Tuesday's Blog- December 6

"Just take it one step at a time" (Coyle, 80)

Back to Clarissa the average musician who in just six minutes, accomplished a month's worth of work, we are going to dig a little deeper into how this happened. In my last blog, we were introduced to myelin, a microscopic substance that is "the key to talking, reading, learning, skills, and being human."

Myelin is built on three simple facts:
1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons- a circuit of nerve fibers.
2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.
3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

Many researchers especially Fields, who is mentioned in my last blog, are attracted to myelin because it provides insights into the biological roots of learning and of cognitive disorders. Clarissa couldn't feel it, but when she was deep-practicing she was firing and optimizing a neural circuit- and growing myelin. Myelin and deep practice is what helped her focus and get a month's worth of work done a short time period.

Myelin operates by a few fundamental principles:
1) The firing of the circuit is paramount- myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas. It is built to respond to actions. It responds to urgent repetition.
2) Myelin is universal- one size fits all skills. Myelin doesn't care who you are- it cares what you do.
3) Myelin wraps- it doesn't unwrap- myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill is protected, ou can't un-insulate it (except age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break.
4) Age matters- in children, myelin arrives in a series of waves, some of them are determined by genes, some are dependent on activity. We continue to experience a net gain of myelin until around the age of fifty, when the balance tips toward loss. This is why majority of world-class athletes/experts start young. The study of myelin can be confusing, but according to Dr. Dogulas Fields, "it's early, but this could be huge."

There are also three rules of deep practice:
Rule 1) chunk it up- how do we know we are deep practicing? What does it feel like?
Deep practice feels a bit like exploring an dark and unfamiliar room. We start slowly, we bump into furniture and run into walls, we stop, think, and then start again. Slowly, we experience the space over and over and where everything is place, building a mental map until we can move through it quickly. The instinct when we are approached with something unfamiliar is to slow down

and break skills into their components. It is universal (myelin is universal). We are "taking it one step at a time" This is where I found my quote. As we are faced with something we are not used to, we take it one step at a time until we are able to fully understand it.
Rule 2) repeat it- repetition is irreplaceable. Spending more time is effective- but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities. Today, we are seeing younger kids practice up to three hours a day, every week because repetition is something that can help us improve.
Rule 3) learn to feel it- myelin is sneaky. It is not possible to sense and feel myelin growing along our nerve fibers. The author asked many people to describe the sensations of their most productive practice and this is what they said: attention, connect, build, whole, alert, focus, mistake, repeat, tiring, edge, and awake. This list as the author says, evokes a feeling of reaching, falling short, but getting back up and reaching again. The more willing individuals are to endure it and to permit themselves to fail- the more myelin they build and the more skill they earn.

This quote connects to me, because as a kid my mom and especially coaches when ever I was frustrated trying to learn something they always told me, "take it one step at a time." No matter what I was doing, my parents and coaches wanted me to slow down and take time to accomplish what I was doing in that moment. I can say I am someone who wants to get something done right away, for example, in school when I learn something and I don't understand it, I get frustrated because I want to be able to know what I am doing right away. Another example, in cheerleading, when I am learning a new skill and I fall each time, yes I get frustrated and I want to keep on going and going until I get it, but I have to realize that I have to take it step by step because nothing is going to work right away.