Older learner? Here's how to learn faster!

hey how you doing justin here today we've got a really interesting topic to explore we're going to be looking at the latest science of learning and particularly how you can learn faster if you're over 25. now most of this information was taken from a couple of podcasts by the hubermann lab they were called how to learn faster using failures movement and balance and another one called how to learn skills faster now andrew d hubermann incredible dude his podcast is fantastic on a whole range of topics he really knows his stuff he's the associate professor in the department of neurobiology at stanford university medicine school right so he's proper now obviously i am not a neurobiologist i'm a guitar player but i'm very interested in the science of learning and about philosophy and psychology so the idea really in this video is for me to try and take the ideas and the concepts that he presented in there do some further research on them as well and then try and distill it down into things that we can actually use to help us learn guitar better and faster a really amazing thing i realized while doing research for this particular lesson was that a lot of the concepts that he talks about in those podcasts the things that actually i was already aware of i just didn't know how they worked a lot of the stuff is already incorporated into the beginner practice routines we'll see a little bit more about that later but there's an amazing twist in the tail that is so fun took me a little while to figure out how it was going to get used directly for the guitar thing but it's super duper cool we're going to talk about that a little bit later on after we've covered the basic gist of how this stuff works and how we can learn most effectively now first thing we're going to talk about is neuroplasticity it's something i'm sure you've at least heard of before somewhere along the way i'm going to have to refer to my notes a little bit i'd carefully uh scripted some notes but it's impossible for me to memorize a little bit so i'm gonna have to read a little bit off my screen down here so please forgive me i don't have a fancy auto cue or anything like that set up so to put it very basically neuroplasticity is the ability of neurons in your brain to grow adapt and reorganize to function in a different way than they had previously usually as a response to some direct experience so your brain is not set the neurons in your brain can grow and adapt to best suit the things that you need to do probably experience and practice and all of those things that you're going to do your musical experiences your life experiences are going to change your brain the way that your brain functions and the things that you're good at and the things that you're not able to do so well all of that stuff your brain can change itself in fact there's an amazing book called the brain that changes itself all about neuroplasticities with some fascinating examples i definitely encourage you to read that book if you're interested in exploring that a little bit more it may be a little bit old now it seems feels like quite a long time ago that i read that book but yeah really amazing thing so the reason children are able to learn so much faster than adults is that their brains are full of the chemicals that allow neural pathways to change and evolve and grow really quickly and really easily these chemicals steeply decrease after the age of 25 so part of the challenge here is being able to find ways to stimulate the production of those chemicals in the brain to be able to create neuroplasticity for us older folks if you happen to be under 25 and you're watching this video please make the most of this time seriously give yourself the best education you can because you're never going to learn things more easily than you are right now i wrote down make sure that you get an education that includes music languages meditation math science and physical stuff as well really please please if you're under 25 just make the most of that time to learn as much as you can fill your brain with real good stuff you can develop it later on but you'll learn so much faster when you're young so triggering plasticity as you get older takes a lot more effort or necessity if you really need to do something if you were stuck on a desert island you managed to make yourself a bow and you needed to learn to hunt you'd be able to learn to hunt very very quickly because you really need to do it your brain knows that so it's able to create those chemicals and create the plasticity needed to to learn that particular skill guitar maybe isn't quite that necessary right i think it'd be difficult to to trigger those chemicals in your brain although i do find it interesting that a lot of the stuff that i learned particularly in jazz when i was a in my late teens i used to play in this piano bar great piano player called phil mckercher uh he used to let me sit on the end of the piano stall and he'd just call jazz standards and i'd have to be able to play him most often i didn't know them but i think because of the panic and the the forced necessity for me to be able to get my way through the tunes i could learn them a lot faster now i'm not certain that is a true representation of neuroplasticity but definitely the being in a pressured environment that seemed to enable me to to learn faster i definitely think it's part of the reason why playing live with other musicians is so important because in that moment there's this pressure there's the necessity to be able to learn which i'm for sure no it speeds up the learning process whether that's directly neuroplasticity i'm not exactly sure but there are ways that we know that do increase neuroplasticity in your brain which you can utilize to learn guitar faster so one of the key findings of the hubermann studies was that failure is in fact one of the key ingredients for releasing those chemicals to create neuroplasticity and therefore learn faster so when you're doing the same thing over and over again we're looking for repetitions and you're going to make mistakes while you're doing it now i've been a really big one to to preach about practicing perfectly all the time and i do think that's really important that's to do with the twist in the tail which we're going to talk a little bit about later but a really good example of that is something like learning chord changes if you're learning to change from one chord to another chord in my courses i teach it in one minute changes and i say don't worry about making mistakes just change those chords as fast as you can so each time you're changing those chords and you're making mistakes your brain knows that it's not right because you're watching your hand you're going oh that's not right that failure that amount creates those chemicals to make your brain more plasticity plastic to be able to allow neuroplasticity to take place for those changes to happen now what's really interesting though is that when you get something right you get a little hit of a thing in your brain called dopamine i'm sure you've heard of it's the happy drug but the little burst of dopamine comes into your brain when you get it the thing right when you get the chord change right and then when you stop practicing that little dopamine hit that came about when you did the chord change perfectly tells your brain hey that was the right one now also really important is having a little rest after the practice session something that i haven't really thought too much about i do encourage people to take little rest while they're practicing but when you've just been doing that chord change go go go go oh yeah i got it right okay keep going wrong wrong wrong your brain is like oh he's getting it wrong he's getting it wrong we need to learn this we need to learn this release those chemicals that allow for the plasticity so we're learning we're learning and then yay he got it right dopamine comes in that tells your brain hey that chord changed that particular shape that movement whatever was the right one and here's the really interesting part is that after you've finished practicing you just have a little bit of quiet time your brain is able to remove the ones that had the mistake and relying on that little dopamine is going to say hey that was the right one that's the one that you've got to remember then by having a break be it a day or a couple of days until you go back to do that one you will notice that you get things more correct more often correct because your brain knows which one it was striving for now on guitar there is some physical stuff there's like muscular strength ability to control your fingers all of those things are going to grow grow with time as well a lot of it's to do with being able to use this plasticity about repetitions allowing yourself to fail this really blew my mind because i've known that the one-minute changes thing has been really really effective for a long time 10 years more i never really understood why but this is why and it was like got it somebody's figured out this is why this exercise is so effective so it's one of the little adaptations i'm going to make in my suggested practice routines for beginners is just taking that little break 30 seconds just of quiet time don't rush in and don't look at something else don't look at social media or fill your brain up with other rubbish just stop chill out close your eyes let your brain sort out that sort of stuff before you continue practicing like i said this stuff is particularly useful for older learners okay when you're kids you that stuff is already happening you're going to be learning all the time whether you like it or not okay important whether you like it or not so you've got to make sure you respect that learning process when you're young and also respect it later on we're going to talk like i said about ways of of keeping this plasticity door open in a little bit which is super interesting and really really fun so understanding that this repetition and making mistakes is okay and that your brain is going to fire off that dopamine when you get it right and your brain will sort out the right from the wrong later on and while you sleep as well good sleep really important for this kind of learning if you want to learn most effectively make sure you're getting good kip but i still don't feel like it's the correct approach all the time to make loads of mistakes a good example learning scales uh my teacher when i was in high school wrote down a scale wrong the pattern what i now know is pattern five of the major scale i'd learned it as the pure minor scale but it must have just been in a hurry put a little circle wrong i still sometimes make that mistake if i'm going to make a mistake on that it's always the same one because i learned it wrong and i would encourage you not to learn things wrong okay and this is where the really fun twist in the tale comes so if you're learning say practicing a scale or something where it's a fairly complicated long technical thing and one of the things where i've been talking about and raven on the you know in the lesson saying how important it is that you get it right right away i would suggest that you make your brain plastic another way because one other thing another thing from the human thing that just really blew me out was that once you get into this fully plastic state it lasts for a while up to an hour or around an hour i think you said now here's this is the really fun part right so get ready there are a few ways of triggering this response like i said it's failure but it's also failure to frustration if you can get really keep doing the same thing and you're getting really frustrated with it your brain's going no this isn't working we have to figure out a way to do this so it starts to release those chemicals to make the brain nice and plastic one of the strongest ways of developing that is ex physical exercises that use balance now guitar doesn't use balance but there are other exercises that do that you could try for five minutes before you do your guitar practice that's gonna help give you that plastic state and help you learn guitar faster now this is absolutely nuts but let's say um for me i've been doing it and i have actually been doing this i've been experimenting with doing handstands because i can't do a handstand in fact it always annoys me the fact that i can't do handstands so for the last two weeks i've been doing handstands before i've been doing my practice for five minutes i'm getting better but i'm still really wobbly and it's still really frustrating but the fact that it's a balance based exercise that i can't do sends all of these chemicals for hyper neuroplasticity and then i go about doing my guitar practice for the stuff that i want to learn at the moment i'm learning different patterns of the altered scale because it's something that i've always struggled to learn figure that i'm not going to delay anymore it's a good tester for me to be doing this and it really seems to be working okay you're gonna have to try it but doing handstands for most people that's probably maybe a little bit too far especially if you're a lot older if you're you know not massively fit or an older person who doesn't feel comfortable even attempting a handstand it might be something like standing on one leg right just balancing on one leg is already pretty hard for a lot of people if you're trying to do a yoga pose or whatever on one leg if standing on one leg is really easy maybe standing on tippy toes on one leg maybe getting up one of those wobble boards those flat boards with a little half circle half a ball underneath and then trying to balance on one leg with one of those that's really difficult okay that probably be safer than doing handstands because i nearly knocked over the camera that i'm talking to right now trying to do my handstands in the studio now i'm doing it in a different part of the house but you get the idea doing a balance based exercise that you can't do for five minutes before your practice is gonna help you learn guitar faster how weird is that don't recommend trying to practice guitar upside down might be pushing it taking a little bit too far but it is such a cool idea you get all of this plasticity you know you're about to learn something so you go and do a little bit of the base balance based activity first then you sit down and practice and you'll learn faster so my suggestion when it comes time to practice is looking at what exactly the exercises are and trying to figure out whether it's one where doing lots of the mistakes is going to help you because your brain a good one might be string bending you're doing that string bend over and over again you're not getting it right you're not getting it right but when you do get it right you'll be like wow i've got it really in tune dopamine hit your brain will know huh this is going to be the the one to do it so therefore you've you know when you stop practicing your brain will sort out the good ones from the bad ones a little bit of practice on that over a few weeks or a few months you start you know noticing that your bending is getting a lot more in tune than it would have been had you just been doing it really slowly and carefully and trying to bend it every time i still hold that learning really complicated long things pieces of music stuff like that i don't think the right approach is to be making lots of mistakes if i'm learning a new song i don't want to be learning it wrong learning it wrong learning it wrong learn it wrong oh i got one right great don't mean hit learn it you know i don't feel like that's the most effective way of learning i really don't so therefore in those circumstances you want to go for an experiment with the balanced basic balanced exercises that require balance before you start your guitar learning and really do go and check out those podcasts if you're not believe me because he's like a proper dude who really knows his stuff so go and have a listen he'll convince you you can do you can research the backstory you get he references loads of studies that you want to read if you're that much inclined to do it i'm not going into all of the the technical terms even though i might be able to sprout on something because i'm a bit worried about getting them wrong and making myself look stupid but do go and check it out i i really researched this not just those podcasts i did go back and read some of the studies that he'd referenced in the in the podcast i did some external research as well and it really holds up it's it's a really fascinating and fun i like i love the idea that some of you guys are going to be standing on one leg trying to work on your balance before you're doing your guitar i know this all sounds a little bit crazy i wouldn't have believed it either if it hadn't have come from such an eminent scholar in the field but really it's incredible but a little bit of balanced based exercise five to seven minutes before you start your guitar practice is going to make it way way more effective incredible well i really hope you found this fun and you find it effective moving forward do go and check out the hooven lab podcast as well it's full of interesting stuff not just on learning but about how to use our bodies and brains better it is somewhat technical but it's understandable and digestible for people like me that aren't scientists me and maybe you as well maybe you're a scientist uh super super interesting on yeah like i said a whole range of different topics uh it's on all the major platforms so do go and check it out uh he covers a lot of other things as part of those talks which are things that i already covered as part of my effective practice series which is part of the grade 3 lessons which are available over on the website so if you want to learn a little bit more about why it's really useful to use a timer and the importance of having a practice routine all that sort of stuff that's already covered so i haven't gone into those details in this particular lesson that's all part of the grade three course do go and check it out have yourselves an absolutely fantastic day and i'll see you for plenty more lessons very soon you'll take care bye-bye

Channel: JustinGuitar

Views: 318,147

Keywords: neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity exercises, neuroplasticity how to rewire your brain, neuroplasticity music, neuroplasticity explained, neuroplasticity guitar, learning guitar for older beginners, guitar lessons for older beginners, learn guitar at age 40, learning guitar older age, learning guitar at 25, justinguitar older learners, justinguitar, justin guitar, justinguitar grade 3, justin guitar grade 3

Id: 1xY1VS5-rqQ

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/askscompquestions]

Caveat, he hasn't done this for an extended amount of time. But he got some results with his tips.

General summary of the video:

1. If you're under 25, please make the most of your time. Get the best education you can, it's harder to learn things when you're older.
2. Repetitions and failure are effective. JustinGuitar thinks they work when learning singular techniques. But not for learning scales or other longer complicated thing like a new song. You may know common advice in music is to play slower but without mistakes. (Same with touch-typing, now that I think about it.) He also mentions things like sleep and rest being important.
   
3. Balance exercise stimulates neuroplasticity. His example is handstand, because he can't do it well. But he also suggests standing on one leg and wobble/balance board. So his advice is to do a balance-based exercise just before your guitar learning session.