"The Myth of 'Practice Makes Perfect'"

A very good article. It points out that when it comes to learning skills, it's not how many hours you practice that counts but how you pracitce. Since the blogger doesn't allow copying and pasting, please click the link and visit the site to read this good article.

http://colormalinsu.pixnet.net/blog/post/33104260

勤能補拙的神話  20120210

編譯  高英哲

The following is the cited passage in English by Gary Marcus, the psychologist who learned to play the guitar, as mentioned in this article. It could shed some light on why practice doesn't make perfect.

"But practice alone is not enough. Hundreds of thousands of people took music lessons when they were young and remember little or nothing. The second prerequisite is what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice", a constant sense of self-evaluation, of focusing on one's weaknesses rather than fooling around and playing to one's strengths. Studies show that practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice that most people do most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect. Sooner or later, most learners reach a plateau, repeating what they already know rather than battling their weaknesses, at which point progress becomes slow."

The source of the cited passage:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/05/guitar-zero-adult-learning-neuroscience

Guitar Zero: can science turn a psychologist into Jimi Hendrix?

Gary Marcus used his scientific knowledge to show you can teach an old dog new tricks – even to play guitar like a musical genius (well, near enough)

Are musicians born or made? All my life, I wanted to become musical but I always assumed that I never had a chance. My ears are dodgy, my fingers too clumsy. I have no sense of rhythm and a lousy sense of pitch. I have always loved music, but could never sing, let alone play an instrument; in school, I came to believe that I was destined to be a spectator rather than a participant, no matter how hard I tried. As I grew older, I figured my chances only diminished. Our lives, once we finish school, tend to focus on execution rather than enrichment. Whether we are breadwinners or caretakers, our success is measured by outcomes. The work it takes to achieve those outcomes, we are meant to understand, is something that should happen quickly and behind closed doors. If the conventional wisdom is right, by the time we are adults it's too late to learn anything new. Children may be able to learn anything, but if you wanted to learn French you should have started when you were six. Until recently, science supported this theory. Virtually everybody in developmental psychology was a firm believer in "critical periods" of learning. The idea is that there are particular time windows in which complex skills, such as languages, can be learned; if you don't learn them by the time the window shuts, you never will. Case closed. But the more people have actually studied critical periods, the shakier the data has become. Although adults rarely achieve the same level of fluency that children do, the scientific research suggests that differences typically pertain more to accent than grammar. There is also no magical window that slams shut the moment puberty begins. In fact, in recent years, scientists have identified people who have managed to learn languages with near-native fluency, even though they only started as adults. If critical periods aren't quite so firm as once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbour secret dreams – whether to learn a language, become a pastry chef or pilot a plane. And quests such as these, no matter how quixotic they may seem, and whether they succeed, could bring unanticipated benefits, not just for their ultimate goals but for the journey itself. Exercising our brains helps maintain them, by preserving plasticity (the capacity of the nervous system to learn new things), warding off degeneration and literally keeping the blood flowing. Beyond the potential benefits for our brains, there are benefits for our emotional wellbeing, too. There may be no better way to achieve lasting happiness – as opposed to mere fleeting pleasure – than pursuing a goal that helps broaden our horizons. From primary school, every musical attempt I made ended in failure. The first time I tried to play guitar, a few years ago, my friend Dan Levitin (who had not yet finished his book This Is Your Brain on Music) kindly offered to give me a few lessons. When I came back to him after a week or two of practice, he quickly realised what my primary school teachers had realised long ago: that I had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. Dan offered me a metronome, and when that didn't help, he gave me something my teachers couldn't – a diagnosis: congenital arrhythmia. And yet I never lost the desire to play. Music hasn't been studied as systematically as language in terms of critical periods, but there are certainly artists who started late and still became first-rate musicians. Tom Morello, the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine and among Rolling Stone magazine's greatest guitarists of all time, didn't start until he was 17. Patti Smith scarcely considered becoming a professional singer until she was in her mid-20s. Then there is the jazz guitar star Pat Martino, who relearned how to play after a brain aneurysm at the age of 35, and Dr John, who switched his primary allegiance from guitar to piano at 21 (after his left ring finger was badly injured in a bar-room fight) and won the first of his five Grammy awards in his late 40s. Given my arrhythmia, I had no aspiration of reaching such heights, but at 38, long after I had completed my PhD and become a professor of cognitive psychology, I realised that my desire to become musical wasn't going away. I wanted to know whether I could overcome my intrinsic limits, my age and my lack of talent. Perhaps few people had less talent for music than I did, but few people wanted to be able to play more acutely. I began to read the scientific literature. How did children learn music? Were there any lessons for adults? To my surprise, although children had been well studied, there was hardly any systematic research on people my age. Nobody seemed to know much about whether adults could learn to play late in life, and it wasn't just music that we knew little about; the literature on the capacity of adults to learn new skills in general was far sparser than I had imagined. We know something about gradual declines in memory, but the only truly firm result I could find concerned perfect pitch (the ability to identify a single note in isolation). For that, one must indeed start early, but luckily for me and anyone else starting late, it is also clear that perfect pitch is more luxury than necessity. Duke Ellington didn't have it and neither did Igor Stravinsky (nor, for that matter, did Joey Ramone). Other studies show some advantages for music learners who began earlier in life, but most of those don't take consideration of the total amount of practice. When it came to other aspects of music, such as the ability to improvise or compose, or even to learn a simple melody, there was almost no compelling literature. Although any number of studies have shown that the more you practise the better you get, startlingly few have compared what happens when people of different ages get the same amount of practice. How could such a basic scientific question remain so unanswered? I wondered about this for months, until Caroline Palmer, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, explained the answer to me. The problem wasn't a lack of scientific interest – it was a lack of subjects. To learn a musical instrument, you need to put in a lot of work – 10,000 hours is an oft-mentioned (if somewhat oversold) number – and to do a proper study, you'd need a reasonably large sample of participants, which is to say a big group of adult novices with sufficient commitment. Nobody has studied the outcomes of adults who put in 10,000 hours of practice starting at 42 because most people of that age have lives and responsibilities – few adult learners are prepared to invest the kind of time that a teenager has. No subjects, no science. At that point, I decided to become a guinea pig. At the outset, one study in particular gave a glimmer of hope. For years, the strongest scientific evidence for critical periods came not from humans but barn owls. These birds are, as it happens, a little like bats: they rely on sound to navigate. At the same time, however, they can typically see better than bats and one of the first things they do after hatching is calibrate their eyes with their ears, lining up what they hear with what they see. This allows them to use sound cues to help them navigate in their nocturnal world. But exact mapping between eyes and ears cannot be hardwired at birth because the navigational function of the auditory information depends on the exact distance between the two ears and that distance changes as an animal grows. How do owls calibrate the visual with the auditory world? The Stanford biologist Eric Knudsen explored this by raising owls in a kind of virtual reality world, in which prisms shifted everything by 23 degrees. This disrupted the owls' normal capacity to see and forced them to adjust their internal map of the visual world. The earlier the prisms were installed, the better the owls were able to cope with the altered world. Young owls could easily learn to compensate whereas old owls could not. If that were the only paper I had read, I would have given up on the guitar right there. But I stumbled on a more recent study, less widely known, in which Knudsen discovered that older owls weren't entirely hopeless after all. They couldn't master 23 degrees of distortion in one go, but they could succeed if the job was broken down into smaller chunks: a few weeks at six degrees, another at 11 degrees and so on. Maybe I didn't have talent, and maybe I was old (or at least no longer young), but I was willing to take it slow. Could adults acquire new skills if we approached them bit by bit, owl-style? Knowing what I do about language from my day job as a developmental psychologist, I also strongly suspected that my only realistic hope of learning an instrument was to become completely immersed. I figured that I had no more chance of becoming musical by playing three minutes every other week than I had of learning to fly. Children who learn second languages in immersion programmes do vastly better than those with more occasional exposure, presumably because it takes the human brain a great deal of exposure to learn anything complicated, and we tend to forget the new stuff if we take too long between practice sessions to consolidate what we've learned. It is no accident that popular music education paradigms such as the Suzuki method are based on immersion and there is no reason to expect that adults would be exempt from the need for high doses of regular exposure. Why is it that skills such as music require such profound dedication? The cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson, the world's leading expert on expertise, mentions two vital keys to becoming an expert in any domain. The first is a ton of practice. The oft-quoted "10 years" or "10,000 hours" is based on Ericsson's research into experts in domains ranging from chess to violin. This is not to say that one gets nowhere with 5,000 hours, but there can be no doubt that there is a strong correlation between practice and skill. But practice alone is not enough. Hundreds of thousands of people took music lessons when they were young and remember little or nothing. The second prerequisite is what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice", a constant sense of self-evaluation, of focusing on one's weaknesses rather than fooling around and playing to one's strengths. Studies show that practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice that most people do most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect. Sooner or later, most learners reach a plateau, repeating what they already know rather than battling their weaknesses, at which point progress becomes slow. Ericsson's notion of practising deliberately, and targeting weaknesses, bears some relation to an older concept known as the "zone of proximal development", the idea that learning works best when the student tackles something just beyond their current reach, neither too hard nor too easy. In classroom situations, for example, one team of researchers estimated that it's best to arrange things so that children succeed roughly 80% of the time; more than that and children tend to get bored; less and they tend to get frustrated. The same is surely true of adults, which is why video game manufacturers have been known to invest millions in play-testing to make sure that the level of challenge always lies in that sweet spot of neither too easy nor too hard. My journey began with what we call in my trade a pilot study – a relatively small-scale exploratory study to see whether further investment might pay off: two weeks at the end of August. My wife's family owns a lakeside cottage in Canada, which we visit nearly every summer, and I decided I would devote those two weeks to music and nothing else. Six months shy of my 39th birthday, I decided that now was the time. I brought nearly every piece of musical equipment I owned. Just because I couldn't play didn't mean I couldn't buy. I had a Casio keyboard, a cheap acoustic guitar (an eBay special) and a small pile of books on music, including Play Piano in a Flash! and The Complete Guitar Player, along with a pile of ear-training applications on my mobile phone. And I was serious about the immersion: I practised every day, two, three, four even six hours, roughly half on piano, half on guitar. Because I was a complete beginner my goal was simply to become acquainted with some of music's most basic elements – individual notes and, especially, chords. The rudiments of piano came relatively easy; guitar was brutal. On piano, it's easy to find the notes and form the basic chords. With a pair of simple rules, it became relatively easy to play any of the major and minor chords. One can always form a major chord, for example, by starting with one note, known as the root, and counting four keys (both black and white) to the right, and then heading up three more. As straightforward and mathematical as piano is, I knew it wasn't the instrument for me. Something about the physical intimacy of plucking guitar strings called to me. The guitar was obviously going to be harder to break into, but within a week or two I was convinced that it was the instrument I really wanted to play. At first, I regretted my decision. Everything, even something as simple as playing a single note, seemed harder on the guitar. Whereas playing an isolated note on a piano requires nothing more than striking a key, playing a single note on the guitar (unless it's a so-called open string) generally requires two actions, one from each hand, co-ordinated in synchrony. Playing a chord is even more complicated, in part because you can play only one note on any given string at any one time; forming a chord requires you to form weird left-hand shapes that span across several strings. Even if you know the four-up/three-up mathematics of how to form a major chord on a piano, it's often not at all obvious where to find the requisite notes on the guitar; instead, the beginner has little choice but to memorise an obscure series of shapes. And even when the strings to press are memorised, there is the by-no-means-trivial matter of holding them all down at the same time, each perfectly aligned, without creating a foul noise known as fret buzz. For the first several weeks, that challenge alone seemed almost insurmountable; the idea of shifting my hand from one chord to the next in time with a song seemed almost comical. Yet somehow I remained undeterred. Much to the amusement of my in-laws, I kept at it, practising every day. My first real breakthrough came a couple of weeks later when, on a road trip to a family reunion in a small town in Vermont, I stopped in a music store and poked through its section of guitar books. And it was there that I discovered David Mead's Crash Course: Acoustic Guitar. For the next seven days, Mead's book became my bible; I worked through it exercise by exercise. Mead had no magic bullets; the contortions of the hand that the guitar required remained difficult, but his "crash course" broke guitar down into just the sort of bite-size morsels that an old owl like me could easily digest. It gave me a better sense of the basics of rhythm and helped me move beyond simple chords and isolated notes to grasp the significance of larger units, such as scales. Among the scales a beginner might learn, one of the simplest is the bluesy minor pentatonic, which consists of just five notes. The minor pentatonic, I soon found out, is a mainstay of rock'n'roll and the blues, used in countless guitar solos, from Jimi Hendrix's Hey Joe to Dire Straits's Money for Nothing. Soon, it became a staple of my musical life – and a first hint that I might someday be able to make up my own music. Once I began to be comfortable with my first scales, my fumblings started to become faintly musical. My mother-in-law looked up. When she listened to my playing for the first time, even if it was only for a few seconds, I felt I was finally on to something. Thus encouraged, I set aside all the books I was reading, stopped watching television, and devoted myself full-time to the pursuit of music. Learning about music soon became, for all intents and purposes, an addiction. When I read some neuroimaging studies that suggested new knowledge can bring the same sort of surge of dopamine one might get by ingesting crack cocaine, I could only nod my head in agreement. Creating my own music was an adventure that seemed to bring me into a new place: meditative, beautiful, intoxicating.

Extracted from Guitar Zero – The Science of Learning to be Musical by Gary Marcus, published by Oneworld.