
Overlearning hyperstabilizes a skill by making processing inhibitory-dominant - alfozan
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4490.html
======
vezycash
Practice doesn't make perfect. Rather, practice makes Permanent - locks it in.
And perfect practice makes perfect.

Practicing the wrong way is like having a bad habit. The habit (practice) is
bad but it locks in nonetheless.

Perfect Practice

To reach perfection, care has to be taking when practicing to encode things
the right way. Good coaches accomplish this by:

1\. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully
slow rate to make errors more noticeable

2\. Chunking - breaking down the skill into smaller components and practicing
these chunks separately. E.g. tearing music notes into pieces and practicing
the notes separately

Books: Little Book of Talent, The Talent Code

~~~
stcredzero
_1\. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully
slow rate to make errors more noticeable_

You have to be careful with this as well. There are some musicians who do
this, but can only play at the practice speed. (So be sure to speed things up,
and vary things. You'll have true mastery if you can morph what you've
practiced.) It's also good to listen to recordings of yourself and of model
musicians as a means of feedback.

 _2\. Chunking - breaking down the skill into smaller components_

Care has to be taken with this as well. I've encountered musicians who have
chunked ornaments in traditional music, but have practiced so much, that they
consistently replay the ornament at their practice tempo, regardless of the
tempo being played at the moment.

Music is a game of continual contextual awareness. There is a powerful analogy
with programming here.

~~~
lettergram
One of the tricks Ive worked with, is practicing something slow and chunked
three times in a row perfectly. If you fail you start over, I.e. you may play
it perfectly twice, but third time you fail, you start over.

Then once you do a small chunked section slowly perfectly (say 8 measures),
you then try at regular speed until you do it three times perfectly.

Then you try playing two chunks (say 16 measures) the same way, constantly
building.

For reference, I had a full ride to multiple universities for my music. So at
least for me it worked well this way.

~~~
spangry
'Chunking down' a piece is pretty much the only way I've managed to learn some
harder pieces, at least by my regular-guy standards e.g. Rach Prelude in C
sharp minor. That last one was particularly hard as I'm a terrible sight
reader, and there's about two pages where you're playing 10 notes every half-
beat.

But I think GP has a point about the dangers of this approach (even though
it's unavoidable I think). It sometimes results in noticeable 'seams' in an
otherwise fluent performance. You can occasionally spot these 'seams' even in
performances by world-class concert pianists (though this is rare). I find it
weirdly reassuring: no matter how talented you are, those first few days of
practising a new piece will always be a tedious grind.

~~~
stcredzero
_there 's about two pages where you're playing 10 notes every half-beat._

There's a bit of stuff in classical music that strikes me as being there so
that musicians can show off their speed. It's one of the things that even the
lowest common denominator audience can relate to, so of course this happens!

 _It sometimes results in noticeable 'seams' in an otherwise fluent
performance._

The way to avoid seams is to truly make the chunk yours, by being able to
morph it in rhythm and time and introducing variation. By the time you can
freely do that -- by the time it has become a plaything -- it is truly yours,
and you can play it without seams. The problem for me with this and classical
music, is that often I really don't care so much for the difficult segments.
I'd rather play something beautiful, than something that shows me off.

~~~
_raoulcousins
Absolutely! I learned to play a lot of fast runs of sixteenth notes by varying
the rhythm. Effective and much more fun than starting slowly ticking up the
metronome (although I do a lot of that too).

~~~
chopin
You may want to check out Cortot, who did a series on how to practice Chopin
pieces, notably the notorious Etudes. One of the techniques he describes is
varying either rhythm or accentuation. I tried especially the latter which
works pretty well. But I am a bit unsure whether it is a genuine effect or a
consequence that a practice a chunk more often if you do this.

------
malanj
If you can't get past nature's paywall, and want more detail...
[https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/01/overlearn](https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/01/overlearn)

tldr:

Task: detect which one of the two successively presented images had a
patterned orientation and which depicted just unstructured noise.

A first group practiced the task for eight blocks, waited 30 minutes, and then
trained for eight blocks on a new similar task. The next day they were tested
on both tasks to assess what they learned. The other group did the same thing,
except that they overlearned the first task for 16 blocks of training.

On the next day’s tests, the first group performed quite poorly on the first
task compared to the pre-test. Meanwhile the overlearning group showed strong
performance on the first task, but no significant improvement on the second.
Regular learning subjects were vulnerable to interference by the second task
(as expected) but overlearners were not.

------
ryen
Curious how overlearning influences political beliefs, and if a subject is
less likely to alter their belief system based on living in an "echo chamber"
and constant re-enforcement of those beliefs.

~~~
probablyfiction
There's growing evidence that political beliefs are linked to self-image more
than factual evidence, which is why arguing over the facts of an issue often
winds up causing both sides to double-down on what they already believe to be
true and generally accomplishes nothing.

~~~
Malice
Source please?

~~~
edblarney
I can't speak for his source.

But I have encountered this: I dated a bunch of girls from OKC a couple of
years ago. Many of them claimed they were 'Buddhist' on their profiles.

I'm very interested in religion, and thought it was odd so many claimed to be
this, when clearly it was not of their 'ethnic origin'.

When I talked to them about it, none of them knew anything about Buddhism
beyond 'The Dalai Lama' and a few platitudes. They had never read a full book.
Knew next to nothing of Buddhist theology. Never been to a Temple. Had no
practices, holidays, knew nothing of the various forms of Buddhism (some of
them are pretty hard-core and not what we think of in the West) etc.. So in
reality, they 'thought positively of the pop-culture Buddhist image' and what
that image meant for themselves, and how it projected onto others. And that's
about it - but they were not remotely 'Buddhist' in any tangible way.

My point is people often 'identify with some idea' \- but those ideas, and
even their understanding of the more formalized idea, can be essentially
fictional - or rather, they are used to 'paint a picture of their self
identity', and possibly nothing more.

------
derefr
So it sounds like they're saying that overlearning is what takes us from from
"oh, huh, I was wrong" on encountering new evidence, to instead saying "no
way, the evidence has to be wrong."

~~~
davesque
I think that's way too high level. It seems to me that this paper is
discussing learning at the level of memorization or motor skills. I would
think that behaviors like egoism can't be reliably connected to something at
this level.

~~~
derefr
I wasn't quite trying to communicate egoism; more what the mental process (you
could say "subconscious flinch reaction", but that doesn't capture the
"physiological-ness" of what's happening) to encountering the kind of
contradictory information that the brain "learns" from.

That is, new information that contradicts your knowledge usually triggers
focused attention (i.e. NMDA activation) in order to facilitate learning.
However, overlearning can make the same information be discounted as
irrelevant (i.e. a GABAergic signal of "it's okay, I don't need to figure that
out.")

Explaining at a high level exactly what that "it's okay, don't pay attention
to that" signal is rationalized as in conscious experience, is a whole
different thing.

~~~
davesque
Whether you call it egoism or something else, I still think what you're
describing is too high level for this research to be applied to it.

------
RangerScience
Holy shit. It this what over-fit looks like for humans (as compared to neural
nets)?

~~~
curuinor
Gerd Gigerenzer is the author you want for looking at overfit in human beings.
Sworn life enemy of the Kahneman and Tversky collaboration, and vice
versa(Kahneman actually put in a few disses in his Nobel prize ceremony aimed
pretty much at him...).

------
fundingshovel
Is there an free copy of the article not just the abstract?

~~~
hashnsalt
Try using scihub

------
deepakkarki
Sci-hub link for the paywalled paper : [http://sci-
hub.cc/10.1038/nn.4490](http://sci-hub.cc/10.1038/nn.4490)

------
waynecolvin
How then do you forget, after this overlearning already occurred?

EDIT: Someone says "If you can't get past nature's paywall,"

~~~
striking
Stop practicing wrong, take some time to forget, and start over later.

~~~
waynecolvin
I was actually thinking about veterins returning to civillian life at the
time, but maybe you're right.

