The Fastest Way To Learn
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Practice makes perfect: One of those clichés that gets endlessly trotted out, told to children at the piano and point guards shooting from behind the arc. It applies to multiplication tables and stickshifts, sex and writing. And the line is true, even if it overpromises. Perfection might be impossible, but practice is the only way to get close.
Unfortunately, the cliche is limited by its imprecision. What kind of practice makes perfect? And what aspects of practice are most valuable? Is it the repetition? The time? The focus? Given the burden of practice – it’s rarely much fun – knowing what works is useful knowledge, since it comes with the promise of learning faster. To invoke another cliché: Less pain, more gain.
These practical questions are the subject of a new paper by Nicholas Wymbs, Amy Bastian and Pablo Celnik in Current Biology that investigates the best ways to practice a motor skill. In the experiment, the scientists had subjects play a simple computer game featuring an isometric pinch task. Basically, subjects had to squeeze a small device that translated the amount of force they applied into cursor movements. The goal of the game was to move the cursor to specific windows on the screen.
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