How Learning New Skills Rewire Your Brain
You are born with the machinery to from beginner to professional
Every time you learn a new skill, you change your brain. More specifically, you change the connections inside it. This ability to change according to the challenges it faces, is called neuroplasticity.
Whatever skill you want to build, you are born with the machinery to transform a beginners clumsiness into fast, fluent action. That machinery (your body and brain), is controlled by you. Our bodies and brains are amazingly adaptable, and will gradually try to adapt to any challenge or condition you present it to.
If presented with a challenging environment, our body and mind changes. Muscles gets stronger, hearts and lungs get larger and brain connections become faster and more focused. This reorganisation of the brain is the basis of all skill acquisition and development.
The body itself does not know why these changes happen. But it is programmed to constantly reorganise itself to make things as simple as possible. The body and mind prefers when things are easy, and so will try to adapt itself to make it simpler to perform a task next time.
By straining your body when learning a certain skill, you are signaling that this is important, and telling it to devote more resources to this challenge.
The results of practicing a specific skill, is that we are strengthening neural connections, which makes it much easier to perform fast, fluent and precise actions.
It’s all about having the right connections
The connections between neurones in the brain are very plastic, meaning that they can change a lot. By practicing a new skill, you start creating new connections and pathways in your brain. If we keep practicing, these connections will become stronger, which leads to improved performance in the skill.
If you do a certain movement, specific neurones will be activated. And if you keep doing this movement, you are telling your body that this is important, which leads to higher activation from each neuron and activation from more neurons. By using the connections you want, you are thereby strengthening these specific neural pathways.
Often used connections are strengthened, while rarely used connections are weakened or eliminated (this is called synaptic pruning). Cutting of the weakest, most unused connections leaves the whole brain more efficient.
Your neurones don’t know the correct way to do something. So, it is essential that you practice with quality. If you practice in a sub-optimal way, you will only become better at performing the skill sub-optimally. The body learns what you teaches it to do.
That we are physically reorganising our brain, also explains why learning a new skill takes time. Such changes to the structure of the brain is gradual, and if you want to improve a lot, it is necessary to practice consistently over time.
Make some mistakes
Targeted, mistake-focused practice is so effective, because the best way to build a good neural circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement.
It is normal to fear making mistakes, but it’s necessary to challenge yourself to stretch past your current capabilities. And it has been found that a lot of our deepest satisfaction in life comes from our willingness to expose ourselves to new challenges and engage in novel experiences.
By taking on new challenges and overcoming them, you are creating a better life for yourself.
Stress your body to rewire your brain
The body will only change when we present it with a challenging environment or learning task. If not, it will not devote resources to the task. By trying to do something just outside your capability, the body will try to adapt, to be able to perform.
To grow your muscles or improve the connections within your brain, it is therefore necessary to push your limits. This means that you need to perform tasks that are currently just outside of what you can comfortably do.
If on the other hand, you are just repeating what you already know, you will maintain your current skill level, but will not improve much. If you don’t do anything, things you have previously known how to do, will gradually weaken and disappear from your skillset.
Only by stressing the body can we push it to become stronger, faster, more agile or flexible. By pushing past your comfort zone and experiencing slight discomfort, you will maximise your potential to expand your capacity.
Don’t strengthen the connections you don’t want
The body does not know what you want it to do. If you repeatedly practice poor technique, this means that you will only improve at doing something poorly.
You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise. -Michael Jordan
Poor practice=Poor skill
Consistent practice of poor performance can strengthen the poor performance of the skill. If you repeatedly practice poor technique, this could actually make you worse than if you’re not practicing at all. Practicing when tired is therefore often not great for improvement, and in the worst case you could become worse. If you feel tired, it may be better to take a rest.
Use it or loose it
Hebb’s Law: What fires together, wires together
The body doesn’t want to use resources on what it doesn’t think is important, and will not remember skills and movement patterns that you don’t use. By not using a skill, you are telling it that this is not important. Same goes for knowledge and vocabulary, if you don’t use information for a long while, your brain will think it’s not very important, and it will be forgotten.
Take home message
As Aristotle said: ‘We are what we repeatedly do.’
By practicing a skill, you are strengthening the neural connections, which makes it easier to perform a task in the future.
These sort of changes requires effort, which means that good learning is not easy.
If you practice with quality over time, repeating the movements you want, you change your brain and build new connections and capability.
Good luck with your skill learning!
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