Thursday's Blog- Deep Practice

A theme I found in the book, The Talent Code is deep practice. The part of the book I am at really emphasizes on what deep practice is and how important it is. Brazil produces outstanding players because Brazilian players have trained in a particular way, using a tool that improves ball-handling skill faster than anywhere else in the world since the 1950s. This type of training the author, Daniel Coyle, calls training of deep practice. This deep practice he says applies to not only soccer, but to more. The way the author helps us understand what deep practice is, is by actually doing it. He gives us the following lists. He wants the readers to take a few seconds to look at both lists and spend the same amount of time on each one.

List A

ocean/breeze
leaf/tree
sweet/sour
movie/actress
gasoline/engine
high school/college
turkey/stuffing
fruit/vegetable
computer/chip
chair/couch

List B

bread/b_tter
music/l_rics
sh_e/sock
phone/b_ok
chi_s/salsa
pen_il/paper
river/b_at
be_r/wine
television/rad_o
l_nch/dinner

After studying each list, Coyles says, "now turn the page and without looking, try to remember as many as the word pairs you can. From which column do you recall more words? The book says, like most people, we will remember more worlds from List B, the ones that contain fragments. In those few seconds, our memory skills suddenly sharpened. If this was a test, our list B score would have been 300 percent higher. Our IQ did not increase and we did not feel different. This is how the author let us experience what deep practice actually is.

However, readers were encountered by words with blank spaces. We stopped. We may have stumbled over the words briefly but then we figured it out. Us readers, experienced a microsecond of struggle, but that microsecond made all the difference. We did not practice harder when we looked at list B, we just practiced deeper.

Deep practice is constructed and appears to be self-contradictory: struggling in certain targeted ways- operating at the edges of our ability, and where we make mistakes- makes us smarter. In another way, these type of experiences where we are forced to slow down for a second, make some errors, and correct them. Robert Bjork, the man who developed the list above, says, "we think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn." Meaning if we are not forced to think as hard, we have an advantage, but Bjork thinks that is a terrible way to learn because we are not actually using our brains. He also mentions, "We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that's wrong. It's a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn." When we are practicing deeply, we use time more efficiently.

Deep practice is a powerful idea and an average musician, named Clarissa describes how she managed to accomplish a month's worth of work in just six short minutes. Clarissa states, she was introduced to a microscopic substance called myelin. Knowing about myelin changes the way we see the world. Dr. Douglas Fields a director of the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at the National Institutes of Heath in Maryland expresses that, myelin is "the key to talking, reading, learning, skills, and being human." I could write and write even more about myelin but that would take a while. To make it short, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.