 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: smill01
Date: 2022-02-01 12:15
Has anyone else been following the podcasts from Andrew Huberman's neuroscience lab at Stanford? (For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx3U64IXFOY). His research highlights the importance of errors in triggering the learning of motor skills - errors give rise to frustration, which produces epinephrine in the brain, which works with acetylcholine to mark the neurons that need to be updated later during deep sleep to produce learning.
However, I think we've all been trained on a regimen of "perfect practice", because errors are thought to be hard to extinguish. Slow reps, no mistakes, speed up gradually until we reach performance tempo. I'm having trouble reconciling the science with our tried and true practice methods.
(By the way, his podcasts are full of useful information on structuring learning or practice sessions to maximize the results. The neuroscience is presented for lay people.)
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Author: JTJC
Date: 2022-02-01 16:40
Looks like I might need to get more frustrated when I’m practicing to get those chemicals working.
More seriously, I try to avoid generating emotions like frustration, stress, anger etc when I’m practicing. In doing so I’m trying to disassociate such emotions from playing as I don’t feel they’re helpful to practice, playing and performance. I’ll have to look into this more, as maybe my approach isn’t as helpful as I’d assumed. How do others view the revelations of this science?
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Author: brycon
Date: 2022-02-01 19:15
Quote:
However, I think we've all been trained on a regimen of "perfect practice", because errors are thought to be hard to extinguish. Slow reps, no mistakes, speed up gradually until we reach performance tempo. I'm having trouble reconciling the science with our tried and true practice methods.
I was fortunate to have a teacher-mentor who always questioned such established ways of doing things. He taught me that perfect practice, starting slow and speeding up technical passages, etc. were wasteful practice techniques (and because he possessed unbelievable technical facility, I figured there was something to what he was saying!). I'm not surprised that neuroscience shows us that these techniques are wasteful: sports psychologists, education specialists, and others show us the same thing.
With regard to frustration, I'm reminded of something I heard from a sports psychologist called "desirable difficulty." Many adults, unsurprisingly, learn like adults! Things are grasped on an intellectual level and then performed many times over until perfected (not unlike how one might learn French from a textbook or clarinet from a YouTube video or bboard: "I know I'm supposed to do double-lip embouchure because it prevents biting..."). Children, however, don't bother intellectualizing things but rather jump right into the performing. They make mistakes, more or less learn something, and then move on to new challenges.
The perfect-practice-makes-perfect-playing method seeks out mastery before moving on to new material. How many folks here, for example, do the same warm up every day, the same scale patterns every day, etc.? This type of approach leads to plateaus in the learning experience: months or even years are spent getting Baermann scales from 95% to 99% (often while other substantial issues in the playing are left unexamined). A perhaps better way of practicing would be to introduce new difficulties into the learning experience once a plateau is reached. If you can basically play your scales, could you then play your scales in triplets with a chromatic lower-neighbor note below each scale degree? And, in this way, you introduce new difficulty and therefore a new learning curve as well as exercise your creativity and imagination.
At the same time, though, too much difficulty would overwhelm us: "Alright, I just played 'Three Blind Mice,' now I'll tackle the Nielsen concerto." So we should look for something that will engage our minds and perhaps even frustrate us a bit but not completely overwhelm.
At the moment, I'm practicing baroque keyboard improvisation for fun. I have to improvise a melodic line, usually moving contrapuntally in thirds or sixths, and ornament the bass line. But then I have to invert my melodic lines: what was in my right-hand pinky is now in my thumb and vice versa. Keeping invertible counterpoint in your memory while you're transposing to new key areas and ornamenting a bass line can be frustrating! But it's a sort of frustrating not unlike playing a difficult level in a really fun video game. And I think that sort of thing is what we need when we practice.
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Author: JAS
Date: 2022-02-02 02:19
He mentions somewhere else (can't find it at the moment) that you're ideally getting it right about 8 out of 10 times. If you're getting it right 4 out of 10 times, it's too difficult.
But the main takeaway is this: if you're practicing at a tempo where you can play it comfortably 10 out of 10 times, then you're not practicing.
(Also worth noting that, if I remember correctly, he says that this applies more to adult learning than youth learning. People below the age of 25 or so don't need these mechanism so much because their brains are already under the conditions for plasticity. Adults need more specific circumstances such as intense focus or the experience of frustration.)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-02-02 08:43
Hmmm...........
There were a lot of "old timers" that used the old, 'play it 100 times in a row perfectly.' Guys like Doc Severinsen are adherents. And by that it is meant that if you miss on 68 of the series, you start all over at ONE. Harsh, but that was a thing back in the day and there were great players that came from that sort of practice. I guess you use what works for you......I really do want to watch the whole hour and twenty-eight minutes to see what this fellow is saying.
................Paul Aviles
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Author: SunnyDaze
Date: 2022-02-02 11:07
Synaptic plasticity is pretty weird stuff. I don't know exactly about the perfect way to practise clarinet, but I can offer this in case it helps:
My biggest experience of learning and synaptic plasticity was when I was in my 20s and I had eye exercises to get my eyes to converge properly for the first time. I had had double vision since birth, and finally tackled the problem of solving that, because it was getting really hard to read. Doing this work was a massive lesson for me in how the brain learns.
My brain had to learn to converge my eyes, then learn to cope with switching from seeing double to seeing one image, then learn to cope with seeing in 3D instead of 2D. Then my brain had to learn to understand how my new 3D vision worked with the existing information about balance and physical position that it was still getting from my ears and my body. That was a very steep and difficult learning curve, and I had to do it while holding down a job, with a long commute and regular transatlantic flights.
All the way through that process I had to learn how to learn, because there was no text book, and no perfect way. However, I did learn. My brain was able to rewire itself on the fly, and I managed to solve most of the problems. I hestitate to say that I solved all of them, because I still struggle with balance, even though my reading and depth perception are now tack sharp.
The thing that I learned from that is this:
1) Adults can rewire their brains if they want it badly enough.
2) There is no perfect way that works for everyone.
3) In order to learn fast, the adult has to look critically at their situation, where they are now and where they want to get to. Then they need to find the perfect way that works *for them*.
4) I think there are important things that really help though, like not being paralysed by fear or ambition, getting enough sleep, eating well, and having a confidant who will encourage rather than criticise. If anything, I find that an understanding listener helps me most, and a thoughtless critic is most harmful.
I hope that helps a bit.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-02-03 03:25
It is almost sounding to me that what this podcaster is talking about is more that science is beginning to demystify learning rather than actually controlling it. He says that "flow" is the performance of what you know how to do already, but doesn't really address how you get there. In fact, doing something unusually disorienting is supposed to help trigger neural plasticity, but only if it's unusual for you. Hands stands can be a trigger unless you are good at hand stands, then it doesn't work. So how does that help an olympic gymnast refine a routine? Simone Biles HAD (has) amazing skills in the gymnastic realm but developed "twisties" where she completely lost orientation to the ground during a twisting dismount. So what triggered the UN-learning and how do you trigger further plasticity to become even greater, when that is the goal, but you already have "flow?"
He further used the example of shooting a thousand free throws. But how is that different from the standard hours and hours of practice on a horn?
Maybe I liked the concept of the release of "reward neuro-chemicals" as a subjective issue. And if we can create a positive feeling around struggling through errors, then we can learn more efficiently. But that really only sounds like "I want to get better, so I need to practice."
Where is the revolutionary science in that?
......................Paul Aviles
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Author: crazyclari
Date: 2022-02-03 11:47
Hi there is a number of researchers working in the motor learning and flow space.
Well worth the exploring. If I can find the books as i have just moved i will list some. The take away I got from the motor learning was "calculated exploration. Simply perfect practice did not extend and practiced failure did not improve.
A book I have and just found it titled music, motor control and the brain
I have been taught as a part of my degree and other workshops and read about flow, again I can provide books when I find them. From my experience of the flow workshops. The people teaching were often highly skilled performers but did not have the links to join concept and practice. They usually left me disappointed with there presentations. I believe there are some skills that can be taught to connect theory to practice.
It is a bit unfortunate I believe that in some cases research does not provide a "real world link" to performance. As is mentioned above much focus appears to be put on the demystifying. If the podcaster used the term: "flow" is the performance of what you know how to do already" I doubt they have read, experienced, nor understands the sensation of flow. It make me wonder whether the presenter has even read the original books as I do not believe this is even vaguely what flow means.
In 1992, in his book flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote and put a stake in the ground. Again it is a bit academic in nature but in the preface he describes flow as:
"joy, creativity, the process or total involvement with life" I think the total involvement e.g. total involvement in clarinet playing is what we are talking about here
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Author: jonok
Date: 2022-02-09 06:03
Somewhere in my past learning about learning ...
One way to make the brain think something is important is repetition - if it's continually "seeing", for example, a particular motor skill, it will start to automate it so it doesn't have to spend as much energy on making it happen "consciously". That's the perfect practice route. It works. One trick here is, it takes MORE effort to automate something than not, so we have to keep the repetitions up. I think this is often the impetus for when I get bored with something I'm working on (doesn't only happen with music) ... it's the brain asking me, do you REALLY want to automate this, because it's hard work!
The other way, is related to excitment. The brain doesn't really care about good or bad emotions: all it "cares" about is the level of "excitement". When something happens that causes the excitement levels to go up, it gives more emphasis to what just happened. You make a mistake, get upset, frustrated, angry etc, the brain says, "oh that's important". You go back and, hopefully, repeat without the mistake, and you don't much react to it ... maybe just some relief you got past it. Of those two, the brain is going to like the mistake more.
So when I practice, I try to be completely neutral about mistakes, but celebrate getting it right, especially after a mistake. Celebrating can be anything that's just more excited than doing nothing. Putting on a big silly cheesey smile works.
Apologies for the anthropomorphisms ...
Jonathan.
-------------------
aspiring fanatic
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