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Proof That Practice Does Make Perfect
eldavojohn sends us an article about a discovery by Carnegie Mellon researchers that explains why repetitive studying or training is effective. Previous research had suggested the opposite, which ran counter to nearly everyone's personal experience. Scientists hope that this information will help us to learn more about diseases which affect the memory, such as Alzheimer's. From the article:
"In a series of experiments the researchers blocked different receptors, including NMDA, to see the receptors' effect on long-term neural stimulation. They found that while the NMDA receptor is required to begin neural strengthening, a second neurotransmitter receptor -- the metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptor -- comes into play after this first phase of cellular learning. ...blocking mGlu receptors caused strengthening to stop."
... blocking mGlu receptors caused strengthening to stop.
What I want to know is, how many people block their own mGlu receptors? I mean, there are an awful lot of people that just do not seem capable of learning from experience. Maybe they should be concentrating on finding a drug that will unstick those people's mGlu's.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The research is a little deeper than you imply, it seems to be showing the biochemical mechanism which causes this phenomenon. knowing that repetition helps learning is simple, knowing exactly why it does so is useful if we ever want to do anything interesting with our brains from a technological standpoint.
as a bad analogy: knowing that an apple fell and whacked you on the head is obvious, knowing that the Earth curved space in such a way to allow this is something quite different.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Yes, but intuition has no scientific validity, and the point here is not to prove that something is the way we all know it is, but to figure out why it works that way.
... maybe something like this is what ushers in Vernor Vinge's Singularity.
It will be interesting to see if this discovery results in some nifty new drugs to improve the efficiency of the learning process. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to absorb vast quantities of information as easily as remembering a phone number? Hell, if popping a pill could give one the effect of an eidetic memory, it would revolutionize everything. Who cares how hard something is to use? Just read the manual. Once.
Students could graduate from college with the equivalent of a dozen different degrees. Interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas would be dramatically increased, the pace of progress would accelerate
Okay, so maybe it's not such a good idea after all. I'd still like to have a bottle of those pills handy though.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Anyone who's ever had to rely in a serious way on their training can tell you this is true.
Say you buy a gun for protection, but you don't practice with it, never think about it. How well do you think you're going to do when you need it in a life threatening situation? Frankly, you'd be better off without a gun at all because as likely as not the assailant would take it away from you and use it against you.
I think "most people's intuition" is that rote learning doesn't work well, not repetition.
expandfairuse.org
Previous research had suggested the opposite, which ran counter to nearly everyone's personal experience.
What could have possibly have contradicted a learning curve such as "the more I play, the better I get"?
Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
If you do the same bad thing over and over, all you get is a bad habit. If you record, analyze, correct, and repeat all your actions, you will get better.
I fly RC helis and airplanes. When doing pattern flying, I equip my birds with a GPS (garmin forerunner). After a practice session, I import the data into Google Earth and try and find out why my loops aren't round or why my vertical lines are not straight.
Lots of golfers record themselves at the driving range. After, they can overlay their swing with that of the Club Pro or another golfer and see exactly what they are doing wrong.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Perfect practice makes perfect. Without method you are simply forming bad habits...
Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998). Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians. I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things. * Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball. ** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes *** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step
Whoops, reposting with correct formatting:
Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998).
Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians.
I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things.
* Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball.
** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes
*** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step