice "that all of us have embedded in our minds "and in our students." And I agree, at some
point you need to start including feedback about whether or not things sound correct. But one of the beauties of skill learning is that you can choose to parameterize it, meaning you can choose to just
focus on the motor sequence or just focus on the
sounds that are coming back and then integrate those. And so we hear a lot about chunking, about breaking things down
into their component parts. But one of the biggest
challenges for skill learning is knowing where to place your attention. So to dial out again,
we're building a protocol across this episode, early sessions, maybe it's the first one,
maybe it's the first 10, maybe it's the first 100. It depends on how many
repetitions you're packing in. But during those initial sessions, the key is to make many errors
to let the reward process govern the plasticity, let the
errors open the plasticity. And then after the learning sessions, to let the brain go idle at least for a short period of time and of course, to maximize sleep. As you start incorporating more sessions, you start to gain some skill level, learning to harness and
focus your attention on particular features of the movement independent of the
rewards and the feedback. So the reward is no longer in
the tone coming from the piano or whether or not you
struck the target correctly but simply the motor
movement focusing your, for instance in a dart throw,
on the action of your arm. That is embedding the
plasticity in the motor pattern most deeply, that's what's been shown by the scientific literature. I'm sure there are coaches
and teachers out there that will entirely disagree
with me and that's great. Please let me know what you prefer, let me know where you think this is wrong and it rarely happens, but
let me know where you think this might be right as well. So we're breaking the
learning process down into its component parts. As we get more and more skilled, meaning as we make fewer and fewer errors per a given session per unit
time, that's when attention can start to migrate from one feature such as the motor sequence
to another feature which is perhaps one's
stance and another sequence, component of the sequence,
which would be the result that's one getting on
a trial to trial basis. So changing it up each time. So maybe I served the tennis ball and I'm focusing on where the ball lands and then I'm focusing on the speed, then I'm focusing on my grip,
then I'm focusing on my stance from trial to trial. But until we've mastered
the core motor movements which has done session to session, that at least according to the literature that I have access to here,
seems to be suboptimal. So hopefully this is
starting to make sense, which is that these connections
between upper motor neurons, lower motor neurons and
central pattern generators, you can't attack them all at once. You can't try and change them all at once. And so what we're doing is
we're breaking things down into their component parts. Some of you may be wondering
about speed of movement. There are some data, meaning
some decent papers out there showing that ultra slow movements, performing a movement
essentially in slow motion can be beneficial for enhancing
the rate of skill learning. However, at least from my
read of the literature, it appears that ultra slow
movements should be performed after some degree of proficiency
has already been gained in that particular movement. Now that's not the way I
would have thought about it. I would have thought, well,
if you're learning how to do a proper kick or a paunch in martial arts or something that ultra
slow movements at first are going to be the way
that one can best learn how to perform a movement and then you just gradually
increase the speed. It turns out that's not the case and I probably should have known that. And you should probably know
that because it turns out that when you do ultra slow movements, two things aren't available to you. One is the proprioceptive
feedback is not accurate because of fast movements
of limbs are very different than slow movements of limbs. So you don't get the opportunity to build in the proprioceptive feedback. But the other reason why it doesn't work is that it's too accurate,
you don't generate errors. And so the data that I was able to find show that very slow
movements can be beneficial if one is already
proficient in a practice, but very slow movements at the beginning don't allow you to learn more quickly because you never generate errors and therefore the brain doesn't,
it's not open for change. The window for plasticity has
never swung open, so to speak. So it brings us back to this theme that errors allow for plasticity, correct performance of movements or semi correct performance of
movements, cues the synapses in the brain areas and spinal
circuits that need to change. And then those changes occur in the period immediately after skill
learning and in sleep. So super slow movements can be beneficial once you already have some proficiencies. So this might be standing
in your living room and just in ultra slow motion, performing your tennis serve, learning to, or thinking about how
you're adjusting your elbow and your arm and the trajectory
exactly how you were taught by your tennis coach. But trying to learn it
that way from the outset does not appear to be the
best way to learn a skill. When should you start to
introduce slow learning? Well, obviously talk to
your coaches about this, but if you're doing this recreationally or you don't have a coach,
I realize many of you don't. I don't have a coach
for anything that I do. I'm going to have just navigating it by using the scientific literature. It appears that once you're
hitting success rates of about 25 or 30%, that's
where the super slow movements can start to be beneficial. But if you're still
performing things at a rate of five or 10% correct
and the rest are errors, then the super slow movements are probably not going
to benefit you that much. Also super slow movements
are not really applicable to a lot of things. For instance, you could
imagine throwing a dart super slow motion, but if you actually try and throw an actual dart, the dart's just going to
fall to the floor, obviously. So there are a number of
things like baseball bat swing which you can practice
in super slow motion. But if you try and do that
with an actual baseball or softball or something like that, that's not going to give
you any kind of feedback about how effective it was. So super slow movements
or a decelerated movement has its place but once you're
already performing things reasonably well like maybe
25 to 30% success rate. And I've tried this, I actually,
I struggle with basketball for whatever reason and
my free throw is terrible. So I practiced free throws
in super slow motion and I nailed them every time, the problem is there's no ball. Some of you already have a
fair degree of proficiency, of skill in a given practice
or sport or instrument. And if you're in this sort
of advanced intermediate or advanced levels of
proficiency for something, there is a practice that you
can find interesting data for in the literature, which
involves metronoming. So this you'll realize relates
to generating repetitions and it relates to the tone experiment where it doesn't really
matter what your attention is cued to as long as you are performing many many reps of the motor sequence. You can use a metronome and
obviously musicians do this, but athletes can do this too. You can use a metronome to set the cadence of your repetitions. Now for swimmers, there's
actually a device. I was able to find online, I forgot what the brand name was and that's not what this is
about, but that actually goes in the swim cap that can cue you to when you need to
perform another stroke. And for runners, there are
other metronome type devices that through headphones or
through a tone in the room if you're running
indoors or on a treadmill we'll cue you to when you basically you need to lift your heels. And if you do that, what athletes find is they can perform more repetitions, they can generate more output,
you can increase speed. A number of really interesting
things are being done with auditory metronoming. And then I'm involved in
a little bit of work now that hopefully I'll be
able to report back to you about using stroboscopic metronoming. So actually changing the speed
of the visual environment. These are fun experiments,
basically changing one's perception of how fast
they're moving through space by playing with the visual system, something for a future discussion. But you can start to
use auditory metronoming for generating more
movements per unit time and generating more errors
and therefore more successes and more neuroplasticity. There are a number of
different apps out there. I found several free
apps where you can set in a metronome pace, or
it might be tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. That's a little fast for most things, but you can imagine if this were darts or this were golf swings
that it might be tick, tick, tick, tick or something
more like tick, tick. And every time the
metronome goes, you swing. Every time the metronome
goes, you throw a dart. Actually there's some wild
experiments out there. You know there's a world
championship of cup stacking. There's a young lady who I
saw could take all these cups spread out on a table and
basically just stack them into the perfect pyramid in
the least amount of times and all the kids go wild. This is something I'd
never thought to pursue and frankly never will pursue unless my life depends
on it for some reason, but it's really impressive. And if you look at the sequence 'cause these have been recorded, you can look this up on YouTube. What you'll find is that
these expert cup stackers, it's just all about error elimination. But they're two metronomic
and auditory cues can actually cue them to
pick up the cups faster than they would ordinarily
and to learn to do that. You can do this for anything. I think cup stacking
is probably not a skill most of you are interested in doing, but for any skill, if you
figure out at what rate you are performing
repetitions per unit time and you want to increase that slightly, you set a metronome
which is slightly faster than your current rate and
you just start generating more repetitions. Now what's interesting
about this and is cool is it relates back to the experiment from Lappe and colleagues,
which is your attention is now harnessed to the
tone, to the metronome, not necessarily to what you're doing in terms of the motor movement. And so really you need
a bit of proficiency. Again, this is for people
who are in intermediate or advanced intermediate or advanced. But what you're essentially
doing is you're creating an outside pressure, a
contingency so that you generate, again, more errors. So it's all about the errors that you get. Now, these aren't errors
where all the cups tumble or you have to stop or you can't keep up, you have to set the pace just a little bit beyond what you currently can do. And when you do that,
you're essentially forcing the nervous system to make
errors and correct the errors inside of the session. I find this really interesting
because what it means is, again you've got sensory perception, what you're paying attention to, proprioception where your
limbs are and the motor neurons in your upper lower motor neurons and central pattern generators. And you can't pay attention to, "Well, they're my upper motor neurons, "they're my lower motor neurons." Forget that, you're not going to do that. You can't pay attention to
your proprioception too much. That would be the super slow motion would be the proprioception. But you have to harness
your attention to something. And if you harness your attention to this outside
contingency, this metronome that's firing off and saying,
now go, now go, now go. Not only can you increase the
number of repetitions, errors and successes, but for some
reason and we don't know why, the regular cadence of
the tone of the metronome and the fact that you are
anchoring your movements to some external force,
to some external pressure or cue seems to accelerate the plasticity and the changes and the
acquisition of skills beyond what it would be if
you just did the same number of repetitions without
that outside pressure. We don't know exactly
what the mechanism is. Presumably it's neurochemical,
like there's something about keeping up with
a timer or with a pace that presumably and I'm speculating here, causes the release of
particular chemicals. But I think it's really cool. Metronomes, they're totally inexpensive, at least the ones that
you use outside of water are very inexpensive. You can find these free apps, you can use a musical metronome. So metronomes are a powerful tool as well in particular for speed work. So for sprinting or swimming or running where the goal is to generate more strokes or more efficient strokes
or more steps, et cetera. The rate of the metronome obviously is going to be very important. Sometimes you're trying
to lengthen your stride, sometimes you're trying
to take fewer strokes but glide further in
the pool for instance. But the value of occasionally just the number of repetitions,
the number of strokes or steps, et cetera per unit time is also that you're training the
central pattern generators to operate at that higher speed. One of the sports has
kind of interesting to me is speed walking. It's not one I engage in or
ever planned to engage in, but if you've ever tried
to really speed walk, it's actually difficult
to walk very very fast without breaking into a run. All animals have these
kinds of crossover points where you go. I think with horses it's
like it was that they trot, then they gallop on, or
what's the next thing. Clearly, I don't know
anything about horses except that they're beautiful
and I liked them very much. But they break into a
different kind of stride. And that's because you shift over to different central pattern generators. So when you're walking or a
horse is moving very slowly and then it breaks into a jog and then into a full sprint
or gallop for the horse, you're actually engaging different central pattern generators. And those central pattern generators always have a range of
speeds that they're happiest to function at. So with the metronoming
for speed purposes, what you do is you can
basically bring the activity of those central pattern generators into their upper range and
maybe even extend their range. And there's a fascinating biology of how central pattern
generators work together. There's coupling of central
pattern generators, et cetera in order to achieve maximum
speeds and et cetera. It's a topic for a kind
of an advanced session. Costa loves this topic, he just barked. And he loves it so much, he barked again. In any event, the metronome
is a powerful tool, again for more advanced practitioners or for advanced
intermediate practitioners. But it's interesting
because it brings back the point that what we
put our attention to while we're still learning is important to the extent that it's on one thing at least for the moment or trial to trial, but that what we focus our
attention on can be external, it can be internal and
ultimately the skill learning is where all that is brought together. So let's talk about where
skill learning occurs in the nervous system. And then I'm going to give you a really, what I think is a really cool tool that can increase flexibility
and range of motion based on this particular brain area. It's a tool that I used and
when I first heard about, I did not believe would work. This is not a hack, this
is actually anchored deeply in the biology of a particular
brain region that we all have whose meaning is mini brain. And that mini brain that we all have is called your cerebellum. The cerebellum is called the mini brain because it's in the back of your brain. It looks like a little mini version of the rest of your brain. It's an absolutely incredible structure that's involved in movement. It also has a lot of non-movement
associated functions. In brief, the cerebellum
gets input from your senses, particularly, your eyes and pays attention to where your eyes are in
space, what you're looking at. It basically takes information
about three aspects of your eyes and eye
movements which are occurring when your head goes like
this, which is called pitch. So this is pitch. For those of you that are
listening I'm just nodding up and down then there's yaw, which is like shaking your
head, no, from side to side. And then there's roll,
which is that like sometimes if you see a primate, like
a Marmoset or something, they will roll their head
when they look at you. Actually, the reason they
do that is it helps generate depth perception, it's a kind
of form of motion parallax if you're curious why they do that. It's not to look cute, they do
it because when they do that, even if you're stationary
and they're stationary, they get better depth perception as to how far away from them you are. So you've got pitch, yaw and roll. And as you move your head
and as you move your body and you move through space,
the image on your retina moves, pitch, yaw on roll in some combination, that information is
relayed to your cerebellum. So it's rich with visual information. There's also a map of your body surface and your movements and
timing in the cerebellum. So it's an incredible
structure that brings together timing of movements,
which limbs are moving and has proprioceptive information. It really is a mini brain, it's just the coolest
little structure back there. And in humans, it's
actually not that little, it's just an incredible structure. Now, all this information
is integrated there, but what most people don't tell
us is that a lot of learning of motor sequences of skill
learning that involves timing occurs in the cerebellum. Now, you can't really use that information except to know that after you
learn something pretty well, it's handed off or kind of
handled by your cerebellum, but there is something that
you can do with your cerebellum to increase range of
motion and flexibility. Much of our flexibility, believe it or not is not because our tendons
are particular length or a elasticity, although
that plays some role, it's not because our muscles are short. I don't know what that would even mean. Some people have longer muscle bellies or shorter muscle bellies,
but your muscles always essentially span the
entire length of the bone or limb or close to it,
along with your tendons. But has to do with the
neural innervation of muscle and the fact that when
muscles are elongated, there's a point at which
they won't stretch out any longer and the nerves
fire, and they shut down that you actually have inhibitory pathways that prevent you from
contracting the muscles or from extending them, from
stretching them out any more. So you can do this right now. If you're driving, don't do
it because unless you have a self-driving car, you'll
need to take your hands off the steering. But because of the way that
vision and your muscles are represented in your cerebellum, it turns out that your
range of visual motion and your range of vision,
literally how wide a field of view you take impacts how far
you can extend your limbs. So we'll talk about this in a second exactly how to do this and explore this. But as you move through
space, as you walk forward or you walk backward,
or you tilt your head or you learn a skill, or you
just operate in the normal ways throughout your day,
driving, biking, et cetera, your eyes are generating
spontaneous movements to offset visual slip. In other words, you don't
see the world as blurry even though you're
moving because your eyes are generating low
compensatory eye movements to offset your motion. So if I spin, we could do this experiment. There's a fun experiment
we do with medical students where you spin them around in
a chair with their eyes closed and then you stop and you
have them open their eyes and their eyes are going
like this, is nystagmus. I don't suggest you do this experiment. When we were kids, we did
a different experiment which was to take a stick
and to look at the top of the stick and to
spin around on the lawn looking at the top of the
stick then put it down on the ground and try and jump over it. And you ended up like jumping to the side, you miss the thing entirely. The reason those two "experiments"
which I hope you don't do or for somebody else to do. The reason they work is because
normally your eye movements and your balance and your limb
movements are coordinated. But when you spin around
looking up at the stick, what you're doing is
you're fixating your eyes on one location while you're moving. And then when you stop
those two mechanisms are completely uncoupled
and it's like being thrown into outer space. I've never been to outer space, but probably something like
that, low gravity, zero gravity. If you spin around in your
chair with your eyes closed, you're not giving the visual
input that you're spinning. And then you open the eyes
and then the eyes only have what we call the vestibular,
your eyes jolting back and forth, back and forth. Again, these aren't
experiments you need to do 'cause I just told you the result. However, if you want to
extend your range of motion, you can do that by... These things always look
goofy, but at this point I'm just kind of used
to doing these things. If I want to extend my range of movement, first, I want to measure
my range of motion. If you're listening what I'm
doing is I'm stretching out my arms like a T on either side and I'm trying to push
them as far back as I can, which for me feels like it's
in line with my shoulders and I can't get much further. I'm not really super flexible nor am I particularly
inflexible at least physically. So what I would then do is stop. I would move my eyes to the far periphery. So I'm moving my eyes
all the way to the left while keeping my head and body stationary. I'm trying to look over my
left shoulder as far as I can then off to the right. It's a little awkward to
do this, then up then down but I'm mostly going to just focus on left and then right. Now what that's doing
is it's sending a signal to my cerebellum that my field
of view is way over to there and way over to there. Remember your visual
attention has an aperture. It can be narrow, or it can be broad. And I've talked about some of the benefits of taking a broad visual aperture in order to relax the nervous system. This is just moving my eyes, not my head, like I just did for a
second, from side to side. Now I can retest. And actually you get about
a five to 15 degree increase in your range of motion. Now I'm doing this for you. You can say, "Well, he
gamed it 'cause he knew "the result that he was hoping for." But you can try this. And you can do this for legs too. You can do this for any limb essentially. And that's it's purely cerebellar. And it's because the proprioceptive visual and limb movement feedback converge in the ways that we
control our muscle spindles and the way we control the
muscle fibers and the tendons and essentially you can
get bigger range of motion. So actually we'll warm up before exercise or before skill learning by
both doing movements for my body but also moving my eyes from side to side in order to generate
larger range of motion if range of motion is something
that I'm interested in. So that's a fun one that you
can play with a little bit and it's purely cerebellar. Some other time we'll get back
into a cerebellar function. There's all sorts of just incredible stuff that you can do with cerebellum. I talked in an earlier
episode on neuro-plasticity about how you can disrupt
your vestibular world. In other words, by getting
into modes of acceleration, moving through space where
you're tilted in certain ways, it can open up the windows for plasticity and yet other ways. So you can check that out, it's
one of the earlier episodes on neuroplasticity
everything's timestamped. But meanwhile, if you want to
expand your range of motion before doing skill learning or
afterward, this is a fun one. It's also kind of neat because
I have this kind of aversion to stretching work. It never seems like something I want to do and so I always put it off. So if I start with the
visual practice of expanding my field of view to off to
one side or the other side or up or down, then what
I find is I'm naturally more flexible. I'm not naturally more flexible. What's happened is I've
expanded my range of motion. Let's talk about visualization
and mental rehearsal. I've been asked about this a lot, and I think it relates
back to that kind of matrix Hollywood idea that we can
just be embedded with a skill. Although in this case, in fairness, visualization involves some work. And I've talked about
this on an earlier episode that some people find it very hard to mentally visualize things. And some people find it very easy. There was great work that
was done in the 1960s by Roger Shepherd at
Stanford and by others, looking at people's ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in their mind. And some people really good at this and some people are less good at this. And one can get better
at it by repeating it. But the question we're
going to deal with today is does it help, does it
let you learn things faster? And indeed the answer
appears to be yes, it can. However, despite what you've
heard, it is not as good. It is not a total replacement for physical performance itself. So I'm going to be really
concrete about this. I hear all the time that just imagining contracting a muscle can
lead to the same gains as actually contracting that muscle. Just imagining a skill can
lead to the same increases in performance as actually
executing that skill. And that's simply not the case. However, it can supplement
or support physical training and skill learning in ways
that are quite powerful. One of the more
interesting studies on this was from Rang Ganason at all, forgive me for the pronunciation. This was a slightly older paper, 2004, but nonetheless was one that I thought had particularly impressive results and included all the
appropriate controls, et cetera. And what they did is they
looked at 30 subjects. They divide them into different groups. They had one group perform
essentially finger flection. So it actually sort of the
imagine if you're just listening to this, the come here a finger movement. They also had elbow flection,
so bicep curl type movement. And they either had subjects
do a actual physical movement against resistance, or to
imagine moving their finger or their wrist towards the shoulder, meaning at the bending at the elbow towards actual resistance. Just to make a long story short, what they found was that
there were increases in this finger, adduction
strength, abduction, excuse me, strength of about
35% and the elbow flection strength by about 13.5%,
which are pretty impressive considering that was just done mentally. So they had people imagine
moving against a weight, a very heavyweight or had
imagined people moving their wrist towards their shoulder
against a very heavyweight. But again, they weren't doing it, they were just imagining it. Other experiments looked at the brain and what was happening in
the brain during this time. So we'll talk about that in a moment. But essentially what they
found were improvements in strength of anywhere from 13.5 to 35%. However, the actual
physical training group, the groups that actually moved their wrist or moved their finger against
an actual physical weight had improvements of about 53%. So this repeats over and over
throughout the literature mental rehearsal can cause
increases in strength. It can create increases in
skill acquisition and learning, but they are never as great if done alone as compared to the
actual physical execution of those movements or
the physical movement of those weights, which
shouldn't come as so surprising. However, if we step back and we say, "Well, what is the source
of this improvement?" You might not care what the source is because I could tell
you it's one brain area or another brain area. What difference would it make? But again, if you can understand
mechanism a little bit, you're in a position to create newer and even better protocols. What mental rehearsal appears
to do is engage the activity of those upper motor
neurons that we talked about way back at the beginning of the episode. Remember you have upper motor neurons that control deliberate action, you've got lower motor
neurons that actually connect to the muscles
and move those muscles and you have central pattern generators. Mental rehearsal, closing
one's eyes typically and thinking about a
particular sequence of movement and visualizing it in one's "mind's eye" creates activation of
the upper motor neurons that's very similar if not the
same as the actual movement. And that makes sense because
the upper motor neurons are all about the command for movement. They are not the ones that
actually execute the movement. Remember, upper motor neurons are the ones that generate the command for movement, not the actual movement. The ones that generate the actual movement are the lower motor neurons and the central pattern generators. So visualization is a powerful tool. How can you use visualization? Well, in this study, they
had people perform this five days a week. I believe that it was 15. Yes, it was 15 minutes
per day, five days a week for 12 weeks. So that's a lot of mental rehearsal. It's not a ton of time each
day, 15 minutes per day. But sitting down, closing your eyes and imagining going through
a particular skill practice or moving a weight. Maybe it's playing keys on
a piano if that's your thing or strings on a guitar,
for 15 minutes a day, five days per week for
12 weeks is considerable. I think most people, given the fact that the actual practice,
the physical practice is going to lead to larger improvements, greater improvements then
would the mental training would opt for the actual
physical training. But of course, if you're on a plane and you don't have access to your guitar and you're certainly not
going to be sprinting up and down the aisle
or you are very serious about your craft and you want
to accelerate performance of your craft or strength increases or something of that sort,
then augmenting or adding in the visualization training
very likely will compound the effects of the
actual physical training. There are not a lot of studies
looking at how visualization on top of pure physical training can increase the rates of learning and consolidation of learning, et cetera. It's actually a hard study to
do because hard to control for because what would you do in its place. You would probably add
actual physical training and then that's always going
to lead to greater effects. So the point is if you want
to use visualization training, great, but forget the idea
that visualization training is as good as the actual behavior. You hear this all the time. People say, do you know that
if you imagine an experience to your brain and to your body, it's exactly the same as
the actual experience. Absolutely not. This is not the way the
nervous system works. I'm sorry, I don't mean
to burst anybody's bubble, but your bubble is made of myths. And the fact of the
matter is that the brain, when it executes a movement is generating proprioceptive feedback. And that proprioceptive
feedback is critically involved in generating our sense of the experience and in things like learning. So I don't say this because
I don't like the idea that visualization couldn't work. In fact visualization does work, but it doesn't work as well, it doesn't create the same millu, the same chemical millu,
the same environment as actual, physically
engaging in the behavior, the skill the resistance
training, et cetera. And I'd be willing to
wager that the same is true for experiences of all kinds. PTSD is this incredibly
unfortunate circumstance in which there's a replay
often of the traumatic event that feels very real. But that's not to say
that the replay itself is the same as the actual event. And of course, PTSD needs to be dealt with with the utmost level of
seriousness, it should be treated. In fact, my lab works on
these sorts of things, but my point about visualization
and imagining something not being the same as
the actual experience is grounded in this
idea of proprioception. And the fact that feedback
to the cerebellum, the cerebellum, talking to
other areas of the brain are critically involved in communicating to the rest of our nervous system. That not just that we believe
something is happening but something is actually happening. And in the case of muscle loads, muscles actually feeling tension, the actual feeling of
tension in the muscle. The contracting of the
muscle under that tension is part of the important
adaptation process. In a future episode, we'll
talk about hypertrophy and how that works at the
level of upper motor neurons, lower motor neurons and muscle itself. But for now just know that
visualization can work. It doesn't work as well
as real physical training and practice, but these effects of 35% or 13.5% increases are
pretty considerable. They're just not as great
as the 53% increases that come from actual physical training. For those of you that are interested in some of this skill
learning that more relates to musical training, but also
how cadence and metronomes and tones, et cetera, can
support physical learning. If you're interested in that,
if are you a fussy and autos, there is a wonderful
review, also published in the Journal Neuron
again, excellent journal by Herholz and Zatorre,
that's H-E-R-H-O-L-Z and Zatorre, Z-A-T-O-R-R-E. That really describes in
detail how musical training can impact all sorts of different things and how cadence training,
whether or not with tones or auditory feedback
and things of that sort carries over to not just
instrumental music training but also physical skill
learning of various kinds. So if you want to do the deep dive, that would be the place you
can find it easily online. It's available as a complete article free of charge, et cetera. Many of you are probably
asking what can I take in order to accelerate skill learning? Well, the conditions are going to vary, but motivation is key. You have to show up to
the training session motivated enough to focus your attention and to perform a lot of repetitions in the training sequence. That's just a prerequisite. There's no pill that's
going to allow you to do fewer repetitions and
extract more learning out of fewer repetitions. It's actually more a question
of what are the conditions that you can create for yourself
such that you can generate more repetitions per unit time. I think that's the right
way to think about it. What are the conditions
that you can create for yourself in your mind and in your body that are going to allow you to focus? And I've talked about focus and plasticity and motivation in previous episodes. Please see those episodes if
you have questions about that. I've detailed a lot of tools
in the underlying science. So for some people, it might
be drinking a cup of coffee and getting hydrated before
the training session. For some of you, it
might be avoiding coffee because it makes you too jittery and your attention jumps
all over the place. It's going to vary tremendously. There is no magic pill
that's going to allow you to get more out of less, that's
just not going to happen. It's simply not going to happen. You're not going to get more learning out of fewer repetitions or less time. However, there are a few compounds I think are worth mentioning
because of their ability to improve the actual
physical performance, the actual execution of
certain types of movements. And some of these have also been shown to improve cognitive function, especially in older population. So I'd be remiss if I didn't
at least mention them. I'm only going to mention
one today in fact. The one that's particularly interesting and for which there really
are a lot of data is alpha GPC and I'm going to attempt to pronounce what alpha GPC actually is. It's alpha glycerylphosphorylcholine. Alpha GPC, alpha
glycerylphosphorylcholine. See, if I keep doing it
over and over repetitions, alpha glycerylphosphorylcholine. There I made an error. Okay, so the point is that alpha GPC, which is at least in the United States is sold over the counter
typically is taken in dosages of about 300 to 600 milligrams. That's a single dose or
have been shown to do a number of things that for
some of you might be beneficial. One is to enhance power output. So if you're engaging in
something like Shotput throwing or resistance training or sprinting or something where you have
to generate a lot of power, maybe you're doing rock
climbing, but you're working on a particular aspect
of your rock climbing that involves generating a
lot of force, a lot of power. Well then in theory, alpha GPC
could be beneficial to you. For the cognitive effects,
the dosages are much higher up to 1200 milligrams daily
divided into three doses of 400 milligrams is what the studies that I was able to find show or used. The effects on cognitive decline
are described as notable. Notable, meaning several
studies showed a significant but modest effect on in
offsetting cognitive decline, in particular in older populations and some populations,
even with some reported neuro degeneration. Power output was notable. How notable, what does that mean, notable? A study noted a 14%
increase in power output. That's pretty substantial, 14%. And if you think about it,
but it wasn't like a doubling or something of that sort. Believe it or not, the
symptoms of Alzheimer's have been shown at least
among the nutraceuticals of which alpha GPC is to
significantly improve cognition in people with Alzheimer's. Now this episode, isn't
about cognitive decline and longevity, we will talk about that, but this is a so-called
another effect of alpha GPC. Fat oxidation is increased by alpha GPC, growth hormone release
is promoted by alpha GPC although to a small degree. So as you can see, things
like alpha GPC in particular when they are combined
with low levels of caffeine can have these effects of
improving power output, can improve growth hormone release, can improve fat oxidation. All these things in theory
can support skill learning. But what they're really
doing is they're adjusting the foundation upon which
you are going to execute these many, many repetitions. The same thing would be
said for caffeine itself. If that's something that motivates you and gets you out of a chair to actually do the physical training,
then that's something that can perhaps improve or enhance the rate of skill learning and how well you retain those skills. Now on a previous episode I talked about, and this was the episode on
epinephrin on adrenaline. I talked about how for mental,
for cognitive learning, it makes sense to spike epinephrin, to bump epinephrin levels
up adrenaline levels up after cognitive learning. For physical learning, it
appears to be the opposite that if caffeine is in your practice or if you decide to try alpha GPC that you would want to do
that before the training, take it before the training use it. Its effect should extend
into the training, presumably throughout, and then afterward if you're thinking about
following some of the protocols that we discussed today,
that you would use some sort of idle time
where the brain can replay these motor sequences in reverse. And then of course, you want to do things that optimize your sleep. A lot of the questions I
get are about how different protocols and things that I described start to collide with one another. So let's say for instance,
you go to bed at 10:30 and you're going to do your
skill training at 9:30, well, taking a lot of caffeine
then is not going to be a good idea 'cause it's going
to compromise your sleep. So I'm not here to design
the perfect schedule for you because everyone's situation's vary. So the things to optimize
are repetitions, failures, more repetitions, more failures
at the offset of training. Having some idle time that
can be straight into sleep or it could be simply letting
the brain just go idle for five to 10 minutes, mean
not focusing on anything, not scrolling, social media, not emailing, not ideally not even talking
to somebody just lying down or sitting quietly with your eyes closed letting those motor sequences replay. Then we talked about how one can come back for additional training sessions, use things like metronoming
where you're queuing your attention to some
external cue, some stimulus, in this case, an auditory
stimulus most likely and trying to generate more
repetitions per unit time. So again, it's repetitions
and errors, that's key. And then we also talked about some things that you can do involving
cerebellar neurophysiology to extend range of motion if
that's what's limiting for you or to use visualization
to augment the practice or let's say your particular
skill involves nice weather and it's raining or snowing outside and you can't get outside or thunderstorm, then that's where visualization training might be a good replacement
under those conditions. Or in most cases is going
to be the kind of thing that you're going to want to do in addition to the actual physical skill or strength training session done, at least in the study that we described for 15 minutes a day, five days a week over a period of 10 to 12 weeks or so. So hopefully that makes it clear. Today we've covered a lot of mechanism. We talked so much about the
different motor pathway, central pattern generator. So you now are armed
with a lot of information about how you generate movement. And I like to think that you're also armed with a lot of information
about how to design protocols that are optimized for
you or if you're a coach, for your trainees in order to optimize their learning of skills various kinds. Today we focused almost
entirely on motor skills, things like musical
skills or physical skills. These have some overlap,
they're partially overlapping with neuroplasticity, for
learning things like languages or math or engineering or
neuroscience for that matter. Before we depart, I just want to make sure that I return to a concept,
which is the ultradian cycle. Ultradian cycles are
these 90 minute cycles that we go through throughout
sleep and wakefulness that are optimal for
learning and attention. In the waking state, they
are the stages of sleep in which we have either
predominantly slowey sleep or rem sleep. Some of you who have been
following this podcast for a while might be asking,
well should a physical practice be 90 minutes. That's going to depend because
with physical practices, oftentimes for instance,
with strength training, that might be too long. You're not going to be able to
generate enough force output for it to be worthwhile. For golfing, I don't know. I've never played golf with
all my friends that play golf, they disappear onto the
golf course for many hours. So I know there's a lot
of walking and driving and other stuff, I even hear that somebody carries your stuff around for
you sometimes, not always. But it's going to differ. A four hour golf game,
you're probably not swinging the golf club for four hours,
so it's going to depend. I would say that the ultradian
cycle is not necessarily a good constraint for skill
learning in most cases. And I should say that for
those of you that are short on time or have limited amounts of time, 10 minutes of maximum repetitions, maximum focus skill learning work is going to be very beneficial. Whereas two hours of kind of haphazard not really focused work or
where you're not generating very many repetitions 'cause you're doing few repetitions then you're
texting on your phone or pay attention to something else, that's not going to be beneficial. It's really about the density of training inside of a session. So I think you should let the... Work toward maximal or
near maximum density of repetitions and failures
provided they're failures you can perform safely in order
to accelerate skill learning and don't let some
arbitrary or in this case, the ultradian constraint prevent you from engaging in that practice. In other words, get the work
in, get as much work done as you can per unit time. And based on the science,
based on things that I've seen, based on things that I'm now involved in with various communities, you
will see the skill improve vastly at various stages. Sometimes it's a little bit stutter start, it's not always a linear improvement but you will see incredible
improvement in skill. If you're enjoying this podcast and you're finding the
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at any level that you like. In previous episodes and in this episode, I mentioned some supplements. Supplements certainly have
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I want to thank you for your time and attention. I very much appreciate your
interest in neuroscience and in physiology and in
tools that are informed by neuroscience and physiology. Today, we talked all about skill learning. I hope that you'll
consider the information, you might even decide to
try some of these tools. If you do, please let us
know your results with them. Give us feedback in the comments and as always, thank you for
your interest in science. [instrumental music]
Quick question.. are there summaries of his podcasts?