How to Practice Effectively...For Just About Anything

This video explores the science behind effective practice and how it enhances skill mastery. It delves into the role of myelin in the brain's neural pathways, explaining how repetition strengthens these pathways for improved performance.

Pause the video now if you'd like to take a moment to think about what you're doing. Pause the video now if you'd like to take a moment to think about what you're doing. Pause the video now if you'd like to take a moment to think about what you're doing. Mastering any physical skill, be it performing a pirouette, playing an instrument, or throwing a baseball, takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. So what does practice do in our brains to make us better at things? Our brains have two kinds of neural tissue: gray matter and white matter. The gray matter processes information in the brain, directing signals and sensory stimuli to nerve cells, while white matter is mostly made up of fatty tissue and nerve fibers. In order for our bodies to move, information needs to travel from the brain's gray matter down the spinal cord through a chain of nerve fibers called axons to our muscles. So how does practice, or repetition, affect the inner workings of our brains? The axons that exist in the white matter are wrapped with a fatty substance called myelin, and it's this myelin covering, or sheath, that seems to change with practice. Myelin is similar to insulation on electrical cables. It prevents energy loss from electrical signals that the brain uses, moving them more efficiently along neural pathways. Some recent studies in mice suggest that the repetition of a physical motion increases the layers of myelin sheath that insulates the axons. And the more layers, the greater the insulation around the axon chains, forming a sort of superhighway for information connecting your brain to your muscles. So while many athletes and performers attribute their successes to muscle memory, muscles themselves don't really have memory. Rather, it may be the myelination of neural pathways that give these athletes and performers their edge with faster and more efficient neural pathways. There are many theories that attempt to quantify the number of hours, days, and even years of practice that it takes to master a skill. While we don't yet have a magic number, we do know that mastery isn't simply about the amount of hours of practice. It's also the quality and effectiveness of that practice.