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- 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
sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is
Belcampo Meat Company.
Belcampo Meat Company
is a regenerative farm
in Northern California that
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
previous podcast episodes,
Now, because I eat meat
essentially every day,
the source of that meat is
extremely important to me.
I want it to be healthy for me
and I want the animals that it comes from
to be healthy and to
have lived a good life.
Conventionally raised animals
are confined to feedlots
and they eat a diet of
inflammatory grains,
which is terrible for them
and it's terrible for us
when we eat those meats.
Belcampo's animals graze on open pastures
and seasonal grasses,
which results in meat
that is higher in
nutrients and healthy fats.
They actually have very
high levels of Omega threes
which I've also talked
about on this podcast,
are important for mental
and physical health
for a variety of reasons.
The way Belcampo raises its animals
is also good for the environment.
They practice regenerative agriculture,
which means it's climate
positive and carbon negative
which translates to good for
us and good for the planet.
You can order Belcampo
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That's belcampo.com/huberman for 20% off.
Today's podcast is also
brought to us by InsideTracker.
InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition platform
that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
to help you better understand your body
and reach your health goals.
I've long been a believer
in getting blood work done
for the simple reason that many,
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our immediate and longterm health
can only be assessed from a blood test.
And now with the advent
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One of major problems with
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Today's episode is also brought
to us by Athletic Greens.
Athletic Greens is an
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probiotic drink.
I've been using Athletic Greens
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I started using Athletic
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And with Athletic Greens,
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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.
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In previous episodes and in this episode,
I mentioned some supplements.
Supplements certainly have
their place for various things.
They aren't necessary, but
many people, including myself
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If you're interested in seeing
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And last but not least,
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.
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