How to Learn Skills Faster | Huberman Lab Podcast

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.940 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology

00:00:12.440 | and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.840 | This podcast is separate from my teaching

00:00:17.640 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:00:19.460 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:00:21.540 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:00:23.680 | about science and science-related tools

00:00:25.900 | to the general public.

00:00:27.660 | In keeping with that theme,

00:00:28.860 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:00:32.060 | Our first sponsor is Belcampo Meat Company.

00:00:35.540 | Belcampo Meat Company is a regenerative farm

00:00:37.960 | in Northern California that raises organic, grass-fed,

00:00:41.140 | and grass-finished certified humane meats.

00:00:44.500 | I eat meat about once a day.

00:00:46.360 | I'm neither pure carnivore nor am I a vegetarian,

00:00:49.760 | obviously, I eat meat.

00:00:51.040 | The way I eat is I tend to fast until about noon,

00:00:55.000 | and then I have my first meal,

00:00:56.380 | which generally consists of a piece of beef,

00:00:58.760 | you know, it's either ground beef or a steak.

00:01:01.580 | I like ribeyes, I like flat irons, these kinds of things,

00:01:04.400 | and a small salad, sometimes a large salad.

00:01:06.940 | And then throughout the day,

00:01:08.420 | I generally am low carb until the evening

00:01:10.620 | when I eat pasta and rice and things of that sort.

00:01:13.020 | Eating that way is what optimizes my levels of alertness

00:01:16.820 | and optimizes my sleep.

00:01:18.660 | I've talked about this on previous podcast episodes.

00:01:21.620 | Now, because I eat meat essentially every day,

00:01:24.240 | the source of that meat is extremely important to me.

00:01:26.500 | I want it to be healthy for me,

00:01:27.900 | and I want the animals that it comes from to be healthy

00:01:31.600 | and to have lived a good life.

00:01:33.980 | Conventionally raised animals are confined to feedlots

00:01:36.480 | and they eat a diet of inflammatory grains,

00:01:38.840 | which is terrible for them,

00:01:40.040 | and it's terrible for us when we eat those meats.

00:01:42.560 | Belcampo's animals graze on open pastures

00:01:44.920 | and seasonal grasses,

00:01:46.180 | which results in meat that is higher in nutrients

00:01:48.200 | and healthy fats.

00:01:49.140 | They actually have very high levels of omega-3s,

00:01:51.940 | which I've also talked about on this podcast

00:01:53.760 | are important for mental and physical health

00:01:55.780 | for a variety of reasons.

00:01:57.660 | The way Belcampo raises its animals

00:01:59.340 | is also good for the environment.

00:02:01.900 | They practice regenerative agriculture,

00:02:03.780 | which means it's climate positive and carbon negative,

00:02:06.940 | which translates to good for us and good for the planet.

00:02:10.820 | You can order Belcampo sustainably raised meats

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00:02:16.100 | by going to belcampo.com/huberman,

00:02:18.980 | and you'll get 20% off your first time order.

00:02:22.180 | That's belcampo.com/huberman for 20% off.

00:02:27.060 | Today's podcast is also brought to us by Inside Tracker.

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00:04:21.400 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens.

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00:04:29.080 | I've been using Athletic Greens for well over a decade now.

00:04:32.380 | I started using Athletic Greens

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00:05:12.500 | It's compatible with fasting, at least for me.

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00:05:17.760 | So most often I'll have my Athletic Greens early in the day

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00:06:27.680 | This month on the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:06:29.640 | we're talking all about physical performance.

00:06:32.520 | So that means athletic performance, recreational exercise,

00:06:36.380 | weightlifting, running, swimming, yoga,

00:06:40.120 | skills and skill learning.

00:06:42.320 | Today, we're going to talk about and focus on skill learning.

00:06:46.200 | We are going to focus on how to learn skills more quickly,

00:06:49.700 | in particular motor skills.

00:06:51.600 | This will also translate to things like musical skills

00:06:55.280 | and playing instruments,

00:06:56.520 | but we're mainly going to focus on physical movements

00:07:00.080 | of the body that extend beyond the hands,

00:07:03.320 | like just playing the piano

00:07:04.520 | or the fingers like playing the guitar.

00:07:06.800 | But everything we're going to talk about

00:07:08.520 | will also serve the formation and the consolidation

00:07:13.240 | and the performance of other types of skills.

00:07:15.740 | So if you're interested in how to perform better,

00:07:19.180 | whether or not it's dance or yoga,

00:07:21.160 | or even something that's just very repetitive

00:07:23.120 | like running or swimming, this podcast episode is for you.

00:07:27.860 | We're going to go deep into the science of skill learning,

00:07:31.480 | and we are going to talk about very specific protocols

00:07:34.100 | that the science points to and has verified

00:07:37.240 | allow you to learn more quickly,

00:07:39.700 | to embed that learning so that you remember it,

00:07:42.520 | and to be able to build up skills more quickly

00:07:45.360 | than you would otherwise.

00:07:47.220 | We are also going to touch on a few things

00:07:49.100 | that I get asked about a lot, but fortunately recently,

00:07:52.660 | I've had the time to go deep into the literature,

00:07:54.820 | extract the data for you, and that's mental visualization.

00:07:58.720 | How does visualizing a particular skill or practice

00:08:02.740 | serve the learning and or the consolidation

00:08:05.800 | of that practice?

00:08:06.960 | Turns out there are some absolutely striking protocols

00:08:10.360 | that one can use, striking meaning they allow you

00:08:12.960 | to learn faster and they allow you to remember

00:08:16.160 | how to do things more quickly and better

00:08:19.320 | than if you were not doing this mental rehearsal,

00:08:21.320 | but the pattern of mental rehearsal,

00:08:23.580 | and when you do that mental rehearsal

00:08:25.640 | turns out to be vitally important.

00:08:27.900 | So I'm excited for today's episode.

00:08:30.160 | We're going to share a lot of information with you,

00:08:32.920 | and there are going to be a lot of very simple takeaways.

00:08:36.200 | So let's get started.

00:08:38.080 | Before we get into the topic of skill learning

00:08:40.540 | and tools for accelerating skill learning,

00:08:43.020 | I want to briefly revisit the topic of temperature,

00:08:45.620 | which was covered in the last episode,

00:08:47.520 | and just highlight a few things

00:08:49.140 | and clear up some misunderstandings.

00:08:51.180 | So last episode talked about these incredible data

00:08:54.240 | from my colleague Craig Heller's lab at Stanford,

00:08:57.320 | he's in the Department of Biology,

00:08:58.960 | showing that cooling the palms in particular ways

00:09:02.040 | and at particular times can allow athletes

00:09:05.080 | or just recreational exercisers to do more pull-ups, dips,

00:09:09.520 | bench presses per unit time, to run further,

00:09:12.660 | to cycle further and to feel better doing it.

00:09:15.940 | There really are incredible data that are anchored

00:09:18.320 | in the biology of the vascular system, the blood supply,

00:09:22.320 | and how it's involved in cooling us.

00:09:25.000 | Many of you, dozens of you in fact, said, wait a second,

00:09:30.000 | you gave us a protocol in this episode,

00:09:33.600 | which says that we should cool our palms periodically

00:09:36.880 | throughout exercise in order to be able to do more work.

00:09:40.320 | But on the episode before that on growth hormone

00:09:44.320 | and thyroid hormone, you said that heating up the body

00:09:48.400 | is good for release of growth hormone.

00:09:51.080 | And I just want to clarify that both things are true.

00:09:54.800 | These are two separate protocols.

00:09:57.440 | You should always warm up before you exercise.

00:09:59.600 | That warm up will not increase your body temperature

00:10:02.080 | or the muscle temperature to the point where it's going

00:10:05.540 | to diminish your work capacity,

00:10:07.520 | that it's going to harm your performance.

00:10:10.280 | The cooling of the palms, which is really just a route

00:10:13.280 | to cool your core in an efficient way,

00:10:15.480 | the most efficient way in fact,

00:10:17.600 | is about improving performance.

00:10:19.560 | Heating up the body with exercise

00:10:22.800 | and focusing on heat increases or using sauna

00:10:26.640 | for heat increases is geared toward growth hormone release,

00:10:30.140 | which is a separate matter.

00:10:31.680 | So you can do both of these protocols,

00:10:33.740 | but you would want to do them at separate times.

00:10:36.400 | So just to make this very concrete

00:10:38.280 | before I move on to today's topic,

00:10:41.040 | if you're interested in doing more work,

00:10:43.840 | being able to do more sets and reps per unit time

00:10:46.320 | and feel better doing it or to run further

00:10:48.920 | or to cycle further, then cooling the palms periodically

00:10:53.200 | as I described in the previous episode

00:10:55.340 | is going to be the way to go.

00:10:56.760 | If you're interested in getting growth hormone release,

00:10:59.420 | well then hot sauna and I offered some other tools

00:11:02.700 | if you don't have a sauna in the episode on growth hormone

00:11:05.560 | and thyroid hormone is going to be the way to go.

00:11:08.460 | So those are separate protocols.

00:11:09.960 | You can include them in your fitness regime

00:11:12.580 | and your training regime,

00:11:14.080 | but you do want to do them at separate times.

00:11:16.580 | And as a last point about this,

00:11:18.840 | I also mentioned that caffeine can either help

00:11:21.980 | or hinder performance depending on whether or not

00:11:24.080 | you're caffeine adapted because of the ways

00:11:26.420 | that caffeine impacts body temperature

00:11:28.840 | and all sorts of things like vasodilation and constriction.

00:11:31.560 | It's very simple.

00:11:32.960 | If you enjoy caffeine before your workouts

00:11:34.760 | and you're accustomed to caffeine,

00:11:36.500 | meaning you drink it three or five times or more a week,

00:11:39.760 | 100 to 300 milligrams is a typical daily dose of caffeine.

00:11:43.620 | Some of you are ingesting more, some less.

00:11:45.580 | If you do that regularly,

00:11:47.040 | well then it's going to be just fine

00:11:48.900 | to ingest caffeine before you train.

00:11:50.600 | It's not going to impact your body temperature

00:11:52.440 | and your vasodilation or constriction

00:11:54.840 | in ways that will hinder you.

00:11:55.880 | However, if you're not a regular caffeine user

00:11:58.520 | and you're thinking, oh, I'm going to drink a cup of coffee

00:12:00.880 | and get this huge performance enhancing effect.

00:12:03.400 | Well, that's not going to happen.

00:12:05.200 | Chances are it's going to lead to

00:12:07.240 | increases in body temperature

00:12:09.160 | and changes in the way that blood flow

00:12:11.400 | is happening in your body and in particular

00:12:13.240 | on these palmer surfaces and in your face

00:12:15.640 | that is going to likely diminish performance.

00:12:19.880 | So if you enjoy caffeine and you're accustomed to it,

00:12:23.000 | so-called caffeine adapted, enjoy it before your training.

00:12:25.800 | If you regularly, excuse me,

00:12:28.360 | if you do not regularly use caffeine,

00:12:30.280 | then you probably do not want to view caffeine

00:12:32.660 | as a performance enhancing tool.

00:12:35.320 | And while we're on the topic of tools

00:12:36.920 | and because this is a month on athletic performance

00:12:39.720 | and exercise and physical skill learning,

00:12:44.060 | I want to offer an additional tool

00:12:46.720 | that I've certainly found useful,

00:12:49.000 | which is how to relieve the so-called side stitch

00:12:52.440 | or side cramp when running or swimming.

00:12:56.340 | This actually relates to respiration

00:12:59.480 | and to the nervous system.

00:13:01.360 | And it is not a cramp.

00:13:03.040 | If you've ever been out running

00:13:05.000 | and you felt like you had a pain on your side,

00:13:07.480 | that pain could be any number of things,

00:13:08.880 | but that what feels like cramping of your side

00:13:11.400 | is actually due to what's called collateralization

00:13:14.880 | of the phrenic nerve,

00:13:16.400 | which is a lot harder to say than a side cramp

00:13:19.600 | or a side stitch.

00:13:21.000 | But here's the situation.

00:13:23.080 | You have a set of nerves,

00:13:25.480 | which is called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C,

00:13:29.960 | the phrenic nerve, which extends down

00:13:32.680 | from your brainstem essentially, this region,

00:13:35.620 | to your diaphragm to control your breathing.

00:13:38.660 | It has a collateral, meaning it has a branch,

00:13:41.280 | just like the branch on a tree that innervates your liver.

00:13:45.000 | And if you are not breathing deeply enough,

00:13:49.920 | what can happen is you can get

00:13:51.600 | what's called sometimes a referenced pain.

00:13:54.980 | Referenced pain is probably going to be familiar

00:13:56.900 | to any of you who have ever read

00:13:58.560 | about how to recognize heart attack.

00:14:00.240 | You know, people who have heart attacks

00:14:01.400 | will sometimes have pain on one side of their body,

00:14:03.640 | the left arm.

00:14:04.840 | Sometimes people that have pain in a part of their back

00:14:07.240 | will suddenly also get pain in their shoulder

00:14:09.200 | or part of their face.

00:14:10.040 | This has to do with the fact

00:14:11.080 | that many of our nerves branch

00:14:13.080 | and are meaning they're collateralized

00:14:14.920 | to different organs and areas of the body.

00:14:17.700 | And the way those nerves are woven together,

00:14:20.960 | it's often the case that if we disrupt the pattern of firing

00:14:25.140 | of electrical activity in one of those nerve branches,

00:14:27.420 | that the other ones are affected too.

00:14:29.500 | The side stitch, the pain in your side,

00:14:32.420 | is often because of the contractions of the diaphragm

00:14:36.100 | because of the way you're breathing while you're exercising,

00:14:38.700 | running or swimming or biking.

00:14:40.340 | And as a consequence, you feel pain in your side,

00:14:43.460 | but that's not a cramp.

00:14:45.460 | The way to relieve it is very simple.

00:14:47.780 | You do the physiological side that I've talked about

00:14:50.480 | in previous episodes of the podcast and elsewhere,

00:14:54.040 | which is a double inhale through the nose, very deep,

00:14:56.820 | and then a long exhale.

00:14:59.020 | And you might want to repeat that two or three times.

00:15:01.440 | Typically, that will relieve the side stitch

00:15:04.880 | because of the way that it changes the firing patterns

00:15:07.700 | of the phrenic nerve.

00:15:09.400 | So the side stitch is annoying, it's painful,

00:15:12.080 | sometimes where you think we're dehydrated

00:15:13.760 | and you might be dehydrated,

00:15:14.960 | but oftentimes it's just that we're breathing in a way

00:15:18.220 | that causes some referenced pain of the liver.

00:15:21.460 | We call it a side stitch or a side cramp,

00:15:24.180 | and you can relieve it very easily

00:15:25.700 | through the double inhale, long exhale.

00:15:27.980 | That pattern, done two or three times.

00:15:32.720 | Often you can continue to engage in the exercise

00:15:35.560 | while you do the double inhale, exhale,

00:15:37.820 | and it will just relieve itself that way.

00:15:39.980 | So give it a try if you experience the side stitch.

00:15:42.780 | Some people I know are also doing the double inhale,

00:15:45.620 | long exhale during long continuous bouts of exercise.

00:15:49.860 | I actually do this when I run.

00:15:51.680 | We have decent data,

00:15:53.040 | although these are still unpublished data

00:15:54.720 | that can engage a kind of regular cadence

00:15:57.220 | of heart rate variability.

00:15:58.820 | So there are a number of reasons

00:15:59.780 | why this physiological side can be useful,

00:16:02.260 | but it certainly can be useful for relieving the side stitch

00:16:05.060 | or so-called side cramp.

00:16:07.660 | Let's talk about the acquisition of new skills.

00:16:11.440 | These could be skills such as a golf swing

00:16:14.540 | or a tennis swing, or you're shooting free throws,

00:16:19.540 | or you're learning to dance,

00:16:21.500 | or you're learning an instrument.

00:16:23.740 | I'm mainly going to focus on athletic performance.

00:16:27.500 | There are basically two types of skills,

00:16:29.920 | open loop and closed loop.

00:16:33.760 | Open loop skills are skills

00:16:37.300 | where you perform some sort of motor action

00:16:39.740 | and then you wait and you get immediate feedback

00:16:42.520 | as to whether or not it was done correctly or not.

00:16:44.960 | A good example will be throwing darts at a dartboard.

00:16:47.980 | So if you throw the dart,

00:16:49.900 | you get feedback about whether or not you hit the bullseye,

00:16:52.240 | you're off the dartboard,

00:16:53.720 | or you're some other location on the dartboard.

00:16:56.580 | That's open loop.

00:16:58.640 | Closed loop would be something that's more continuous.

00:17:01.120 | So let's say you're a runner

00:17:02.720 | and you're starting to do some speed work and some sprints,

00:17:06.260 | and you're running and you can kind of feel

00:17:08.460 | whether or not you're running correctly

00:17:09.640 | or maybe you even have a coach

00:17:11.660 | and they're correcting your stride

00:17:13.900 | or you're trying to do some sort of skill

00:17:16.760 | like a hopscotch skill,

00:17:18.960 | which maybe you're doing the ladder work

00:17:22.000 | where you're stepping between designated spaces

00:17:24.880 | on the ground, that's closed loop.

00:17:27.020 | Because as you go, you can adjust your behavior

00:17:30.300 | and you can adjust the distance of your steps

00:17:33.380 | or you can adjust your speed

00:17:35.400 | or you can adjust your posture.

00:17:37.320 | And you are able to essentially do more practice

00:17:41.140 | per unit time,

00:17:42.340 | but you're getting feedback on a moment to moment basis.

00:17:46.240 | Okay, so you have open loop and closed loop.

00:17:48.120 | And just to make this very, very clear,

00:17:50.400 | open loop would be practicing your tennis serve.

00:17:52.880 | So let's say that you set a target

00:17:54.960 | on the other side of the net,

00:17:56.480 | you throw the ball up and you hit the ball,

00:17:59.920 | it goes over, that's open loop.

00:18:01.980 | You'll know whether or not you were in the court,

00:18:03.720 | you were on the location you wanted to hit

00:18:05.600 | or close to it or not.

00:18:07.100 | That's open loop.

00:18:08.220 | Closed loop would be if you're in a regular case.

00:18:11.880 | So maybe you're learning a swim stroke

00:18:14.160 | or maybe you're trying to learn a particular rhythm

00:18:16.660 | on the drums.

00:18:17.500 | So maybe you're trying to learn a particular beat.

00:18:19.040 | I'm not very musical, so I'm not going to embarrass myself

00:18:21.320 | by giving an example of this, although later I will.

00:18:24.760 | Where you're trying to get a particular rhythm down

00:18:28.540 | and if you're not getting it, you can adjust in real time

00:18:32.000 | and try and catch up or slow down or speed up, et cetera.

00:18:34.760 | Okay, so hopefully you'll understand open loop

00:18:37.080 | and closed loop.

00:18:38.540 | You should always know before you try and learn a skill

00:18:40.940 | whether or not it's open loop or closed loop

00:18:43.740 | and I'll return to why that's important shortly.

00:18:46.440 | But if you want to learn something,

00:18:47.940 | ask is it open loop or closed loop?

00:18:50.020 | There are essentially three components of any skill

00:18:54.500 | that involves motor movement.

00:18:56.480 | And those are sensory perception,

00:18:59.520 | actually perceiving what you are doing

00:19:01.900 | and what's happening around you.

00:19:04.140 | So what you see, what you hear.

00:19:06.400 | Sometimes you're paying attention

00:19:07.720 | to what you're doing specifically,

00:19:09.140 | like the trajectory of your arm

00:19:10.940 | or how you're moving your feet if you're learning to dance.

00:19:13.560 | Sometimes you're more focused on something

00:19:15.080 | that's happening outside of you.

00:19:16.560 | Like you're listening for something in music

00:19:18.780 | or you're paying attention

00:19:19.700 | to the way your partner is moving, et cetera.

00:19:22.180 | So there's sensory input.

00:19:24.240 | Then there are the actual movements.

00:19:26.300 | Okay, so there are the movements of your limbs and body.

00:19:29.320 | And then there's something called proprioception.

00:19:31.900 | And proprioception is often discussed

00:19:35.380 | as kind of a sixth sense of knowing where your limbs are

00:19:40.080 | in relation to your body.

00:19:42.100 | So proprioception is vitally important.

00:19:45.100 | If I reach down and pick up this pen and pick it up,

00:19:47.180 | I'm not thinking about where the pen in my hand is

00:19:49.980 | relative to my body, but proprioceptively,

00:19:53.900 | I'm aware of it at kind of a sixth

00:19:55.980 | and deeper subconscious level.

00:19:58.100 | I can also make myself aware of where my limbs are.

00:20:02.260 | And typically when we learn,

00:20:04.360 | we are placing more focus on proprioception

00:20:08.180 | than we do ordinarily.

00:20:09.960 | So if I get up from this chair

00:20:11.580 | and I happen to walk out of the room,

00:20:13.380 | I don't think about where my feet are landing

00:20:15.320 | relative to one another.

00:20:16.820 | But if my leg had fallen asleep

00:20:19.380 | because I had been leaning on one of the nerves of my leg

00:20:23.060 | or something like that,

00:20:24.360 | and my leg feels all tingly or numb,

00:20:27.640 | I and you, if this were to happen,

00:20:29.300 | you would immediately notice a shift in gait.

00:20:31.900 | It would feel strange.

00:20:32.740 | I'd have to pay attention to how I'm stepping.

00:20:34.420 | And the reason is I'm not getting

00:20:35.540 | any proprioceptive feedback.

00:20:38.140 | Now, skill learning has a lot of other dimensions too,

00:20:40.800 | but those are the main ones that we're going to focus on.

00:20:44.380 | So just to remind you,

00:20:45.620 | you need to know open loop or closed loop,

00:20:47.460 | and you need to know whether or not,

00:20:49.420 | excuse me, you need to know that there's sensory perception,

00:20:52.480 | what you're paying attention to,

00:20:55.300 | movements themselves, and proprioception.

00:20:58.460 | And there's one other important thing that you need to know,

00:21:02.380 | which is that movement of any kind is generated

00:21:05.620 | from one, two, or three sources within your nervous system,

00:21:09.680 | within your brain and body.

00:21:11.860 | These are central pattern generators,

00:21:15.480 | which are sometimes called CSPGs.

00:21:17.860 | Excuse me, CPGSs.

00:21:20.260 | CSPGs are something entirely different in biology.

00:21:24.220 | CPGSs, this just goes to show that I have a module.

00:21:27.960 | CSPGs are chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans.

00:21:30.180 | They have nothing to do with this topic.

00:21:31.820 | CPGSs are central pattern generators,

00:21:35.860 | or CPGs they're sometimes called.

00:21:38.340 | These CPGs are in your spinal cord, mine and yours,

00:21:43.340 | different ones, and they generate repetitive movements.

00:21:46.940 | So if you're walking, if you're running, if you're cycling,

00:21:51.020 | if you're breathing, which presumably you are,

00:21:53.300 | and you're doing that in a regular rhythmic cadence,

00:21:56.660 | central pattern generators are controlling that movement.

00:21:59.780 | After you learn how to walk, run, swim, cycle,

00:22:03.500 | do anything really, much of the work is handed off

00:22:07.180 | to the central pattern generators.

00:22:09.620 | And there were experiments that were done

00:22:12.500 | in the '60s, '70s, and '80s

00:22:14.780 | that actually looked at decerebrate animals

00:22:18.220 | and even decerebrate humans.

00:22:20.820 | These are humans and animals that lack a cerebral cortex.

00:22:24.600 | They lack much of the brain and yet they can engage

00:22:28.280 | in what's called a fictive movement.

00:22:30.620 | So it sounds like a kind of barbaric experiment.

00:22:32.700 | I'm glad I wasn't the one to have to do them,

00:22:34.540 | but this is the stuff of neuroscience textbooks

00:22:36.580 | that cats or dogs or mice that have their neocortex removed,

00:22:41.580 | put them on a treadmill, they'll walk just fine.

00:22:44.540 | And they will adjust their speed of walking just fine

00:22:47.780 | even though they basically lack

00:22:49.180 | all their thinking decision-making brain.

00:22:51.660 | And it turns out humans that have, unfortunately,

00:22:54.540 | massive strokes to their cortex and lack any neocortex,

00:22:59.320 | but preserve the central pattern generators

00:23:02.080 | will also walk just fine

00:23:04.500 | even though they lack any of the other stuff in the brain.

00:23:07.860 | So these CPGs or CPGSs are amazing

00:23:12.260 | and they control a lot of our already learned behavior.

00:23:15.940 | When you're really good at something,

00:23:17.900 | CPGs are controlling a lot of that behavior.

00:23:22.020 | And that's true also for a golf swing,

00:23:24.720 | even if it's not really repetitive.

00:23:26.660 | Somebody who's really good at golf is going to,

00:23:28.780 | I guess you call it a T, you put the ball on the T,

00:23:31.540 | I show my knowledge of golf.

00:23:32.740 | I've only done mini golf, frankly,

00:23:34.440 | but someday maybe I'll learn how to golf,

00:23:37.700 | but you set the golf ball down and swing,

00:23:39.440 | set the golf ball down, swing.

00:23:41.880 | Central pattern generators are going to handle a lot of that.

00:23:44.820 | If I were to go to the golf course,

00:23:47.540 | Stanford has a beautiful golf course.

00:23:48.940 | If I were to go out there and put a ball on the T,

00:23:50.840 | my central pattern generators

00:23:52.080 | would not be involved in that at all.

00:23:54.220 | The moment I get bringing the club back to swing,

00:23:58.420 | it's going to engage other things.

00:24:00.820 | And the other things that's going to engage,

00:24:02.640 | because I don't know that behavior now or then,

00:24:06.140 | is upper motor neurons.

00:24:08.460 | We have motor neurons in our cortex,

00:24:11.540 | in our neocortex that control deliberate action.

00:24:15.220 | And those are the ones that you're engaging

00:24:17.480 | when you are learning.

00:24:19.160 | Those are the ones that you have to pay attention

00:24:23.360 | in order to engage.

00:24:25.080 | And that's what's happening, for instance,

00:24:26.300 | if I decide I'm going to reach down and pick up my pen,

00:24:28.340 | which I rarely think about, but now I'm thinking about it

00:24:30.620 | and I'm going to do this in a very deliberate way.

00:24:31.960 | I'm going to grab with these two fingers and lift,

00:24:33.680 | my upper motor neurons are now involved.

00:24:36.620 | So upper motor neurons are very important

00:24:39.300 | because a little bit later in the episode,

00:24:41.440 | when we talk about how to use visualization

00:24:44.360 | in order to accelerate skill learning,

00:24:47.000 | it's going to leverage these upper motor neurons

00:24:50.460 | in very particular ways, okay?

00:24:52.080 | So we have CPGs for rhythmic movement,

00:24:53.740 | upper motor neurons for deliberate unlearned movements

00:24:56.820 | or movements that we are in the process of learning.

00:24:59.700 | And then we have what are called lower motor neurons.

00:25:02.440 | Lower motor neurons are the ones in our spinal cord

00:25:04.960 | that send little wires out to our muscles,

00:25:06.820 | which actually cause the firing of those muscle fibers, okay?

00:25:10.860 | So the way to think about this

00:25:12.440 | is you've got upper motor neurons,

00:25:13.800 | which talk to CPGs and to lower motor neurons.

00:25:16.620 | So it's really simple.

00:25:18.060 | And now you know most everything there is to know

00:25:21.320 | about the neural pathways controlling movement,

00:25:24.300 | at least for sake of this discussion.

00:25:26.420 | So anytime we learn something,

00:25:28.220 | we have to decide what to place our sensory perception on,

00:25:32.900 | meaning what are we going to focus on?

00:25:35.340 | That's critical.

00:25:36.180 | If you're listening to this

00:25:37.000 | and you're the type of person who likes taking notes,

00:25:39.420 | this should be the second question you ask.

00:25:41.660 | Remember, the first question is, is it open loop

00:25:43.800 | or closed loop?

00:25:45.000 | The second question should be,

00:25:46.780 | what should I focus my attention on?

00:25:50.160 | Auditory attention, visual attention or proprioception.

00:25:54.220 | Should I focus on where my limbs are relative to my body

00:25:57.340 | or should I focus on the outcome?

00:25:59.780 | Okay, this is a critical distinction.

00:26:01.600 | You can decide to learn how to do a golf swing

00:26:03.980 | or learn how to shoot free throws

00:26:05.660 | or learn how to dance tango

00:26:07.080 | and decide that you are going to focus on

00:26:10.020 | the movements of your partner

00:26:12.740 | or the positions of your feet.

00:26:14.340 | You maybe are going to look at them.

00:26:16.100 | Maybe you're going to sense them.

00:26:17.900 | You're going to actually feel where they are

00:26:20.940 | or maybe you're going to sense the position

00:26:23.180 | and posture of your body, which is more proprioceptive.

00:26:25.820 | Okay, so you have to allocate your attention

00:26:28.180 | and I'm going to tell you how to allocate your attention

00:26:30.460 | best in order to learn faster.

00:26:32.460 | So these are the sorts of decisions that you have to make.

00:26:35.740 | Fortunately for you, you don't have to think about

00:26:37.840 | whether or not you're going to use your upper motor neurons

00:26:40.480 | and your lower motor neurons or not

00:26:42.500 | because if you don't know how to do something,

00:26:43.940 | you're automatically going to engage

00:26:45.460 | your upper motor neurons.

00:26:46.360 | And if you do, you are all right,

00:26:49.500 | then you're not going to use your upper motor neurons.

00:26:51.280 | You're mainly going to rely on central pattern generators.

00:26:53.800 | You are always using your lower motor neurons

00:26:56.940 | to move muscle.

00:26:58.100 | So we can really simplify things now.

00:26:59.760 | I've given you a lot of information, but we can simplify it.

00:27:02.220 | Basically open loop or closed loop, that's one question.

00:27:05.360 | And what am I going to focus on?

00:27:07.120 | And then your neurology will take care of the rest.

00:27:09.800 | So now I want to talk about realistic expectations.

00:27:13.680 | Somewhere in Hollywood, presumably,

00:27:18.440 | it got embedded in somebody's mind

00:27:20.880 | that instant skill acquisition was possible.

00:27:24.400 | That you could take a particular pill

00:27:26.460 | or you could touch a particular object

00:27:29.100 | or you could have a wand wave over you

00:27:31.820 | and you would suddenly have a skill.

00:27:34.620 | And so that is the result of Hollywood at all.

00:27:38.660 | It doesn't exist, at least not in reality.

00:27:43.660 | And I love movies, but it simply doesn't exist.

00:27:47.000 | Then the self-help literature created another rule

00:27:51.620 | called the 10,000 hours rule.

00:27:54.260 | And frankly, that doesn't really match the literature,

00:27:57.900 | at least the scientific literature either.

00:28:01.080 | I like it because it implies that learning takes time,

00:28:04.860 | which is more accurate than the Hollywood at all

00:28:08.600 | instant skill acquisition rule,

00:28:11.960 | which isn't really a rule, it's a myth.

00:28:14.680 | But the 10,000 hours rule overlooks something crucial,

00:28:18.480 | which is that it's not about hours, it's about repetitions.

00:28:23.480 | Now, of course, there's a relationship

00:28:26.520 | between time and repetitions,

00:28:29.440 | but there are some beautiful experiments

00:28:31.820 | that point to the fact that by simple adjustment

00:28:36.820 | of what you are focused on

00:28:39.540 | as you attempt to learn a new skill,

00:28:42.360 | you can adjust the number of repetitions that you do,

00:28:45.640 | you adjust your motivation for learning,

00:28:47.800 | and you can vastly accelerate learning.

00:28:50.320 | Some of you may recognize this by its internet name,

00:28:55.220 | which is not a scientific term,

00:28:56.920 | which is the Super Mario effect.

00:28:59.180 | There's actually a quite good video on YouTube

00:29:02.020 | describing the Super Mario effect.

00:29:03.720 | I think it was a YouTuber who has,

00:29:05.580 | I think, a background in science.

00:29:08.040 | And he did an interesting experiment,

00:29:11.040 | and I'll talk about his experiment first,

00:29:13.740 | and then I will talk about the neurobiology

00:29:16.700 | that supports the result that he got.

00:29:20.180 | The Super Mario effect

00:29:22.220 | relates to the game Super Mario Brothers,

00:29:24.120 | but you'll see why at the end.

00:29:26.120 | But basically what they did was they had 50,000 subjects,

00:29:30.780 | which is a enormous number of subjects,

00:29:34.140 | learn a program,

00:29:36.320 | essentially taking words from a computer program

00:29:39.200 | or the commands for a computer program

00:29:41.700 | that were kind of clustered in a column on the right.

00:29:44.960 | So these are the sorts of things

00:29:46.320 | that computer programmers will be familiar with,

00:29:48.520 | but other people won't.

00:29:49.720 | And those commands are essentially,

00:29:53.080 | they essentially translate to things like go forward,

00:29:56.400 | and then if it's a right-hand turn in the maze,

00:29:58.500 | then go right and continue

00:30:00.720 | until you hit a choice point, et cetera.

00:30:02.760 | So it's a bunch of instructions,

00:30:04.420 | but the job of the subjects in these experiments

00:30:06.840 | were to organize those instructions in a particular way

00:30:09.160 | that would allow a little cursor

00:30:11.240 | to move through the maze successfully, okay?

00:30:13.680 | So basically the goal was,

00:30:15.340 | or at least what the subjects were told,

00:30:17.160 | is that anyone can learn to computer program,

00:30:20.080 | and if somebody can just organize the instructions

00:30:23.840 | in the right way,

00:30:24.840 | then they can program this little cursor

00:30:27.740 | to move through a maze, very simple.

00:30:29.540 | And yet, if you don't have any background

00:30:32.760 | in computer programming, or even if you do,

00:30:34.760 | it takes some skill.

00:30:36.040 | You have to know what commands to give

00:30:37.700 | in what particular order,

00:30:38.720 | and they made that very easy.

00:30:39.760 | You could just assemble them in a list over onto the right.

00:30:42.760 | So people started doing this.

00:30:45.680 | Now, there were two groups,

00:30:48.360 | and one half of the subjects,

00:30:51.640 | if they got it wrong,

00:30:53.700 | meaning they entered a command and the cursor would move,

00:30:57.180 | and it was the wrong command

00:31:00.920 | for this little cursor to move through the maze,

00:31:04.000 | they saw a signal jump up on their screen that said,

00:31:07.880 | "That did not work, please try again."

00:31:12.600 | That's it.

00:31:13.420 | If they put in the wrong command

00:31:14.640 | or it was in the wrong sequence,

00:31:15.600 | it would say, "That did not work, please try again."

00:31:17.160 | And then the subjects would reorganize the instructions,

00:31:20.360 | and then the little cursor would continue.

00:31:21.760 | And if they got it wrong again,

00:31:23.560 | it would say, "That did not work, please try again."

00:31:26.200 | The other half of the subjects,

00:31:28.720 | if they got something wrong,

00:31:30.160 | were told, "You just lost five points, please continue."

00:31:35.160 | So that's the only difference in the feedback that they got.

00:31:39.880 | Now, I have to confess,

00:31:42.320 | I would have predicted,

00:31:43.740 | based on my knowledge of dopamine circuitry

00:31:46.980 | and reward contingency and epinephrine and stress

00:31:51.980 | and motivated learning,

00:31:53.380 | and this other thing that we've been told

00:31:55.700 | in many, many books on behavioral economics

00:31:58.820 | and in the self-help literature,

00:32:00.120 | which is that people will work much harder

00:32:02.740 | to prevent losing something

00:32:05.080 | than they will to gain something,

00:32:07.600 | that you hear all the time.

00:32:09.360 | And it turns out that that's not at all what happened.

00:32:13.080 | If they looked at the success rate of the subjects,

00:32:17.700 | what they found was that the subjects that were told,

00:32:20.820 | "That did not work, please try again,"

00:32:23.720 | had a 68% success rate.

00:32:25.940 | 68% of them went on to successfully program

00:32:29.780 | this cursor moving through the maze.

00:32:31.960 | Whereas the ones that were told,

00:32:33.220 | "You lost five points," had a 52% success rate,

00:32:38.060 | which is a significant difference.

00:32:40.460 | But the source of the success

00:32:43.860 | or the lack of success is really interesting.

00:32:47.020 | The subjects that were told,

00:32:48.780 | "That did not work, please try again,"

00:32:50.960 | tried many, many more times per unit time.

00:32:55.920 | In other words, they made more attempts

00:32:57.680 | at programming this thing

00:32:58.880 | to allow this cursor to move through the maze.

00:33:01.300 | Whereas the people that were told,

00:33:02.440 | "You lost five points," gave up earlier or gave up entirely.

00:33:07.140 | Okay, so let's just step back from this

00:33:09.380 | because to me, this was very surprising.

00:33:12.140 | It violates a lot of things that I had heard

00:33:14.220 | in the kind of popular culture or the self-help literature

00:33:18.040 | that people will work much harder to avoid losing something

00:33:20.860 | than they will to gain something.

00:33:22.540 | And it didn't really fit with what I understood

00:33:25.380 | about reward contingencies and dopamine.

00:33:27.440 | But it did fit well with another set of experiments

00:33:31.520 | that I'm very familiar with from the neuroscience literature

00:33:34.620 | and I'll give you the punchline first.

00:33:36.300 | And then we're going to take what these data mean

00:33:38.460 | and we're going to talk about a learning protocol

00:33:41.340 | that you can use that will allow you to learn skills faster

00:33:45.060 | by willingly participating in more repetitions

00:33:49.460 | of the skill learning.

00:33:50.480 | Meaning you will want to do more repetitions

00:33:53.280 | even if you're getting it wrong some or most of the time.

00:33:57.740 | So the experiment that I want to tell you about

00:34:00.300 | is called the tube test.

00:34:01.820 | And this is generally done in mice,

00:34:03.940 | although it's sometimes been done in rats

00:34:05.520 | and it has a lot of parallels to some things

00:34:07.460 | that you've probably seen and experienced

00:34:11.460 | even in human life, in regular life,

00:34:14.340 | maybe even in your life.

00:34:16.200 | So here's the experiment.

00:34:17.980 | You take two rats, you put them in a tube

00:34:20.260 | or two mice, you put them in a tube.

00:34:22.120 | And mice and rats, they don't like to share the same tube.

00:34:25.780 | So what they'll do is they'll start pushing each other

00:34:28.500 | back and forth, back and forth.

00:34:30.540 | Sooner or later, one of the rats or mice

00:34:32.700 | pushes the other one out.

00:34:34.780 | The one that got pushed out is the loser,

00:34:36.340 | the one that gets the tube is the winner, okay?

00:34:40.000 | Now you take the winner, you give it a new competitor.

00:34:44.220 | And what you find is that the mouse or rat

00:34:48.020 | that won previously has a much higher than chance

00:34:52.900 | probability of winning the second time.

00:34:55.700 | In other words, winning before leads to winning again.

00:35:00.580 | And the reverse is also true.

00:35:01.900 | If you take the loser and you put that loser in

00:35:04.820 | with another mouse, fresh mouse, new mouse,

00:35:07.980 | the loser typically will lose

00:35:10.660 | at much greater probability than chance.

00:35:13.100 | And this is not related to differences in strength

00:35:15.780 | or size or testosterone or any other of the things

00:35:18.640 | that might leap to mind as explanations for this

00:35:21.100 | because those were all controlled for.

00:35:23.460 | Now, that result had been known about for decades.

00:35:27.600 | But three years ago, there was a paper published

00:35:30.520 | in the journal Science, phenomenal journal.

00:35:32.500 | It's one of the three apex journals that examined

00:35:35.980 | the brain area that's involved in this.

00:35:37.500 | Turns out it's a particular area of the frontal cortex

00:35:40.400 | for those of you that want to know.

00:35:41.740 | And they did a simple experiment

00:35:43.180 | where the experimenters increased or decreased the activity

00:35:47.500 | of this brain area in the prefrontal cortex,

00:35:49.540 | little sub-region of the prefrontal cortex.

00:35:51.100 | And what they found is if they stimulated this brain area,

00:35:54.340 | a mouse or rat, regardless of whether or not

00:35:58.060 | it had been a winner or loser before

00:36:00.100 | became a winner every single time.

00:36:02.360 | And they showed that if they blocked the activity

00:36:06.720 | of this brain area, regardless of whether or not

00:36:09.700 | the mouse or rat had been a winner or a loser,

00:36:11.740 | it became a loser every single time.

00:36:13.900 | And this translated to other scenarios,

00:36:16.620 | other competitive scenarios,

00:36:18.980 | where they'd put a bunch of mice or rats

00:36:20.860 | in a kind of cool chamber.

00:36:23.460 | They'd have a little heat lamp in the corner

00:36:25.060 | and mice like heat.

00:36:26.100 | And there was only enough space for one mouse

00:36:28.340 | to be under the heat.

00:36:30.300 | And the one that had one in the tube test

00:36:32.340 | or that had the brain area stimulated

00:36:33.900 | always got the nice warm spot.

00:36:36.940 | So what is this magic brain area?

00:36:39.260 | What is it doing?

00:36:40.400 | Well, the reason I'm bringing this up today

00:36:42.360 | and the reason I'm bringing it up

00:36:43.720 | on the heels of the Super Mario effect

00:36:45.820 | is that stimulation of this brain area

00:36:48.900 | had a very simple and very important effect,

00:36:52.940 | which was it led to more forward steps, more repetitions,

00:36:57.340 | more effort, but not in terms of sheer might and will,

00:37:01.500 | not digging deeper, just more repetitions per unit time.

00:37:05.740 | And the losers had fewer repetitions per unit time.

00:37:09.760 | So the Super Mario effect, this online experiment

00:37:13.380 | and the tube test, which has been done by various labs

00:37:16.180 | and repeated again and again,

00:37:17.820 | point to a simple but very important rule,

00:37:21.180 | which is neither the 10,000 hours rule

00:37:23.540 | nor the magic wand Hollywood version of learning,

00:37:26.860 | but rather the neurobiological explanation

00:37:29.460 | for learning a skill is you want to perform

00:37:33.260 | as many repetitions per unit time as you possibly can,

00:37:37.520 | at least when you're first trying to learn a skill.

00:37:41.780 | I want to repeat that.

00:37:42.600 | You want to perform as many repetitions as you possibly can,

00:37:46.640 | at least when you're first trying to learn a skill.

00:37:49.400 | Now that might sound like a duh, it's just more reps,

00:37:53.620 | but it's not so obvious.

00:37:56.060 | There's no reason why more repetitions

00:37:58.360 | should necessarily lead to faster learning

00:38:00.780 | because you could also say, well, more repetitions,

00:38:03.900 | you can make more errors.

00:38:05.100 | And those errors would lead to poor performance,

00:38:07.600 | like misstepping a number of times.

00:38:09.880 | And in these cases, there's very little feedback, right?

00:38:13.540 | It's not like every time the rat pushes forward

00:38:17.740 | or moves back that it is sensing, oh, I'm winning,

00:38:20.620 | I'm losing, I'm winning, I'm losing on a micro level.

00:38:22.660 | It probably does that as it starts to push the other one out

00:38:24.860 | the rat or mouse probably thinks I'm winning.

00:38:26.700 | And as it's backing up, it's probably thinks I'm losing.

00:38:29.500 | As you play the game, the Super Mario game,

00:38:31.880 | you are told, nope, that didn't work.

00:38:35.040 | Nope, that didn't work, please try again.

00:38:37.100 | But the important thing is that the winners

00:38:42.500 | are always generating more repetitions per unit time.

00:38:46.460 | It's just a repeat of performance, repeat of performance,

00:38:49.740 | even if there are errors.

00:38:51.120 | And that points to something vitally important,

00:38:54.040 | which is reps are important,

00:38:57.880 | but making error reps is also important.

00:39:01.280 | In fact, it might be the most important factor.

00:39:03.980 | So let's talk about errors

00:39:05.360 | and why those solve the problem of what to focus on.

00:39:09.900 | Because as I said earlier, if you want to learn something,

00:39:12.740 | you need to know if it's open loop or closed loop,

00:39:15.280 | and you need to know what to focus on,

00:39:17.360 | where to place your perception.

00:39:18.960 | And that seems like a tough task,

00:39:21.080 | but errors will tell you exactly what to focus on.

00:39:24.560 | So let's talk about errors and why you can leverage errors

00:39:27.600 | to accelerate skill learning.

00:39:29.600 | Okay, so we've established

00:39:30.880 | that performing the maximum number of repetitions

00:39:34.060 | per training session is going to be advantageous.

00:39:37.640 | And that might seem obvious,

00:39:39.360 | but there's a shadowy side to that, which is,

00:39:43.320 | well, why would I want to just repeat the same thing

00:39:46.000 | over and over again if I'm getting it wrong 90% of the time?

00:39:49.320 | And the reason is that the errors

00:39:51.240 | actually cue your nervous system to two things,

00:39:55.160 | one, to error correction.

00:39:58.340 | And the other is it opens the door

00:40:00.780 | or the window for neuroplasticity.

00:40:02.900 | Neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous system's ability

00:40:06.240 | to change in response to experience,

00:40:08.560 | essentially to custom modify itself

00:40:11.420 | in order to perform anything better.

00:40:13.920 | We did an entire month on neuroplasticity

00:40:15.920 | and I talked a little bit about errors

00:40:17.640 | and why they're important.

00:40:19.060 | Now we're going to make this very concrete

00:40:21.360 | and operationalize it, make it very actionable.

00:40:24.600 | There was a paper that was published in 2021

00:40:27.880 | from Norman et al.

00:40:29.580 | This is a very important paper.

00:40:32.020 | It was published in the journal Neuron,

00:40:33.520 | which is a cell press journal, excellent journal.

00:40:36.520 | The title of the paper gives it away essentially,

00:40:39.380 | which is Post-Error Recruitment

00:40:41.480 | of Frontal Sensory Cortical Projections Promotes Attention.

00:40:45.480 | Now, what that says is that when you make an error,

00:40:50.480 | it causes an activation of the brain areas

00:40:54.620 | that anchor your attention.

00:40:56.700 | Remember, we need perception, attention,

00:40:59.940 | which they're essentially the same thing.

00:41:01.240 | We need proprioception and we need the upper

00:41:03.360 | and lower motor neurons to communicate in the proper ways.

00:41:06.740 | And this vital question is what to pay attention to.

00:41:09.800 | Errors tell your nervous system

00:41:12.060 | that something needs to change.

00:41:13.940 | So if you are performing a task or a skill,

00:41:16.980 | like you're learning how to dance

00:41:18.160 | and you're stepping on the other person's toes

00:41:19.820 | or you're fumbling or you're not getting it right,

00:41:22.260 | those errors are opening the possibility for plasticity.

00:41:25.340 | If you walk away at that point,

00:41:27.580 | you've made the exact wrong choice, okay?

00:41:30.700 | Unless the errors are somehow hazardous to your health

00:41:33.300 | or somebody else's wellbeing,

00:41:35.540 | you want to continue to engage at a high repetition rate.

00:41:39.260 | That's really where the learning is possible.

00:41:41.700 | Without errors, the brain is not in a position

00:41:45.700 | to change itself.

00:41:47.180 | Errors actually cue the frontal cortex networks,

00:41:51.180 | what we call top-down processing, and the neuromodulators,

00:41:54.460 | things like dopamine and acetylcholine and epinephrine,

00:41:57.140 | that will allow for plasticity.

00:41:59.980 | So while the Super Mario experiment, the maze experiment,

00:42:02.660 | was only focused on generating errors,

00:42:05.120 | telling people that wasn't right, please try again,

00:42:07.020 | or that wasn't right, you lost five points,

00:42:09.780 | the key distinction is that the errors themselves

00:42:13.740 | cued people to the fact

00:42:14.880 | that they needed to change something.

00:42:17.140 | So if you're trying to learn a new skill

00:42:19.220 | and you're screwing up and you're making mistakes,

00:42:22.420 | the more mistakes you make,

00:42:23.900 | the more plastic your brain becomes,

00:42:26.380 | such that when you get it right,

00:42:28.800 | that correct pattern will be rewarded and consolidated.

00:42:33.480 | And you can trust that it will

00:42:35.340 | because the performance of something correctly

00:42:37.820 | is associated with the release

00:42:39.660 | of this neuromodulator dopamine.

00:42:41.560 | Dopamine is involved in craving and motivation,

00:42:44.580 | it's involved in a lot of things,

00:42:45.780 | but it's also involved in learning.

00:42:47.980 | We will do an entire episode on dopamine and learning,

00:42:51.960 | but because some of you are probably wondering,

00:42:54.820 | this does not mean that just increasing your dopamine levels

00:42:57.500 | before learning will allow you to learn faster.

00:42:59.780 | In fact, increasing your dopamine levels

00:43:02.820 | before learning using pharmacology

00:43:05.180 | will actually reduce what's called the signal to noise.

00:43:07.900 | It will make these increases in dopamine

00:43:10.360 | that pop up in your brain

00:43:12.100 | that suddenly make you realize, ah, I got that one right.

00:43:14.720 | It will make those smaller

00:43:16.500 | relative to the background levels of dopamine, okay?

00:43:20.380 | You want a big spike in dopamine

00:43:22.500 | when you perform a motor pattern correctly

00:43:25.020 | and you want to make lots of errors,

00:43:27.060 | many, many repetitions of errors

00:43:29.600 | in order to get to that correct performance.

00:43:32.160 | Now, if you're like most people,

00:43:33.940 | you're going to do this in a way that's somewhat random,

00:43:37.740 | meaning, let's say it's a tennis serve.

00:43:39.420 | I can't play tennis.

00:43:40.580 | I think I've probably played tennis twice.

00:43:42.840 | So if I throw the ball up in the air and hit it,

00:43:44.500 | I'm going to get it wrong and probably hit the net.

00:43:46.540 | Then I'm going to hit the net.

00:43:47.380 | Then I'll probably go too long,

00:43:48.720 | then I'll probably go over the fence.

00:43:50.140 | At some point, I like to think I'll get it correct.

00:43:52.840 | The dopamine signal for that is going to be quite big

00:43:56.500 | and I'll think, okay, what did I do there?

00:43:59.540 | I actually don't know, I wasn't paying attention.

00:44:01.300 | What I was paying attention to

00:44:02.260 | is whether or not the ball went to the correct location

00:44:04.680 | on the opposite side of the net.

00:44:05.740 | Remember, it's an open loop move.

00:44:07.580 | So I don't actually know what I did correctly,

00:44:09.820 | but your nervous system will take care of that

00:44:12.200 | provided I, in this case,

00:44:14.660 | complete more and more and more repetitions.

00:44:17.140 | Now, if I were to just elevate my basal level of dopamine

00:44:20.020 | by taking, I don't know,

00:44:21.000 | 1,500 milligrams of L-tyrosine or something,

00:44:24.060 | that would be bad because the increase in dopamine

00:44:26.460 | would actually be much lower, right?

00:44:29.680 | We would say the delta is smaller.

00:44:31.340 | The signal to noise is smaller

00:44:33.260 | if my overall levels of dopamine are very, very high.

00:44:35.780 | So I'm actually going to learn less well.

00:44:37.800 | So for skill learning, motor skill learning,

00:44:40.420 | increasing your dopamine levels prior is not a good idea.

00:44:44.100 | It might help with motivation to get to the learning,

00:44:46.540 | but it's not going to improve the plasticity process itself

00:44:49.460 | and it's likely to hinder it.

00:44:51.940 | And so that's very important.

00:44:53.620 | So these errors cue the brain that something was wrong

00:44:59.340 | and they open up the possibility for plasticity.

00:45:01.940 | It's what's sometimes called the framing effect.

00:45:03.820 | It frames what's important.

00:45:05.620 | And so I think this is a shift

00:45:07.820 | that we've heard about growth mindset,

00:45:09.900 | which is the incredible discovery and theory and practice

00:45:14.240 | of my colleague, Carol Dweck at Stanford.

00:45:15.820 | This is distinct from that, right?

00:45:17.740 | This isn't about motivation to learn.

00:45:20.060 | This is about how you actually learn.

00:45:21.540 | So the key is designate a particular block of time

00:45:24.740 | that you are going to perform repetitions.

00:45:27.700 | So maybe that's 30 minutes.

00:45:28.960 | Maybe that's an hour.

00:45:30.160 | Work for time and then try and perform the maximum number

00:45:33.740 | of repetitions that you can do safely

00:45:36.140 | for you and others per unit time.

00:45:39.020 | That's going to be the best way

00:45:40.640 | to approach learning for most sessions.

00:45:44.020 | I will talk about other things that one can do,

00:45:46.420 | but making errors is key.

00:45:48.200 | And this isn't a motivational speech.

00:45:49.700 | I'm not saying, oh, go make errors.

00:45:51.360 | Errors are good for you.

00:45:52.260 | You have to fail in order to win.

00:45:53.780 | No, you have to fail in order to open up the possibility

00:45:57.500 | of plasticity, but you have to fail many times

00:46:00.360 | within the same session.

00:46:02.160 | And those failures will cue your attention

00:46:05.060 | to the appropriate sensory events.

00:46:06.880 | Now, sometimes we're working with a coach.

00:46:09.060 | And so this is a shout out to all the coaches.

00:46:11.700 | Thank you for doing what you do.

00:46:13.780 | However, there needs to be,

00:46:17.200 | at least what the scientific literature say,

00:46:19.620 | there needs to be a period of each training session

00:46:21.940 | whereby the athlete or the person of any kind

00:46:25.400 | can simply pay attention to their errors

00:46:27.760 | without their attention being cued to something else.

00:46:31.020 | A really well-trained coach will say,

00:46:32.540 | oh, you know, your elbow's swinging too high

00:46:34.580 | or you're not gripping the racket

00:46:36.440 | in the appropriate way, et cetera.

00:46:38.340 | They can see things that the practitioner can't see.

00:46:40.860 | And of course that's vitally important.

00:46:43.000 | But the practitioner also needs

00:46:45.780 | to use this error recognition signal.

00:46:49.940 | They need to basically focus on something

00:46:52.940 | and the errors are going to tell them what to focus on.

00:46:56.160 | So put simply, there needs to be a period of time

00:46:59.420 | in which it's just repetition after repetition

00:47:01.380 | after repetition.

00:47:02.220 | I think many people, including coaches,

00:47:04.460 | are afraid that bad habits will get ingrained.

00:47:07.400 | And while indeed that's possible,

00:47:10.060 | it's very important that these errors occur

00:47:12.480 | in order to cue the attentional systems

00:47:14.720 | and to open the door for plasticity.

00:47:16.920 | So if I'm told, look, you know, I'm standing a little wide,

00:47:19.840 | I need to tighten up my stance a little bit, great.

00:47:22.800 | But then I need to generate many repetitions

00:47:24.680 | from that tightened stance, okay?

00:47:26.340 | So if I'm constantly being cued from the outside

00:47:28.460 | about what I'm doing incorrectly,

00:47:30.260 | that's not going to be as efficient, okay?

00:47:32.460 | So for some people, these learning sessions

00:47:34.920 | might be 10 minutes.

00:47:35.820 | For some people, it might be an hour.

00:47:37.340 | Whatever you can allocate, because your lifestyles will vary

00:47:40.800 | and whether or not you're a professional athlete, et cetera,

00:47:43.000 | will vary, you want to get the maximum number

00:47:45.500 | of repetitions in and you want to make errors.

00:47:47.540 | That's allowing for plasticity.

00:47:49.800 | So science points to the fact

00:47:51.460 | that there's a particular sequencing of learning sessions

00:47:55.500 | that will allow you to learn faster

00:47:57.360 | and to retain the skill learning.

00:47:59.740 | And it involves doing exactly as I just described,

00:48:03.000 | which is getting as many repetitions as you can

00:48:06.080 | in the learning session,

00:48:07.340 | paying attention to the errors that you make,

00:48:11.120 | and then the rewards that will be generated,

00:48:14.640 | again, these are neurochemical rewards,

00:48:16.580 | from the successful performance of a movement

00:48:18.900 | or the approximate successful performance.

00:48:22.360 | So maybe you get the golf swing better, but not perfect,

00:48:25.940 | but that's still going to be rewarded

00:48:28.300 | with this neurochemical mechanism.

00:48:30.620 | And then after the session,

00:48:32.700 | you need to do something very specific, which is nothing.

00:48:37.440 | That's right.

00:48:39.660 | There are beautiful data describing neurons

00:48:45.100 | in our hippocampus.

00:48:47.100 | This area of our brain involved

00:48:48.920 | in the consolidation of new memories.

00:48:50.960 | Those data point to the fact that in sleep,

00:48:54.900 | there's a replay of the sequence of neurons

00:48:59.180 | that were involved in certain behaviors the previous day,

00:49:01.940 | and sometimes the previous day before that.

00:49:04.360 | However, there are also data that show

00:49:08.500 | that after a skill learning session,

00:49:11.060 | any kind of motor movement,

00:49:14.660 | provided you're not bringing in a lot more additional

00:49:18.700 | new sensory stimuli,

00:49:20.200 | there's a replay of the motor sequence

00:49:24.420 | that you performed correctly,

00:49:26.760 | and there's an elimination of the motor sequences

00:49:30.920 | that you performed incorrectly,

00:49:33.380 | and they are run backward in time, okay?

00:49:37.700 | So to be very clear about this,

00:49:39.600 | if I were to learn a new skill or navigate a new city,

00:49:42.860 | or let's just stay with the motor skill,

00:49:44.940 | let's say the free throw or a golf swing or a tennis serve,

00:49:49.140 | dance move, novice,

00:49:51.440 | so I'm still going to make a lot of errors,

00:49:52.940 | don't get it perfectly,

00:49:54.020 | but maybe I get a little bit better

00:49:56.180 | where I perform it correctly three times out of 1,000,

00:49:59.720 | and it sounds like something I might do,

00:50:02.100 | and there I'm probably being generous to myself.

00:50:04.900 | After I finished the training session,

00:50:06.840 | if I do nothing,

00:50:09.860 | I'm not focused on some additional learning,

00:50:11.900 | I'm not bringing a lot of sensory information in.

00:50:15.580 | If I just sit there and close my eyes

00:50:17.500 | for five to 10 minutes,

00:50:19.700 | even one minute,

00:50:21.460 | the brain starts to replay the motor sequence

00:50:24.220 | of the corresponding to the correct pattern of movement,

00:50:28.120 | but it plays that sequence backward.

00:50:30.860 | Now, why it plays it backward, we don't know.

00:50:34.300 | If I were to wait until sleep,

00:50:36.300 | or regardless of when I sleep later that night,

00:50:41.260 | the sequence will be replayed forwards

00:50:44.320 | in the proper sequence.

00:50:46.400 | Immediately afterward, it's played backward

00:50:49.420 | for reasons that are still unclear,

00:50:51.620 | but the replay of that sequence backwards

00:50:54.620 | appears to be important

00:50:56.260 | for the consolidation of the skill learning.

00:50:59.040 | Now, this is important

00:51:01.560 | because many people are finishing their jujitsu class,

00:51:05.060 | or they're finishing their yoga class,

00:51:06.600 | or they're finishing their dance class,

00:51:08.100 | or they're finishing some skill learning,

00:51:09.820 | and then they're immediately devoting their attention

00:51:12.240 | to something else.

00:51:13.280 | You hear a lot about visualization,

00:51:16.100 | and we are going to talk about visualization,

00:51:18.640 | but in the kind of obsession with the idea

00:51:21.220 | that we can learn things just sitting there

00:51:22.940 | with our eyes closed without having to perform a movement,

00:51:25.740 | we've overlooked something perhaps even more important,

00:51:29.460 | or at least equally important,

00:51:30.820 | which is after skill learning,

00:51:33.100 | after putting effort into something,

00:51:35.300 | sitting quietly with the eyes closed

00:51:38.500 | for one to five to 10 minutes

00:51:41.640 | allows the brain to replay the sequence

00:51:44.380 | in a way that appears important

00:51:46.460 | for the more rapid consolidation of the motor sequence

00:51:50.860 | of the pattern and to accelerated learning.

00:51:53.580 | If you'd like to learn more about this,

00:51:55.840 | this is not work that I was involved in.

00:51:57.540 | I want to be very clear.

00:51:58.940 | There's an excellent paper that covers this and much more

00:52:02.000 | for those of you that really want to dive deep on this,

00:52:03.740 | and we will dive deeper in a moment.

00:52:05.780 | This is a review that was published in the journal Neuron,

00:52:08.820 | excellent journal.

00:52:10.040 | Many of the papers that I'm referring to

00:52:12.860 | were covered in this review,

00:52:15.100 | which is titled Neuroplasticity

00:52:16.940 | Subserving Motor Skill Learning by Dayan,

00:52:20.620 | D-A-Y-A-N, I hope I'm not butchering the pronunciation,

00:52:24.060 | and Cohen by Leonard Cohen,

00:52:25.900 | but not the Leonard Cohen most of us are familiar with,

00:52:29.940 | the musician Leonard Cohen.

00:52:32.460 | Dayan and Cohen Neuroplasticity Subserving Motor Skill

00:52:36.020 | Learning, and this was published in 2011,

00:52:40.020 | but there've been a number of updates

00:52:43.820 | and the literature that I've described

00:52:45.720 | in other portions of today's episode

00:52:48.780 | come from the more recent literature,

00:52:50.540 | such as the more recent 2021 paper, okay?

00:52:53.040 | So you have this basic learning session

00:52:55.740 | and then a period of time afterwards

00:52:57.160 | in which the brain can rehearse what it just did.

00:52:59.500 | We hear so much about mental rehearsal

00:53:01.340 | and we always think about mental rehearsal

00:53:02.940 | as the thing you do before you train or instead of training,

00:53:06.720 | but this is rehearsal that's done afterward

00:53:08.940 | where the brain is just automatically scripting

00:53:11.380 | through the sequence and for some reason,

00:53:13.120 | that's still not clear as to why this would be the case,

00:53:17.380 | it runs backward.

00:53:18.780 | Then in sleep, it runs forwards and certainly,

00:53:22.540 | absolutely sleep and quality sleep

00:53:25.440 | of the appropriate duration, et cetera,

00:53:26.940 | is going to be important for learning of all kinds,

00:53:28.900 | including skill learning.

00:53:29.900 | We did an entire four episodes on sleep

00:53:32.980 | and how to get better at sleeping.

00:53:34.020 | Those are the episodes back in January,

00:53:35.560 | episodes essentially one, two, three, and four,

00:53:38.260 | and maybe even episode five, I don't recall,

00:53:42.300 | but you can go there to find out

00:53:44.340 | all about how to get better at sleeping.

00:53:46.840 | Now, there are other training sessions involved, right?

00:53:50.140 | I'm not going to learn the perfect golf swing

00:53:51.760 | or the tennis serve or how to dance in one session

00:53:54.740 | and I doubt you will either.

00:53:58.300 | So the question is when to come back

00:54:00.540 | and what to do when you come back to the training session.

00:54:03.120 | Now, first of all, this principle of errors,

00:54:07.340 | cuing attention and opening the opportunity for plasticity,

00:54:11.840 | that's never going to change.

00:54:14.400 | That's going to be true for somebody who is hyper skilled,

00:54:17.220 | who's even has mastery or even virtuosity

00:54:21.540 | in a given skill, right?

00:54:23.800 | Remember, when you're unskilled at something,

00:54:26.340 | uncertainty is very high, as you become more skilled,

00:54:28.820 | certainty goes up, right?

00:54:30.640 | Then eventually you achieve levels of mastery

00:54:32.780 | where certainty is very, very high

00:54:34.700 | about your ability to perform yours,

00:54:37.100 | certainty and that of other people.

00:54:38.820 | And then there's this fourth category of virtuosity

00:54:42.760 | where somebody, maybe you,

00:54:44.820 | invites uncertainty back into the practice

00:54:47.280 | because only with that uncertainty

00:54:49.220 | can you express your full range of abilities,

00:54:52.700 | which you aren't even aware of

00:54:54.020 | until uncertainty comes into the picture, right?

00:54:56.880 | I happen to have the great privilege

00:55:00.820 | of being friends with Laird Hamilton,

00:55:03.080 | the big wave surfer who is phenomenal.

00:55:05.400 | I don't surf.

00:55:06.500 | I certainly don't surf with Laird,

00:55:08.240 | but he and another guy that he surfs with, Luca Padua,

00:55:12.420 | these guys, they're virtuosos at surfing.

00:55:16.240 | They don't just want the wave that they can master.

00:55:19.280 | They want uncertainty.

00:55:20.540 | They're at the point in their practice

00:55:22.180 | where when uncertainty shows up,

00:55:24.780 | like a wave that's either so big

00:55:27.200 | or is moving in a particular way

00:55:31.020 | that it brings an element of uncertainty for them

00:55:33.960 | about what they're going to do,

00:55:35.660 | they recognize that as the opportunity

00:55:37.460 | to perform better than they would otherwise, okay?

00:55:39.940 | So they're actually trying to eliminate uncertainty.

00:55:42.380 | At the beginning of learning any skill

00:55:44.260 | and as we approach from uncertain to skilled to mastery,

00:55:47.420 | we want to reduce uncertainty.

00:55:49.380 | And that's really what the nervous system is doing.

00:55:50.980 | It's trying to eliminate errors

00:55:52.340 | and hone in on the correct trajectories.

00:55:55.000 | If you perform a lot of repetitions

00:55:59.660 | and then you use a period immediately after,

00:56:02.740 | we don't really have a name for this.

00:56:03.960 | Maybe someone will come up with it

00:56:05.180 | and put it in the comment section if you're on YouTube,

00:56:07.840 | if you're watching this on YouTube,

00:56:09.460 | a name for this post-learning

00:56:11.420 | kind of idle time for the brain.

00:56:13.100 | The brain isn't idle at all.

00:56:14.300 | It's actually scripting all these things in reverse

00:56:16.740 | that allow for deeper learning and more quick learning.

00:56:21.460 | But if we fill that time with other things,

00:56:24.380 | if we are focused on our phones

00:56:26.180 | or we're focused on learning something else,

00:56:27.880 | we're focusing on our performance,

00:56:30.580 | that's not going to serve us well.

00:56:32.220 | It's at least it's not going to serve

00:56:33.220 | the skill learning well.

00:56:34.060 | So please, if you're interested

00:56:35.420 | in more rapid skill learning,

00:56:36.440 | try introducing these sessions.

00:56:37.820 | They can be quite powerful.

00:56:39.660 | And then on subsequent sessions,

00:56:41.300 | presumably after a night's sleep,

00:56:43.180 | or maybe you're doing two sessions a day,

00:56:44.660 | although two sessions a day is going to be a lot

00:56:46.540 | for most people, unless you're a professional

00:56:48.320 | or a high level athlete.

00:56:51.080 | The subsequent sessions are where you get

00:56:55.660 | to express the gains of the previous session, right?

00:56:59.420 | Where you get to perform well, presumably more often,

00:57:03.140 | even if it's just subtle,

00:57:04.060 | sometimes there'll be a decrease in performance,

00:57:06.060 | but most often you're going to perform better

00:57:08.780 | on subsequent and subsequent training sessions.

00:57:12.320 | And there is the opportunity to devote attention

00:57:16.340 | in very specific ways, right?

00:57:18.900 | Not just let the errors inform you

00:57:22.120 | where to place your attention,

00:57:23.460 | but rather to direct your perception

00:57:27.580 | to particular elements of the movement

00:57:30.120 | in order to accelerate learning further, okay?

00:57:33.000 | So to be very clear,

00:57:34.980 | 'cause I know many of you are interested

00:57:36.700 | in concrete protocols,

00:57:38.780 | it's not just that you would only let errors

00:57:41.220 | cue your attention on the first session.

00:57:43.260 | You might do that for one session or five sessions.

00:57:45.980 | It's going to depend.

00:57:47.020 | But once you're familiar with something

00:57:48.720 | and you're performing it well every once in a while,

00:57:51.060 | you're accomplishing it better every once in a while,

00:57:54.700 | then you can start to cue your attention

00:57:56.420 | in very deliberate ways.

00:57:58.420 | And the question therefore becomes

00:58:00.140 | what to cue your attention to.

00:58:02.500 | And the good news is it doesn't matter.

00:58:05.580 | There is a beautiful set of experiments that have been done

00:58:10.480 | looking at sequences of keys being played on a piano.

00:58:15.420 | This is work that was published just a couple of years ago.

00:58:18.100 | There are actually several papers now

00:58:20.020 | that are focused on this.

00:58:22.060 | One of them was published in 2018.

00:58:24.340 | This is from Claudia Lape and colleagues, L-A-P-P-E.

00:58:29.340 | She's done some really nice work,

00:58:30.880 | which talks about the influence of pitch feedback

00:58:33.900 | on learning of motor timing and sequencing.

00:58:36.100 | And this was done with piano,

00:58:37.660 | but it carries over to athletic performance as well.

00:58:40.160 | So I'm going to describe this study to you.

00:58:42.300 | But before I describe it,

00:58:44.940 | what is so interesting about this study

00:58:47.580 | that I want you to know about

00:58:49.220 | is that it turns out it doesn't matter so much

00:58:53.740 | what you pay attention to during the learning sequence,

00:58:57.020 | provided it's something related to the motor behavior

00:58:59.880 | that you're performing, right?

00:59:01.720 | That seems incredible, right?

00:59:03.260 | I'm not good at a tennis serve.

00:59:06.380 | So if I've done, you know,

00:59:07.900 | let's say a thousand repetitions of the tennis serve,

00:59:09.880 | maybe I got it right three to 10 times.

00:59:12.060 | Now I'm being even more generous with myself

00:59:13.700 | and I do this post-training session

00:59:16.080 | where I let my brain idle and I get some good sleep

00:59:18.600 | and I come back and now I start generating errors again,

00:59:21.980 | presumably or hopefully fewer errors,

00:59:24.720 | but I decide I'm going to cue my attention

00:59:26.540 | to something very specific,

00:59:27.620 | like maybe how tightly I'm holding the racket,

00:59:30.820 | or maybe it's my stance,

00:59:32.260 | or maybe it's whether or not I rotate my right shoulder in

00:59:36.120 | as I hit the ball across and I'm making this up again,

00:59:38.700 | I don't play tennis.

00:59:40.220 | Turns out that as long as it's the same thing

00:59:43.340 | throughout the session, learning is accelerated.

00:59:46.220 | And I'll explain why this makes sense in a moment,

00:59:50.620 | but just to be really clear,

00:59:52.660 | you can and one should use your powers of attention

00:59:57.660 | to direct your attention to particular aspects

00:59:59.540 | of a motor movement.

01:00:00.380 | Once you're familiar with the general theme of the movement,

01:00:03.440 | but what you pay attention to exactly is not important.

01:00:06.540 | What's important is that you pay attention

01:00:09.060 | to one specific thing.

01:00:11.020 | So what Claudia Lappe and colleagues showed

01:00:13.020 | was that if people are trying to learn a sequence of keys

01:00:17.060 | on the piano, there are multiple forms of feedback.

01:00:21.460 | There are error signals.

01:00:22.700 | If for instance, they hear a piece of music

01:00:25.340 | and then they're told to press the keys

01:00:26.580 | in a particular sequence and the noise that comes out,

01:00:30.940 | the sound that comes out of the piano

01:00:33.460 | does not sound like the song they just heard, right?

01:00:35.740 | So instead of, and here forgive me

01:00:37.780 | because I'm neither musical nor can I sing,

01:00:40.940 | but instead of they hear that and then instead

01:00:45.940 | when they play or for me, it would sound something like,

01:00:50.580 | it wouldn't sound right.

01:00:53.660 | Okay, it wouldn't sound right

01:00:54.720 | because I likely got the sequence wrong

01:00:56.640 | or I was pressing too hard on the keys

01:00:58.180 | or too lightly on the keys, et cetera.

01:01:00.600 | What they showed was if they just instruct people

01:01:06.620 | about the correct sequence to press on the keys,

01:01:10.020 | it actually doesn't matter what sound comes back

01:01:12.500 | provided it's the correct sound or it's the same sound.

01:01:17.500 | All right, so here's the experiment.

01:01:19.280 | They had people press on these keys

01:01:21.020 | and it was a typical piano

01:01:22.940 | and it generated the particular sequence of sounds

01:01:25.220 | that would be generated by pressing the keys on the piano.

01:01:28.660 | Or they modified the keyboard in this case or piano

01:01:33.060 | such that when people pressed on the keys,

01:01:35.820 | a random tone, different tones were played

01:01:38.880 | each time they pressed on the keys.

01:01:40.500 | So it sounded crazy, it sounded like noise,

01:01:43.020 | but the motor sequence was the same.

01:01:46.180 | Or they had a single tone

01:01:48.680 | that was played every time they pressed a key

01:01:52.360 | and the job or the task of the subject

01:01:54.380 | was just to press the keys in the proper sequence.

01:01:58.260 | So instead of, [vocalizing]

01:02:00.100 | it was just, [vocalizing]

01:02:03.400 | instead of, [vocalizing]

01:02:06.720 | it's even hard for me to say an even tone,

01:02:10.080 | but you get the idea.

01:02:10.980 | So a singular tone,

01:02:12.260 | just think a doorbell being rung

01:02:13.940 | with each press of the key would be really annoying, okay?

01:02:16.860 | But it turns out that the rate to motor learning

01:02:21.760 | was the same whether or not they were getting feedback

01:02:27.060 | that was accurate to the keys of the piano

01:02:29.260 | or whether or not it was a constant tone.

01:02:31.980 | Performance was terrible

01:02:33.820 | and the rates of learning were terrible

01:02:35.740 | if they were getting random tones back.

01:02:38.140 | So what this means is that learning to play the piano,

01:02:40.680 | at least at these early stages,

01:02:42.460 | is really just about generating the motor commands.

01:02:46.240 | It's not about paying attention to the sound

01:02:49.340 | that's coming out of the piano.

01:02:51.300 | And this makes sense because when we are beginners,

01:02:54.300 | we are trying to focus our attention

01:02:56.320 | on the things that we can control.

01:02:58.700 | And if you think about this, if you conceptualize this,

01:03:03.660 | pressing the keys on the piano and paying attention

01:03:06.420 | to the sounds that are coming out are two things.

01:03:08.920 | So what this means is that as you get deeper

01:03:12.220 | and deeper into a practice,

01:03:14.420 | focusing purely on the motor execution can be beneficial.

01:03:18.980 | Now, this is going to be harder to do

01:03:20.940 | with open loop type things where you're getting feedback.

01:03:24.740 | I guess a good example of open loop

01:03:26.320 | would be the attempt at a back flip, right?

01:03:28.220 | If you get it wrong, you will immediately know.

01:03:30.300 | If you get it right, you'll immediately know.

01:03:32.160 | Please don't go out and try and do a back flip

01:03:33.820 | on the solid ground or even on a trampoline

01:03:35.840 | if you don't know what you're doing

01:03:37.300 | because very likely you'll get it wrong

01:03:39.180 | and you'll get injured.

01:03:40.340 | But if it's something that is closed loop

01:03:44.160 | where you can repeat again and again and again and again,

01:03:46.920 | that is advantageous because you can perform

01:03:49.340 | many, many repetitions and you can start to focus

01:03:52.940 | or learn to focus your attention

01:03:54.460 | just on the pattern of movement.

01:03:57.040 | In other words, you can learn to play the piano

01:03:59.620 | just as fast or maybe even faster

01:04:02.440 | by just focusing on the sequence

01:04:04.300 | that you are moving your digits, your fingers,

01:04:06.320 | and not the feedback.

01:04:07.760 | Now, I'm sure there are music teachers out there

01:04:09.640 | and piano teachers that are screaming,

01:04:10.960 | "No, you're going to ruin the practice

01:04:13.120 | that all of us have embedded in our minds

01:04:15.800 | and in our students."

01:04:16.980 | And I agree, at some point,

01:04:20.000 | you need to start including feedback

01:04:22.360 | about whether or not things sound correct.

01:04:24.280 | But one of the beauties of skill learning

01:04:26.600 | is that you can choose to parameterize it,

01:04:29.040 | meaning you can choose to just focus on the motor sequence

01:04:31.900 | or just focus on the sounds that are coming back

01:04:34.260 | and then integrate those.

01:04:36.500 | And so we hear a lot about chunking,

01:04:38.800 | about breaking things down into their component parts.

01:04:41.460 | But one of the biggest challenges for skill learning

01:04:43.580 | is knowing where to place your attention.

01:04:45.760 | So to dial out again,

01:04:47.200 | we're building a protocol across this episode.

01:04:49.640 | Early sessions, maybe it's the first one,

01:04:51.700 | maybe it's the first 10, maybe it's the first 100.

01:04:54.520 | It depends on how many repetitions you're packing in.

01:04:57.220 | But during those initial sessions,

01:04:58.980 | the key is to make many errors,

01:05:00.640 | to let the reward process govern the plasticity,

01:05:04.480 | let the errors open the plasticity,

01:05:06.880 | and then after the learning sessions,

01:05:08.920 | to let the brain go idle,

01:05:10.940 | at least for a short period of time.

01:05:12.220 | And of course, to maximize sleep.

01:05:13.780 | As you start incorporating more sessions,

01:05:16.100 | you start to gain some skill level,

01:05:19.780 | learning to harness and focus your attention

01:05:22.020 | on particular features of the movement

01:05:25.340 | independent of the rewards and the feedback, right?

01:05:28.860 | So the reward is no longer in the tone

01:05:31.220 | coming from the piano,

01:05:32.420 | or whether or not you struck the target correctly,

01:05:34.340 | but simply the motor movement focusing your,

01:05:38.120 | for instance, in a dart throw on the action of your arm,

01:05:41.340 | that is embedding the plasticity

01:05:43.620 | in the motor pattern most deeply.

01:05:45.580 | That's what's been shown by the scientific literature.

01:05:48.020 | I'm sure there are coaches and teachers out there

01:05:49.940 | that will entirely disagree with me, and that's great.

01:05:52.820 | Please let me know what you prefer.

01:05:54.980 | Let me know where you think this is wrong.

01:05:57.700 | And it rarely happens,

01:05:59.180 | but let me know where you think this might be right as well.

01:06:01.820 | So we're breaking the learning process

01:06:03.360 | down into its component parts.

01:06:05.340 | As we get more and more skilled,

01:06:07.060 | meaning as we make fewer and fewer errors

01:06:09.540 | per a given session per unit time,

01:06:12.740 | that's when attention can start to migrate

01:06:16.340 | from one feature, such as the motor sequence,

01:06:19.620 | to another feature, which is perhaps one's stance,

01:06:24.100 | and another component of the sequence,

01:06:26.740 | which would be the result that's one getting

01:06:28.700 | on a trial to trial basis, right?

01:06:31.980 | So changing it up each time.

01:06:32.980 | So maybe I serve the tennis ball

01:06:35.220 | and I'm focusing on where the ball lands,

01:06:37.580 | and then I'm focusing on the speed,

01:06:39.120 | then I'm focusing on my grip,

01:06:40.200 | then I'm focusing on my stance from trial to trial.

01:06:43.880 | But until we've mastered the core motor movements,

01:06:47.100 | which is done session to session,

01:06:49.300 | that, at least according to the literature

01:06:51.260 | that I have access to here, seems to be suboptimal.

01:06:55.220 | So hopefully this is starting to make sense,

01:06:57.540 | which is that these connections

01:07:00.140 | between upper motor neurons, lower motor neurons,

01:07:02.300 | and central pattern generators,

01:07:04.200 | you can't attack them all at once.

01:07:06.040 | You can't try and change them all at once.

01:07:07.460 | And so what we're doing is we're breaking things down

01:07:09.180 | into their component parts.

01:07:11.280 | Some of you may be wondering about speed of movement.

01:07:14.480 | There are some data, meaning some decent papers out there,

01:07:19.580 | showing that ultra slow movements,

01:07:22.020 | performing a movement essentially in slow motion

01:07:26.020 | can be beneficial for enhancing the rate of skill learning.

01:07:31.020 | However, at least from my read of the literature,

01:07:34.980 | it appears that ultra slow movements should be performed

01:07:38.060 | after some degree of proficiency has already been gained

01:07:42.520 | in that particular movement.

01:07:44.260 | Now, that's not the way I would have thought about it.

01:07:46.060 | I would have thought, well,

01:07:47.100 | if you're learning how to do a proper kick

01:07:49.360 | or a punch in martial arts

01:07:50.700 | or something that ultra slow movements at first

01:07:53.140 | are going to be the way that one can best learn

01:07:57.840 | how to perform a movement,

01:07:58.980 | and then you just gradually increase the speed.

01:08:00.940 | And it turns out that's not the case.

01:08:03.480 | And I probably should have known that.

01:08:05.380 | And you should probably know that

01:08:07.580 | because it turns out that when you do ultra slow movements,

01:08:10.400 | two things aren't available to you.

01:08:12.380 | One is the proprioceptive feedback is not accurate

01:08:16.020 | because fast movements of limbs are very different

01:08:18.860 | than slow movements of limbs.

01:08:20.780 | So you don't get the opportunity

01:08:21.900 | to build in the proprioceptive feedback.

01:08:24.420 | But the other reason why it doesn't work

01:08:27.120 | is that it's too accurate.

01:08:29.340 | You don't generate errors.

01:08:31.420 | And so the data that I was able to find

01:08:34.100 | showed that very slow movements can be beneficial

01:08:37.940 | if one is already proficient in a practice,

01:08:40.780 | but very slow movements at the beginning

01:08:43.100 | don't allow you to learn more quickly

01:08:45.360 | because you never generate errors

01:08:47.020 | and therefore the brain doesn't, it's not open for change.

01:08:50.740 | The window for plasticity is never swung open, so to speak.

01:08:54.640 | So brings us back to this theme

01:08:56.940 | that errors allow for plasticity,

01:08:59.140 | correct performance of movements

01:09:00.780 | or semi-correct performance of movements

01:09:02.660 | cues the synapses in the brain areas

01:09:06.020 | and spinal circuits that need to change.

01:09:08.540 | And then those changes occur in the period

01:09:10.540 | immediately after skill learning and in sleep.

01:09:13.820 | So super slow movements can be beneficial

01:09:16.620 | once you already have some proficiency.

01:09:18.500 | So this might be standing in your living room

01:09:21.100 | and just in ultra slow motion performing your tennis serve,

01:09:24.600 | learning to or thinking about how you're adjusting your elbow

01:09:27.380 | and your arm and the trajectory,

01:09:28.680 | exactly how you were taught by your tennis coach,

01:09:31.280 | but trying to learn it that way from the outset

01:09:34.260 | does not appear to be the best way to learn a skill.

01:09:37.940 | When should you start to introduce slow learning?

01:09:40.220 | Well, obviously talk to your coaches about this,

01:09:42.640 | but if you're doing this recreationally

01:09:44.540 | or you don't have a coach,

01:09:45.460 | I realize many of you don't,

01:09:46.860 | I don't have a coach for anything that I do.

01:09:50.140 | I'm going to just navigating it

01:09:52.340 | by using the scientific literature.

01:09:54.620 | It appears that once you're hitting success rates

01:09:56.820 | of about 25 or 30%,

01:09:59.220 | that's where the super slow movements

01:10:00.800 | can start to be beneficial.

01:10:02.580 | But if you're still performing things

01:10:05.220 | at a rate of five or 10% correct and the rest are errors,

01:10:09.160 | then the super slow movements

01:10:10.400 | are probably not going to benefit you that much.

01:10:13.160 | Also super slow movements are not really applicable

01:10:16.240 | to a lot of things.

01:10:18.020 | For instance, you could imagine throwing a dart

01:10:21.120 | super slow motion,

01:10:22.300 | but if you actually try and throw an actual dart,

01:10:24.600 | the dart's just going to fall to the floor, obviously.

01:10:27.180 | So there are a number of things like baseball bat swing,

01:10:30.260 | which you can practice in super slow motion.

01:10:32.800 | But if you try and do that with an actual baseball

01:10:34.880 | or softball or something like that,

01:10:36.420 | that's not going to give you any kind of feedback

01:10:38.520 | about how effective it was.

01:10:39.940 | So super slow movements or a decelerated movement

01:10:44.360 | has its place,

01:10:46.620 | but once you're already performing things reasonably well,

01:10:50.180 | like maybe 25 to 30% success rate.

01:10:52.820 | You know, and I've tried this.

01:10:53.820 | I actually, I struggle with basketball for whatever reason,

01:10:57.460 | and my free throw is terrible.

01:10:59.140 | So I've practiced free throws in super slow motion

01:11:02.260 | and I nail them every time.

01:11:04.220 | The problem is there's no ball.

01:11:06.260 | Some of you already have a fair degree of proficiency

01:11:09.300 | of skill in a given practice or sport or instrument.

01:11:14.300 | And if you're in this sort of advanced intermediate

01:11:18.100 | or advanced levels of proficiency for something,

01:11:22.660 | there is a practice that you can find interesting data for

01:11:27.000 | in the literature, which involves metronoming.

01:11:30.660 | So this you'll realize relates to generating repetitions

01:11:35.660 | and it relates to the tone experiment

01:11:39.140 | where it doesn't really matter what your attention is queued

01:11:42.300 | to as long as you are performing many, many reps

01:11:44.820 | of the motor sequence.

01:11:46.820 | You can use a metronome and obviously musicians do this,

01:11:49.920 | but athletes can do this too.

01:11:52.300 | You can use a metronome to set the cadence

01:11:54.820 | of your repetitions.

01:11:56.760 | Now for swimmers, there's actually a device

01:12:00.180 | I was able to find online.

01:12:01.400 | I forget what the brand name was

01:12:02.700 | and that's not what this is about,

01:12:04.260 | but that actually goes in the swim cap

01:12:06.820 | that can cue you to when you need to perform another stroke.

01:12:10.140 | And for runners, there are other metronome type devices

01:12:14.140 | that through headphones or through a tone in the room

01:12:16.900 | if you're running indoors or on a treadmill

01:12:18.960 | will cue you to when you basically

01:12:20.620 | you need to lift your heels.

01:12:21.820 | And if you do that, what athletes find

01:12:24.100 | is they can perform more repetitions,

01:12:26.300 | they can generate more output, you can increase speed.

01:12:29.580 | A number of really interesting things are being done

01:12:31.220 | with auditory metronoming and then I'm involved

01:12:33.660 | in a little bit of work now that hopefully I'll be able

01:12:35.940 | to report back to you about using stroboscopic metronoming.

01:12:39.180 | So actually changing the speed of the visual environment.

01:12:42.020 | These are fun experiments,

01:12:43.700 | basically changing one's perception

01:12:45.380 | of how fast they're moving through space

01:12:47.100 | by playing with a visual system,

01:12:48.980 | something for a future discussion.

01:12:50.700 | But you can start to use auditory metronoming

01:12:53.620 | for generating more movements per unit time

01:12:57.540 | and generating more errors and therefore more successes

01:13:00.780 | and more neuroplasticity.

01:13:02.620 | There are a number of different apps out there.

01:13:04.840 | I found several free apps

01:13:06.360 | where you can set in a metronome pace.

01:13:07.880 | So it might be tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

01:13:10.280 | That's a little fast for most things,

01:13:11.760 | but you can imagine if this were darts

01:13:14.280 | or this were golf swings that it might be tick, tick,

01:13:17.740 | tick, tick, or something more like tick, tick.

01:13:20.940 | And every time the metronome goes, you swing.

01:13:23.300 | Every time the metronome goes, you throw a dart.

01:13:25.500 | There are actually some wild experiments out there.

01:13:27.180 | You know, there's a world championship of cup stacking.

01:13:29.860 | There's a young lady who I saw could take all these cups

01:13:33.100 | spread out on a table and basically just stack them

01:13:35.280 | into the perfect pyramid and the least amount of times

01:13:37.120 | all the kids go wild.

01:13:38.520 | This is something I'd never thought to pursue

01:13:40.660 | and frankly never will pursue

01:13:42.840 | unless my life depends on it for some reason,

01:13:44.940 | but it's really impressive.

01:13:46.260 | And if you look at the sequence,

01:13:48.080 | 'cause these have been recorded,

01:13:49.260 | you can look this up on YouTube.

01:13:51.580 | What you'll find is that these expert cup stackers,

01:13:54.600 | it's just all about error elimination,

01:13:56.860 | but there too metronoming and auditory cues

01:14:00.020 | can actually cue them to pick up the cups faster

01:14:02.640 | than they would ordinarily and to learn to do that.

01:14:05.440 | You can do this for anything.

01:14:06.500 | I think cup stacking is probably not a skill

01:14:08.920 | most of you are interested in doing,

01:14:10.060 | but for any skill, if you figure out at what rate

01:14:15.060 | you are performing repetitions per unit time

01:14:17.560 | and you want to increase that slightly,

01:14:19.260 | you set a metronome which is slightly faster

01:14:22.400 | than your current rate

01:14:23.380 | and you just start generating more repetitions.

01:14:25.340 | Now what's interesting about this and is cool

01:14:27.920 | is it relates back to the experiment from Lapé and colleagues

01:14:32.920 | which is your attention is now harnessed to the tone,

01:14:37.940 | to the metronome, not necessarily to what you're doing

01:14:40.960 | in terms of the motor movement.

01:14:42.420 | And so really you need a bit of proficiency.

01:14:44.920 | Again, this is for people who are intermediate

01:14:47.120 | or advanced, intermediate or advanced,

01:14:49.080 | but what you're essentially doing is

01:14:50.660 | you're creating an outside pressure, a contingency

01:14:54.140 | so that you generate again, more errors.

01:14:56.700 | So it's all about the errors that you get.

01:14:58.680 | And now these aren't errors where all the cups tumble

01:15:00.640 | or you have to stop or you can't keep up.

01:15:02.660 | You have to set the pace just a little bit

01:15:04.440 | beyond what you currently can do.

01:15:06.440 | And when you do that,

01:15:08.020 | you're essentially forcing the nervous system

01:15:09.640 | to make errors and correct the errors inside of the session.

01:15:12.720 | I find this really interesting

01:15:14.040 | because what it means is again,

01:15:15.760 | you've got sensory perception,

01:15:17.120 | what you're paying attention to,

01:15:18.040 | proprioception, where your limbs are

01:15:19.660 | and the motor neurons in your upper, lower motor neurons

01:15:22.880 | and central pattern generators.

01:15:24.840 | And you can't pay attention to it.

01:15:26.320 | Well, they're my upper motor neurons,

01:15:27.820 | they're my lower motor neurons.

01:15:28.760 | Forget that, you're not going to do that.

01:15:30.520 | You can't pay attention to your proprioception too much.

01:15:33.840 | That would be the super slow motion

01:15:35.520 | would be the proprioception,

01:15:37.480 | but you have to harness your attention to something.

01:15:41.200 | And if you harness your attention

01:15:42.480 | to this outside contingency,

01:15:43.900 | this metronome that's firing off and saying,

01:15:45.760 | now, go, now, go, now, go.

01:15:48.560 | Not only can you increase the number of repetitions,

01:15:51.020 | errors and successes, but for some reason,

01:15:54.600 | and we don't know why, the regular cadence of the tone

01:15:58.360 | of the metronome and the fact that you are anchoring

01:16:02.000 | your movements to some external force,

01:16:04.540 | to some external pressure or cue,

01:16:07.560 | seems to accelerate the plasticity and the changes

01:16:11.240 | and the acquisition of skills beyond what it would be

01:16:13.800 | if you just did the same number of repetitions

01:16:15.860 | without that outside pressure.

01:16:17.700 | We don't know exactly what the mechanism is.

01:16:19.400 | Presumably it's neurochemical.

01:16:21.540 | Like there's something about keeping up with a timer

01:16:24.160 | or with a pace that presumably, and I'm speculating here,

01:16:28.120 | causes the release of particular chemicals.

01:16:30.420 | But I think it's really cool.

01:16:31.880 | Metronomes, they're totally inexpensive.

01:16:34.180 | At least the ones that you use outside of water

01:16:36.420 | are very inexpensive.

01:16:37.440 | You can find these free apps.

01:16:39.180 | You can use a musical metronome.

01:16:40.800 | So metronomes are a powerful tool as well.

01:16:43.880 | In particular for speed work.

01:16:45.600 | So for sprinting or swimming or running

01:16:47.960 | where the goal is to generate more strokes

01:16:52.040 | or more efficient strokes or more steps, et cetera,

01:16:55.800 | the rate of the metronome obviously

01:16:57.400 | is going to be very important.

01:16:59.280 | Sometimes you're trying to lengthen your stride.

01:17:00.900 | Sometimes you're trying to take fewer strokes

01:17:02.880 | but glide further in the pool, for instance.

01:17:05.440 | But the value of occasionally

01:17:08.680 | just increasing the number of repetitions,

01:17:10.880 | the number of strokes or steps, et cetera, per unit time

01:17:13.800 | is also that you're training the central pattern generators

01:17:16.220 | to operate at that higher speed.

01:17:18.560 | One of the sports that's kind of interesting to me

01:17:21.240 | is speed walking.

01:17:22.360 | It's not one I engage in or ever plan to engage in.

01:17:25.560 | But if you've ever tried to really speed walk,

01:17:27.660 | it's actually difficult to walk very, very fast

01:17:30.120 | without breaking into a run.

01:17:31.720 | All animals have these kind of crossover points

01:17:34.160 | where you go, you know, I think with horses,

01:17:38.040 | it's like, what is it, they trot, then they gallop.

01:17:40.680 | I don't know, what's the next thing?

01:17:41.520 | I don't know, clearly.

01:17:42.480 | I don't know anything about horses

01:17:45.200 | except that they're beautiful and I like them very much.

01:17:47.720 | But they break into a different kind of stride.

01:17:50.960 | And that's because you shift over

01:17:52.240 | to different central pattern generators.

01:17:55.040 | So when you're walking or a horse is moving very slowly

01:17:57.920 | and then it breaks into a jog and then into a full sprint

01:18:01.200 | or I got to get a gallop for the horse,

01:18:03.760 | you're actually engaging

01:18:04.600 | different central pattern generators.

01:18:06.320 | And those central pattern generators

01:18:08.080 | always have a range of speeds

01:18:09.820 | that they're happiest to function at.

01:18:12.020 | So with the metronoming for speed purposes,

01:18:15.500 | what you do is you can basically bring the activity

01:18:19.000 | of those central pattern generators into their upper range

01:18:21.860 | and maybe even extend their range.

01:18:23.980 | And there's a fascinating biology

01:18:25.680 | of how central pattern generators work together.

01:18:28.120 | There's coupling of central pattern generators, et cetera,

01:18:30.840 | in order to achieve maximal speeds and et cetera.

01:18:33.620 | It's a topic for kind of an advanced session.

01:18:35.720 | Costello loves this topic.

01:18:37.160 | He just barked and he loves it so much he barked again.

01:18:40.520 | In any event, the metronome is a powerful tool,

01:18:43.020 | again, for more advanced practitioners

01:18:45.160 | or for advanced intermediate practitioners.

01:18:47.320 | But it's interesting because it brings back the point

01:18:52.320 | that what we put our attention to

01:18:54.240 | while we're skill learning is important

01:18:57.120 | to the extent that it's on one thing,

01:18:59.420 | at least for the moment or trial to trial,

01:19:02.060 | but that what we focus our attention on can be external,

01:19:07.060 | it can be internal, and ultimately the skill learning

01:19:10.380 | is where all that is brought together.

01:19:12.600 | So let's talk about where skill learning occurs

01:19:15.080 | in the nervous system.

01:19:16.080 | And then I'm going to give you a really,

01:19:19.260 | what I think is a really cool tool

01:19:22.480 | that can increase flexibility and range of motion

01:19:26.120 | based on this particular brain area.

01:19:27.840 | It's a tool that I used and when I first heard about,

01:19:30.080 | I did not believe would work.

01:19:32.080 | This is not a hack.

01:19:32.960 | This is actually anchored deeply in the biology

01:19:35.400 | of a particular brain region that we all have

01:19:37.640 | whose meaning is mini brain.

01:19:40.860 | And that mini brain that we all have

01:19:43.400 | is called your cerebellum.

01:19:45.280 | The cerebellum is called the mini brain

01:19:47.040 | because it's in the back of your brain.

01:19:48.360 | It looks like a little mini version

01:19:49.520 | of the rest of your brain.

01:19:50.920 | It's an absolutely incredible structure

01:19:53.480 | that's involved in movement.

01:19:54.920 | It also has a lot of non-movement associated functions.

01:19:58.300 | In brief, the cerebellum gets input from your senses,

01:20:04.880 | particularly your eyes and pays attention

01:20:09.560 | to where your eyes are in space, what you're looking at.

01:20:12.400 | It basically takes information about three aspects

01:20:16.240 | of your eyes and eye movements,

01:20:18.760 | which are occurring when your head goes like this,

01:20:23.280 | which is called pitch, okay?

01:20:24.880 | So this is pitch.

01:20:26.400 | For those of you listening, I'm just nodding up and down.

01:20:30.380 | Then there's yaw, which is like shaking your head no

01:20:33.100 | from side to side.

01:20:34.040 | And then there's roll, which is like sometimes

01:20:37.520 | if you see a primate, like a marmoset or something,

01:20:40.620 | they will roll their head when they look at you.

01:20:42.680 | Actually, the reason they do that

01:20:44.080 | is it helps generate depth perception.

01:20:45.940 | It's a kind of form of motion parallax

01:20:47.740 | if you're curious why they do that.

01:20:49.080 | It's not to look cute.

01:20:50.560 | They do it because when they do that,

01:20:52.440 | even if you're stationary and they're stationary,

01:20:54.500 | they get better depth perception

01:20:56.220 | as to how far away from them you are.

01:20:59.860 | So you've got pitch, yaw, and roll.

01:21:03.120 | And as you move your head and as you move your body

01:21:06.520 | and you move through space,

01:21:08.080 | the image on your retina moves, pitch, yaw, and roll

01:21:11.220 | in some combination.

01:21:12.160 | That information is relayed to your cerebellum.

01:21:15.460 | So it's rich with visual information.

01:21:17.780 | There's also a map of your body surface

01:21:19.780 | and your movements and timing in the cerebellum.

01:21:22.660 | So it's an incredible structure

01:21:23.820 | that brings together timing of movements,

01:21:26.000 | which limbs are moving, and has proprioceptive information.

01:21:30.660 | It really is a mini brain.

01:21:32.000 | It's just the coolest little structure back there.

01:21:34.780 | And in humans, actually not that little.

01:21:36.400 | It's just an incredible structure.

01:21:38.740 | Now, all this information is integrated there,

01:21:41.840 | but what most people don't tell us

01:21:44.740 | is that a lot of learning of motor sequences,

01:21:47.920 | of skill learning that involve timing

01:21:49.660 | occurs in the cerebellum.

01:21:51.220 | Now, you can't really use that information

01:21:55.100 | except to know that after you learn something pretty well,

01:21:57.600 | it's handed off or kind of handled by your cerebellum.

01:22:00.780 | But there is something that you can do with your cerebellum

01:22:02.660 | to increase range of motion and flexibility.

01:22:05.700 | Much of our flexibility, believe it or not,

01:22:08.800 | is not because our tendons are a particular length

01:22:12.440 | or elasticity, although that plays some role.

01:22:16.500 | It's not because our muscles are short.

01:22:18.560 | I don't know what that would even mean.

01:22:19.980 | Some people have longer muscle bellies

01:22:22.120 | or shorter muscle bellies,

01:22:23.180 | but your muscles always essentially span

01:22:26.780 | the entire length of the bone or limb or close to it

01:22:30.620 | along with your tendons.

01:22:32.480 | But it has to do with the neural innervation of muscle

01:22:36.880 | and the fact that when muscles are elongated,

01:22:39.200 | there's a point at which they won't stretch out any longer

01:22:43.080 | and the nerves fire and they shut down.

01:22:45.860 | You actually have inhibitory pathways

01:22:48.660 | that prevent you from contracting the muscles

01:22:50.480 | or from extending them, from stretching them out anymore.

01:22:54.960 | So you can do this right now.

01:22:57.500 | If you're driving, don't do it

01:22:58.980 | because unless you have a self-driving car,

01:23:00.540 | you'll need to take your hands off the steering wheel.

01:23:02.160 | But because of the way that vision

01:23:06.580 | and your muscles are represented in your cerebellum,

01:23:11.580 | it turns out that your range of visual motion

01:23:17.380 | and your range of vision,

01:23:19.180 | literally how wide a field of view you take

01:23:23.760 | impacts how far you can extend your limbs.

01:23:27.460 | So we'll talk about this in a second

01:23:30.820 | about exactly how to do this and explore this.

01:23:33.580 | But as you move through space,

01:23:36.780 | as you walk forward or you walk backward

01:23:38.860 | or you tilt your head or you learn a skill

01:23:40.680 | or you just operate in the normal ways throughout your day,

01:23:43.320 | driving, biking, et cetera,

01:23:45.240 | your eyes are generating spontaneous movements

01:23:47.320 | to offset visual slip.

01:23:49.520 | In other words, you don't see the world as blurry

01:23:51.700 | even though you're moving

01:23:53.020 | because your eyes are generating

01:23:54.300 | little compensatory eye movements to offset your motion.

01:23:57.100 | So if I spin, we could do this experiment.

01:23:59.380 | There's a fun experiment we do with medical students

01:24:02.220 | where you spin them around in a chair

01:24:04.540 | with their eyes closed,

01:24:05.620 | and then you stop and you have them open their eyes

01:24:08.400 | and their eyes are going like this,

01:24:09.500 | doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, nice stagmas.

01:24:11.380 | I don't suggest you do this experiment.

01:24:13.740 | When we were kids, we did a different experiment

01:24:16.060 | which was to take a stick

01:24:17.800 | and to look at the top of the stick

01:24:19.260 | and to spin around on the lawn,

01:24:21.360 | looking at the top of the stick,

01:24:22.420 | then put it down on the ground and try and jump over it.

01:24:24.340 | And you end up like jumping to the side,

01:24:25.700 | you miss the thing entirely.

01:24:27.420 | The reason those two quote unquote experiments,

01:24:30.960 | which I hope you don't do or for somebody else to do,

01:24:34.660 | the reason they work is because normally your eye movements

01:24:38.400 | and your balance and your limb movements are coordinated.

01:24:41.000 | But when you spin around looking up at the stick,

01:24:43.600 | what you're doing is you're fixating your eyes

01:24:45.300 | on one location while you're moving.

01:24:47.460 | And then when you stop,

01:24:48.980 | those two mechanisms are completely uncoupled

01:24:50.900 | and it's like being thrown into outer space.

01:24:55.020 | Never been to outer space, but probably something like that,

01:24:57.760 | low gravity, zero gravity.

01:24:59.060 | If you spin around in your chair with your eyes closed,

01:25:02.820 | you're not giving the visual input that you're spinning

01:25:05.040 | and then you open the eyes

01:25:06.660 | and then the eyes only have the,

01:25:09.180 | what we call the vestibular signal,

01:25:10.340 | our eyes jolting back and forth, back and forth.

01:25:12.020 | Again, these aren't experiments you need to do

01:25:13.940 | 'cause I just told you the result.

01:25:16.020 | However, if you want to extend your range of motion,

01:25:19.940 | you can do that by, these things always look goofy,

01:25:23.620 | but at this point I'm just kind of used

01:25:25.660 | to doing these things.

01:25:26.600 | If I want to extend my range of movement,

01:25:28.420 | first I want to measure my range of motion.

01:25:31.000 | So I'm trying to, if you're listening,

01:25:32.620 | what I'm doing is I'm stretching out my arms

01:25:34.500 | from like a T from on either side,

01:25:37.520 | and I'm trying to push them as far back as I can,

01:25:40.300 | which for me is, feels like it's in line with my shoulders

01:25:43.040 | and I can't get much further.

01:25:44.000 | I'm not really super flexible,

01:25:45.780 | nor am I particularly inflexible, at least physically.

01:25:51.740 | So what I would then do is stop,

01:25:54.360 | I would move my eyes to the far periphery, right?

01:25:57.420 | So I'm moving my eyes all the way to the left

01:25:59.500 | while keeping my head and body stationary.

01:26:02.080 | I'm trying to look over my left shoulder as far as I can,

01:26:05.760 | then off to the right.

01:26:07.900 | It's a little awkward to do this, then up, then down,

01:26:11.420 | but I'm mostly going to just focus on left and then right.

01:26:16.420 | Now, what that's doing is it's sending a signal

01:26:19.500 | to my cerebellum that my field of view is way over to there

01:26:22.920 | and way over to there.

01:26:24.260 | Remember, your visual attention has an aperture.

01:26:26.740 | It can be narrow or it can be broad.

01:26:28.780 | And I've talked about some of the benefits

01:26:30.060 | of taking a broad visual aperture

01:26:31.640 | in order to relax the nervous system.

01:26:33.400 | This is just moving my eyes, not my head,

01:26:35.660 | like I just did for a second, from side to side.

01:26:37.840 | Now I can retest, and actually,

01:26:40.140 | you get about a five to 15 degree increase

01:26:43.180 | in your range of motion.

01:26:44.620 | Now I'm doing this for you.

01:26:45.460 | You can say, well, you know, he gamed it

01:26:47.260 | 'cause he knew the result that he was hoping for,

01:26:49.540 | but you can try this, okay?

01:26:51.100 | And you can do this for legs too, right?

01:26:53.660 | You can do this for any limb, essentially,

01:26:55.420 | and it's purely cerebellar.

01:26:57.380 | And it's because the proprioceptive visual

01:27:01.260 | and limb movement feedback converge

01:27:04.740 | in the ways that we control our muscle spindles

01:27:08.340 | and the way we control the muscle fibers and the tendons,

01:27:10.700 | and essentially, you can get bigger range of motion.

01:27:12.760 | So I actually will warm up before exercise

01:27:15.140 | or before skill learning by both doing movements for my body,

01:27:18.220 | but also moving my eyes from side to side

01:27:20.260 | in order to generate larger range of motion,

01:27:22.420 | if range of motion is something that I'm interested in.

01:27:24.820 | So that's a fun one that you can play with a little bit,

01:27:28.220 | and it's purely cerebellar.

01:27:29.780 | Some other time, we'll get back into cerebellar function.

01:27:33.060 | There's all sorts of just incredible stuff

01:27:35.480 | that you can do with cerebellum.

01:27:36.940 | I talked in an earlier episode on neuroplasticity

01:27:39.900 | about how you can disrupt your vestibular world,

01:27:44.140 | in other words, by getting into modes of acceleration,

01:27:49.140 | moving through space where you're tilted in certain ways,

01:27:52.460 | it can open up the windows for plasticity

01:27:54.940 | in yet other ways.

01:27:56.280 | So you can check that out.

01:27:57.980 | It's one of the earlier episodes on neuroplasticity.

01:28:00.220 | Everything's timestamped.

01:28:01.540 | But meanwhile, if you want to expand your range of motion

01:28:04.340 | before doing skill learning or afterward,

01:28:06.660 | this is a fun one.

01:28:07.500 | It's also kind of neat

01:28:08.880 | because I have this kind of aversion to stretching work.

01:28:12.220 | It never seems like something I want to do,

01:28:14.140 | and so I always put it off.

01:28:15.700 | So if I start with the visual practice

01:28:18.920 | of expanding my field of view off to one side

01:28:21.500 | or the other side or up or down,

01:28:23.120 | then what I find is I'm naturally more flexible.

01:28:25.380 | I'm not naturally more flexible.

01:28:26.720 | What's happened is I've expanded my range of motion.

01:28:29.540 | Let's talk about visualization and mental rehearsal.

01:28:33.220 | I've been asked about this a lot,

01:28:35.640 | and I think it relates back to that kind of matrix

01:28:39.140 | Hollywood idea that we can just be embedded with a skill.

01:28:43.100 | Although in this case, in fairness,

01:28:45.260 | visualization involves some work.

01:28:47.660 | And I've talked about this on an earlier episode

01:28:50.260 | that some people find it very hard

01:28:52.980 | to mentally visualize things.

01:28:56.100 | And some people find it very easy.

01:28:57.740 | There was great work that was done in the 1960s

01:29:00.620 | by Roger Shepard at Stanford and by others,

01:29:04.920 | looking at people's ability

01:29:06.660 | to rotate three-dimensional objects in their mind.

01:29:10.280 | And some people are really good at this,

01:29:11.580 | and some people are less good at this,

01:29:12.960 | and one can get better at it by repeating it.

01:29:16.300 | But the question we're going to deal with today is,

01:29:18.940 | does it help?

01:29:19.940 | Does it let you learn things faster?

01:29:22.500 | And indeed the answer appears to be yes, it can.

01:29:26.740 | However, despite what you've heard, it is not as good.

01:29:31.400 | It is not a total replacement

01:29:33.780 | for physical performance itself.

01:29:36.540 | Okay, so I'm going to be really concrete about this.

01:29:39.860 | I hear all the time that just imagining contracting a muscle

01:29:44.860 | can lead to the same gains

01:29:46.440 | as actually contracting that muscle.

01:29:48.460 | Just imagining a skill can lead to the same increases

01:29:51.860 | in performance as actually executing that skill.

01:29:55.340 | And that's simply not the case.

01:29:57.740 | However, it can supplement or support physical training

01:30:02.320 | and skill learning in ways that are quite powerful.

01:30:05.340 | One of the more interesting studies on this

01:30:07.400 | was from Ranganathan et al.

01:30:10.940 | Forgive me for the pronunciation.

01:30:12.840 | This was a slightly older paper, 2004,

01:30:17.140 | but nonetheless was one that I thought

01:30:19.260 | had particularly impressive results

01:30:21.220 | and included all the appropriate controls, et cetera.

01:30:25.420 | And what they did is they looked at 30 subjects

01:30:27.980 | and they divided them into different groups.

01:30:30.420 | They had one group perform essentially finger flexion.

01:30:34.440 | So it was actually just sort of the imagine

01:30:36.100 | if you're just listening to this,

01:30:37.080 | the come here finger movement.

01:30:39.260 | They also had elbow flexion.

01:30:42.840 | So it was our bicep curl type movement.

01:30:44.980 | And they either had subjects do

01:30:48.140 | a actual physical movement against resistance

01:30:51.180 | or to imagine moving their finger

01:30:53.660 | or their wrist towards the shoulder,

01:30:55.980 | meaning at the bending at the elbow,

01:30:57.960 | towards actual resistance.

01:30:59.760 | Just to make a long story short,

01:31:02.280 | what they found was that there were increases

01:31:06.940 | in this finger adduction strength,

01:31:09.240 | abduction, excuse me, strength of about 35%

01:31:12.880 | and the elbow flexion strength by about 13.5%,

01:31:17.880 | which are pretty impressive

01:31:20.580 | considering that it was just done mentally.

01:31:22.300 | So they had people imagine moving against a weight,

01:31:25.660 | a very heavy weight,

01:31:26.600 | or had imagined people moving their wrist

01:31:30.460 | towards their shoulder against a very heavy weight.

01:31:33.480 | But again, they weren't doing it.

01:31:34.740 | They were just imagining it.

01:31:36.540 | Other experiments looked at the brain

01:31:39.460 | and what was happening in the brain during this time.

01:31:41.980 | So we'll talk about that in a moment.

01:31:44.060 | But essentially what they found were improvements

01:31:47.840 | in strength of anywhere from 13.5 to 35%.

01:31:52.840 | However, the actual physical training group,

01:31:56.500 | the groups that actually moved their wrist

01:31:59.040 | or moved their finger against an actual physical weight

01:32:02.540 | had improvements of about 53%.

01:32:05.280 | So this repeats over and over throughout the literature.

01:32:08.980 | Mental rehearsal can cause increases in strength.

01:32:13.120 | It can create increases in skill acquisition and learning,

01:32:18.120 | but they are never as great if done alone

01:32:22.380 | as compared to the actual physical execution

01:32:26.900 | of those movements or the physical movement of those weights,

01:32:29.260 | which shouldn't come as so surprising.

01:32:32.120 | However, if we step back and we say,

01:32:34.180 | well, what is the source of this improvement?

01:32:37.640 | You might not care what the source is

01:32:39.280 | because I could tell you it's one brain area

01:32:40.740 | or another brain area, what difference would it make?

01:32:42.640 | But again, if you can understand mechanism a little bit,

01:32:45.420 | you're in a position to create newer

01:32:47.920 | and even better protocols.

01:32:49.920 | What mental rehearsal appears to do

01:32:52.820 | is engage the activity of those upper motor neurons

01:32:55.760 | that we talked about way back

01:32:56.860 | at the beginning of the episode.

01:32:58.760 | Remember, you have upper motor neurons

01:33:00.220 | that control deliberate action.

01:33:01.860 | You've got lower motor neurons

01:33:03.180 | that actually connect to the muscles and move those muscles,

01:33:05.420 | and you have central pattern generators.

01:33:07.300 | Mental rehearsal, closing one's eyes typically,

01:33:10.140 | and thinking about a particular sequence of movement

01:33:13.220 | and visualizing it in one's quote unquote mind's eye

01:33:18.220 | creates activation of the upper motor neurons

01:33:21.340 | that's very similar if not the same as the actual movement.

01:33:25.740 | And that makes sense because the upper motor neurons

01:33:28.000 | are all about the command for movement.

01:33:30.280 | They are not the ones that actually execute the movement.

01:33:33.200 | Okay?

01:33:34.120 | Remember, upper motor neurons

01:33:35.540 | are the ones that generate the command for movement,

01:33:37.580 | not the actual movement.

01:33:38.960 | The ones that generate the actual movement

01:33:40.560 | are the lower motor neurons

01:33:41.800 | and the central pattern generators.

01:33:43.920 | So visualization is a powerful tool.

01:33:46.520 | How can you use visualization?

01:33:48.640 | Well, in this study,

01:33:50.700 | they had people perform this five days a week.

01:33:54.700 | I believe that it was 15.

01:33:57.460 | Yes, it was 15 minutes per day,

01:33:59.580 | five days a week for 12 weeks.

01:34:01.660 | So that's a lot of mental rehearsal.

01:34:04.180 | It's not a ton of time each day, 15 minutes per day,

01:34:06.540 | but sitting down, closing your eyes,

01:34:08.260 | and imagining going through a particular skill practice

01:34:13.100 | or moving a weight.

01:34:14.760 | Maybe it's playing keys on a piano,

01:34:18.220 | if that's your thing, or strings on a guitar.

01:34:21.500 | For 15 minutes a day, five days per week for 12 weeks

01:34:24.700 | is considerable.

01:34:25.580 | I think most people,

01:34:27.300 | given the fact that the actual practice,

01:34:29.700 | the physical practice is going to lead

01:34:31.420 | to larger improvements, greater improvements

01:34:35.380 | than would the mental training,

01:34:37.300 | would opt for the actual physical training.

01:34:40.000 | But of course, if you're on a plane

01:34:41.800 | and you don't have access to your guitar

01:34:43.460 | and you're certainly not going to be sprinting

01:34:44.700 | up and down the aisle,

01:34:45.980 | or you are very serious about your craft

01:34:48.980 | and you want to accelerate performance of your craft

01:34:52.300 | or strength increases or something of that sort,

01:34:54.720 | then augmenting or adding in the visualization training

01:34:58.660 | very likely will compound the effects

01:35:01.460 | of the actual physical training.

01:35:03.320 | There are not a lot of studies looking at how visualization

01:35:06.460 | on top of pure physical training

01:35:10.300 | can increase the rates of learning

01:35:13.540 | and consolidation of learning, et cetera.

01:35:16.180 | It's actually a hard study to do

01:35:17.620 | because it's hard to control for

01:35:18.860 | because what would you do in its place?

01:35:20.780 | You would probably add actual physical training

01:35:23.480 | and then that's always going to lead to greater effects.

01:35:26.500 | So the point is,

01:35:27.820 | if you want to use visualization training, great,

01:35:31.080 | but forget the idea that visualization training

01:35:34.540 | is as good as the actual behavior.

01:35:37.740 | You hear this all the time.

01:35:38.700 | People say, do you know that if you imagine an experience

01:35:41.260 | to your brain and to your body,

01:35:42.720 | it's exactly the same as the actual experience?

01:35:45.060 | Absolutely not.

01:35:46.080 | This is not the way the nervous system works.

01:35:47.660 | I'm sorry, I don't mean to burst anybody's bubble,

01:35:49.720 | but your bubble is made of myths.

01:35:52.420 | And the fact of the matter is that the brain,

01:35:56.380 | when it executes movement,

01:35:58.540 | is generating proprioceptive feedback

01:36:01.100 | and that proprioceptive feedback is critically involved

01:36:04.420 | in generating our sense of the experience

01:36:06.740 | and in things like learning.

01:36:08.620 | So I don't say this because I don't like the idea

01:36:12.780 | that visualization couldn't work.

01:36:14.220 | In fact, visualization does work,

01:36:16.100 | but it doesn't work as well.

01:36:17.980 | It doesn't create the same milieu,

01:36:20.580 | the same chemical milieu, the same environment

01:36:23.320 | as actual physically engaging in the behavior,

01:36:27.300 | the skill, the resistance training, et cetera.

01:36:29.740 | And I'd be willing to wager that the same is true

01:36:32.480 | for experiences of all kinds.

01:36:35.820 | PTSD is this incredibly unfortunate circumstance

01:36:40.020 | in which there's a replay often of the traumatic event

01:36:43.620 | that feels very real,

01:36:45.480 | but that's not to say that the replay itself

01:36:47.620 | is the same as the actual event.

01:36:49.980 | And of course, PTSD needs to be dealt with

01:36:52.040 | with the utmost level of seriousness.

01:36:55.420 | It should be treated.

01:36:57.000 | In fact, my lab works on these sorts of things,

01:36:59.160 | but my point about visualization and imagining something

01:37:03.560 | not being the same as the actual experience

01:37:06.340 | is grounded in this idea of proprioception

01:37:08.940 | and the fact that feedback to the cerebellum,

01:37:11.040 | the cerebellum talking to other areas of the brain

01:37:12.780 | are critically involved in communicating

01:37:14.940 | to the rest of our nervous system,

01:37:16.380 | that not just that we believe something is happening,

01:37:18.840 | but something is actually happening.

01:37:20.500 | And in the case of muscle loads,

01:37:22.280 | muscles actually feeling tension,

01:37:24.980 | the actual feeling of tension in the muscle,

01:37:28.460 | the contracting of the muscle under that tension

01:37:30.900 | is part of the important adaptation process.

01:37:34.380 | In a future episode, we'll talk about hypertrophy

01:37:36.460 | and how that works at the level of upper motor neurons,

01:37:38.600 | lower motor neurons, and muscle itself.

01:37:40.980 | But for now, just know that visualization can work.

01:37:44.060 | It doesn't work as well as real physical training

01:37:46.060 | in practice, but these effects of 35% or 13.5% increases

01:37:51.060 | are pretty considerable.

01:37:53.980 | They're just not as great as the 53% increases

01:37:56.940 | that come from actual physical training.

01:37:58.900 | For those of you that are interested

01:38:00.460 | in some of the skill learning

01:38:02.380 | that more relates to musical training,

01:38:04.420 | but also how cadence and metronoming and tones, et cetera,

01:38:08.780 | can support physical learning.

01:38:11.560 | If you're interested in that, you aficionados,

01:38:14.680 | there is a wonderful review

01:38:16.660 | also published in the journal Neuron,

01:38:19.160 | again, excellent journal, by Herholz and Zatorre.

01:38:22.480 | That's H-E-R-H-O-L-Z and Zatorre, Z-A-T-O-R-R-E,

01:38:27.480 | that really describes in detail how musical training

01:38:34.880 | can impact all sorts of different things

01:38:37.600 | and how cadence training, whether or not with tones

01:38:41.580 | or auditory feedback and things of that sort,

01:38:44.480 | carries over to not just instrumental music training,

01:38:48.700 | but also physical skill learning of various kinds.

01:38:51.420 | So if you wanted to do the deep dive,

01:38:52.780 | that would be the place.

01:38:53.740 | You can find it easily online.

01:38:55.020 | It's available as a complete article free of charge,

01:38:57.620 | et cetera.

01:38:58.740 | Many of you are probably asking,

01:39:00.620 | what can I take in order to accelerate skill learning?

01:39:03.860 | Well, the conditions are going to vary,

01:39:06.180 | but motivation is key.

01:39:07.760 | You have to show up to the training session

01:39:09.480 | motivated enough to focus your attention

01:39:13.380 | and to perform a lot of repetitions in the training sequence.

01:39:17.180 | That's just a prerequisite, all right?

01:39:19.220 | There's no pill that's going to allow you

01:39:20.460 | to do fewer repetitions and extract more learning

01:39:23.280 | out of fewer repetitions.

01:39:24.440 | It's actually more a question of what are the conditions

01:39:27.340 | that you can create for yourself

01:39:28.880 | such that you can generate more repetitions per unit time?

01:39:32.580 | I think that's the right way to think about it.

01:39:34.200 | What are the conditions that you can create for yourself

01:39:36.980 | in your mind and in your body

01:39:38.140 | that are going to allow you to focus?

01:39:40.560 | And I've talked about focus and plasticity and motivation

01:39:43.600 | in previous episodes.

01:39:44.580 | Please see those episodes if you have questions about that.

01:39:47.340 | I detail a lot of tools and the underlying science.

01:39:50.200 | So for some people, it might be drinking a cup or two

01:39:52.380 | of coffee and getting hydrated before the training session.

01:39:54.880 | For some of you, it might be avoiding coffee

01:39:56.780 | because it makes you too jittery

01:39:57.880 | and your attention jumps all over the place.

01:39:59.580 | It's going to vary tremendously.

01:40:01.160 | There's no real, there is no magic pill

01:40:03.540 | that's going to allow you to get more out of less.

01:40:06.220 | That's just not going to happen.

01:40:07.680 | It's simply not going to happen.

01:40:09.100 | You're not going to get more learning

01:40:10.540 | out of fewer repetitions or less time.

01:40:12.940 | However, there are a few compounds

01:40:15.840 | that I think are worth mentioning

01:40:18.940 | because of their ability to improve

01:40:20.860 | the actual physical performance,

01:40:22.620 | the actual execution of certain types of movements.

01:40:25.580 | And some of these have also been shown

01:40:27.660 | to improve cognitive function,

01:40:29.620 | especially in older populations.

01:40:31.480 | So I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention them.

01:40:34.020 | I'm only going to mention one today in fact.

01:40:36.600 | The one that's particularly interesting

01:40:38.260 | and for which there really are a lot of data is alpha-GPC.

01:40:42.380 | And I'm going to attempt to pronounce

01:40:45.800 | what alpha-GPC actually is.

01:40:47.380 | It's alpha-glycerophosphocoline, right?

01:40:50.800 | Alpha-GPC, alpha-glycerophosphocoline.

01:40:53.940 | See, if I keep doing it over and over repetitions,

01:40:55.820 | alpha-glycerophosphocoline.

01:40:57.800 | There, I made an error.

01:40:58.740 | Okay, so the point is that alpha-GPC,

01:41:02.440 | which is at least in the United States

01:41:04.060 | is sold over the counter,

01:41:05.420 | typically is taken in dosages of about 300 to 600 milligrams.

01:41:10.420 | That's a single dose or have been shown

01:41:13.960 | to do a number of things

01:41:15.200 | that for some of you might be beneficial.

01:41:18.000 | One is to enhance power output.

01:41:19.800 | So if you're engaging in something like shot put throwing

01:41:22.440 | or resistance training or sprinting

01:41:25.420 | or something where you have to generate a lot of power,

01:41:28.060 | maybe you're doing rock climbing,

01:41:29.460 | but you're working on a particular aspect

01:41:31.700 | of your rock climbing

01:41:32.540 | that involves generating a lot of force, a lot of power.

01:41:36.160 | Well, then in theory, alpha-GPC could be beneficial to you.

01:41:40.640 | For the cognitive effects, the dosages are much higher,

01:41:44.260 | up to 1200 milligrams daily divided into three doses

01:41:47.960 | of 400 milligrams is what the studies

01:41:49.680 | that I was able to find show or used.

01:41:52.140 | The effects on cognitive decline are described as notable.

01:41:56.520 | Notable meaning several studies showed a significant

01:41:59.540 | but modest effect in offsetting cognitive decline,

01:42:03.600 | in particular in older populations and some populations

01:42:07.440 | even with some reported neurodegeneration.

01:42:11.280 | Power output was notable.

01:42:13.680 | How notable, what does that mean notable?

01:42:15.800 | A study noted a 14% increase in power output.

01:42:20.700 | That's pretty substantial, 14% if you think about it,

01:42:25.480 | but it wasn't like a doubling or something of that sort.

01:42:27.960 | Believe it or not, the symptoms of Alzheimer's

01:42:29.840 | have been shown at least among the nutraceuticals

01:42:33.600 | of which alpha-GPC is to significantly improve cognition

01:42:37.160 | in people with Alzheimer's.

01:42:38.020 | Now, this episode isn't about cognitive decline

01:42:39.980 | and longevity, we will talk about that,

01:42:41.960 | but this is a so-called another effect of alpha-GPC.

01:42:46.960 | Fat oxidation is increased by alpha-GPC,

01:42:51.040 | growth hormone release is promoted by alpha-GPC,

01:42:55.960 | although to a small degree.

01:42:57.060 | So as you can see, things like alpha-GPC in particular,

01:43:01.880 | when they are combined with low levels of caffeine

01:43:04.560 | can have these effects of improving power output,

01:43:07.200 | can improve growth hormone release,

01:43:09.260 | can improve fat oxidation.

01:43:10.720 | All these things in theory can support skill learning,

01:43:14.840 | but what they're really doing is they're adjusting

01:43:17.040 | the foundation upon which you are going to execute

01:43:19.780 | these many, many repetitions, okay?

01:43:22.000 | The same thing would be said for caffeine itself.

01:43:24.600 | If that's something that motivates you

01:43:26.180 | and gets you out of a chair

01:43:27.080 | to actually do the physical training,

01:43:28.540 | then that's something that can perhaps improve

01:43:32.400 | or enhance the rate of skill learning

01:43:34.240 | and how well you retain those skills.

01:43:36.800 | Now, on a previous episode, I talked about,

01:43:40.200 | and this was the episode on epinephrine, on adrenaline,

01:43:43.860 | I talked about how for mental, for cognitive learning,

01:43:47.560 | it makes sense to spike epinephrine,

01:43:50.840 | to bump epinephrine levels up,

01:43:53.740 | adrenaline levels up after cognitive learning.

01:43:57.020 | For physical learning, it appears to be the opposite,

01:43:59.880 | that if caffeine is in your practice

01:44:02.660 | or if you decide to try alpha-GPC,

01:44:05.200 | that you would want to do that before the training,

01:44:07.420 | take it before the training, use it,

01:44:09.500 | its effect should extend into the training,

01:44:11.600 | presumably throughout, and then afterward,

01:44:14.240 | if you're thinking about following

01:44:15.580 | some of the protocols that we discussed today,

01:44:17.400 | that you would use some sort of idle time

01:44:20.300 | where the brain can replay these motor sequences in reverse,

01:44:23.560 | and then of course you want to do things

01:44:24.700 | that optimize your sleep.

01:44:26.360 | A lot of the questions I get

01:44:28.000 | are about how different protocols

01:44:30.040 | and things that I described

01:44:31.120 | start to collide with one another.

01:44:32.700 | So let's say, for instance, you go to bed at 1030

01:44:35.380 | and you're going to do your skill training at 930,

01:44:39.800 | well, taking a lot of caffeine then

01:44:42.080 | is not going to be a good idea

01:44:43.020 | 'cause it's going to compromise your sleep.

01:44:44.660 | So I'm not here to design the perfect schedule for you

01:44:48.220 | because everyone's situations vary.

01:44:50.420 | So the things to optimize are repetitions, failures,

01:44:55.420 | more repetitions, more failures,

01:44:58.740 | at the offset of training,

01:45:00.300 | having some idle time that could be straight into sleep,

01:45:02.900 | or it could be simply letting the brain

01:45:05.460 | just go idle for five to 10 minutes,

01:45:08.120 | I mean, not focusing on anything,

01:45:09.340 | not scrolling social media, not emailing,

01:45:12.260 | ideally not even talking to somebody,

01:45:13.700 | just lying down or sitting quietly with your eyes closed,

01:45:16.260 | letting those motor sequences replay.

01:45:18.780 | Then we talked about how one can come back

01:45:21.860 | for additional training sessions,

01:45:23.740 | use things like metronoming,

01:45:25.420 | where you're cuing your attention to some external cue,

01:45:29.140 | some stimulus, in this case, an auditory stimulus,

01:45:31.460 | most likely, and trying to generate

01:45:33.260 | more repetitions per unit time.

01:45:34.740 | So again, it's repetitions and errors, that's key.

01:45:37.860 | And then we also talked about some things that you can do

01:45:40.540 | involving cerebellar neurophysiology

01:45:42.740 | to extend range of motion if that's what's limiting for you,

01:45:45.940 | or to use visualization to augment the practice,

01:45:49.820 | or let's say your particular skill involves nice weather

01:45:53.700 | and it's raining or snowing outside

01:45:55.280 | and you can't get outside, a thunderstorm,

01:45:57.220 | then that's where visualization training

01:45:59.140 | might be a good replacement under those conditions,

01:46:01.980 | or in most cases, it's going to be the kind of thing

01:46:04.480 | that you're going to want to do

01:46:05.420 | in addition to the actual physical skill

01:46:08.100 | or strength training session done,

01:46:10.860 | at least in the study that we described,

01:46:12.380 | for 15 minutes a day, five days a week,

01:46:16.200 | over a period of 10 to 12 weeks or so.

01:46:19.220 | So hopefully that makes it clear.

01:46:20.780 | Today, we've covered a lot of mechanism.

01:46:23.340 | We talked so much about the different motor pathways,

01:46:26.260 | central pattern generators.

01:46:27.460 | So you now are armed with a lot of information

01:46:31.540 | about how you generate movement.

01:46:33.360 | And I like to think that you're also armed

01:46:35.720 | with a lot of information about how to design protocols

01:46:38.900 | that are optimized for you, or if you're a coach,

01:46:41.160 | for your trainees in order to optimize their learning

01:46:46.160 | of skills of various kinds.

01:46:49.380 | Today, we focused almost entirely on motor skills,

01:46:53.040 | things like musical skills or physical skills.

01:46:55.700 | These have some overlap.

01:46:57.020 | They're partially overlapping with neuroplasticity

01:47:00.340 | for learning things like languages or math or engineering

01:47:03.540 | or neuroscience for that matter.

01:47:05.160 | Before we depart, I just want to make sure

01:47:09.500 | that I return to a concept which is the ultradian cycle.

01:47:13.320 | Ultradian cycles are these 90-minute cycles

01:47:15.480 | that we go through throughout sleep and wakefulness

01:47:17.200 | that are optimal for learning and attention

01:47:19.920 | in the waking state.

01:47:21.340 | They are the stages of sleep

01:47:24.780 | in which we have either predominantly

01:47:26.060 | slow-wave sleep or REM sleep.

01:47:27.900 | Some of you who have been following this podcast

01:47:29.760 | for a while might be asking,

01:47:31.040 | well, should a physical practice be 90 minutes?

01:47:35.280 | That's going to depend because with physical practices,

01:47:38.120 | oftentimes, for instance, with strength training,

01:47:40.340 | that might be too long.

01:47:41.460 | You're not going to be able to generate enough force output

01:47:43.980 | for it to be worthwhile.

01:47:45.440 | For golfing, I don't know, I've never played golf,

01:47:47.400 | although my friends that play golf,

01:47:48.500 | they disappear under the golf course for many hours.

01:47:50.600 | So I know there's a lot of walking and driving

01:47:53.660 | and other stuff.

01:47:54.660 | I even hear that somebody carries your stuff around for you.

01:47:57.560 | Sometimes, not always, but it's going to differ.

01:48:02.280 | In a four-hour golf game,

01:48:04.160 | you're probably not swinging the golf club for four hours.

01:48:06.660 | So it's going to depend.

01:48:07.560 | I would say that the ultradian cycle

01:48:09.940 | is not necessarily a good constraint

01:48:12.920 | for skill learning in most cases.

01:48:15.480 | And I should say that for those of you

01:48:17.220 | that are short on time or have limited amounts of time,

01:48:20.300 | 10 minutes of maximum repetitions,

01:48:22.140 | maximum focus skill learning work

01:48:24.020 | is going to be very beneficial.

01:48:26.760 | Whereas two hours of kind of haphazard,

01:48:29.820 | not really focused work,

01:48:32.180 | or where you're not generating very many repetitions

01:48:34.500 | 'cause you're doing it for a few repetitions,

01:48:36.060 | and you're texting on your phone

01:48:37.360 | or paying attention to something else,

01:48:38.500 | that's not going to be beneficial.

01:48:40.140 | It's really about the density of training

01:48:42.300 | inside of a session.

01:48:43.180 | So I think you should work toward maximal

01:48:46.520 | or near maximal density of repetitions and failures,

01:48:49.980 | provided they're failures you can perform safely

01:48:52.960 | in order to accelerate skill learning.

01:48:54.560 | And don't let some arbitrary,

01:48:56.780 | or in this case, the ultradian constraint

01:48:59.520 | prevent you from engaging in that practice.

01:49:01.320 | In other words, get the work in,

01:49:02.660 | get as much work done as you can per unit time.

01:49:05.180 | And based on the science,

01:49:06.780 | based on things that I've seen,

01:49:08.200 | based on things that I'm now involved in

01:49:10.260 | with various communities,

01:49:11.460 | you will see the skill improve vastly at various stages.

01:49:16.460 | Sometimes it's a little bit stutter start.

01:49:18.140 | It's not always a linear improvement,

01:49:20.780 | but you will see incredible improvement in skill.

01:49:23.560 | If you're enjoying this podcast

01:49:25.000 | and you're finding the information interesting

01:49:27.060 | and or of use to you,

01:49:28.920 | please subscribe on YouTube.

01:49:30.560 | That really helps us.

01:49:31.980 | As well, please subscribe and download the episodes

01:49:34.380 | on Apple and Spotify.

01:49:37.000 | On Apple, you also have the opportunity

01:49:38.820 | to leave us up to a five-star review,

01:49:41.020 | if you think we deserve that.

01:49:42.780 | And on YouTube, please hit the thumbs up button

01:49:45.700 | if you liked the episode,

01:49:47.260 | and please give us feedback.

01:49:49.140 | Place your feedback in the comment section.

01:49:51.660 | That's a place to tell us how we're doing,

01:49:53.940 | but also to ask us questions.

01:49:56.220 | We read all the comments.

01:49:57.820 | It takes us some time to work through them,

01:49:59.860 | but we read all of them

01:50:00.940 | and we use your comments and your feedback

01:50:03.220 | to sculpt the content and the direction of future episodes.

01:50:07.420 | As well, please check out our sponsors.

01:50:09.540 | The sponsors that we mentioned

01:50:10.740 | at the beginning of each podcast episode

01:50:12.860 | are really important in order to support

01:50:14.420 | our production team.

01:50:15.820 | And as well, we have a Patreon.

01:50:17.940 | It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman.

01:50:20.700 | There you can support us at any level that you like.

01:50:23.580 | In previous episodes and in this episode,

01:50:25.660 | I mentioned some supplements.

01:50:27.300 | Supplements certainly have their place for various things.

01:50:31.240 | They aren't necessary,

01:50:32.240 | but many people, including myself,

01:50:33.780 | derive benefit from supplements

01:50:35.620 | for things like improving sleep and immune system function

01:50:38.660 | and learning and so forth.

01:50:40.520 | If you're interested in seeing the supplements that I take,

01:50:42.740 | you can go to thorn.com/u,

01:50:46.100 | that's the letter U, /huberman,

01:50:48.460 | and you can see the supplements that I take.

01:50:50.720 | If you want to try any of those supplements,

01:50:52.280 | you can get 20% off simply by accessing the Thorne webpage

01:50:56.660 | through that portal,

01:50:57.820 | as well as 20% off any of the other supplements

01:51:00.300 | that Thorne makes.

01:51:01.540 | The reason we've partnered with Thorne

01:51:03.040 | is because Thorne has the very highest levels of stringency

01:51:05.880 | in terms of the quality of the supplements

01:51:08.540 | and the accuracy about the amounts of each supplement

01:51:11.640 | that are in the bottle.

01:51:12.480 | One of the major problems in the supplement industry

01:51:14.940 | is that when supplements get tested,

01:51:17.040 | often it's the case that the amount of a given ingredient

01:51:21.080 | is far lower or far greater

01:51:23.860 | than what's reported on the bottle.

01:51:25.300 | That's not the case for Thorne.

01:51:26.800 | Thorne has very high levels of stringency.

01:51:29.760 | They partnered with the Mayo Clinic

01:51:31.280 | and all the major sports teams,

01:51:32.720 | and that's why we've partnered with them as well.

01:51:34.720 | So if you want to check those out,

01:51:35.900 | again, it's Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E, /u, /huberman,

01:51:40.900 | to get 20% off any of the supplements that Thorne makes.

01:51:45.120 | And last but not least,

01:51:46.360 | I want to thank you for your time and attention.

01:51:48.620 | I very much appreciate your interest in neuroscience

01:51:51.200 | and in physiology and in tools that are informed

01:51:54.140 | by neuroscience and physiology.

01:51:56.160 | Today, we talked all about skill learning.

01:51:58.800 | I hope that you'll consider the information.

01:52:00.980 | You might even decide to try some of these tools.

01:52:02.760 | If you do, please let us know your results with them.

01:52:05.380 | Give us feedback in the comments.

01:52:07.080 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

01:52:09.860 | [upbeat music]

01:52:12.440 | (upbeat music)

How to Learn Skills Faster | Huberman Lab Podcast

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