The learning process

[dmc]

I'm hoping some teachers might have insight into this.

When I'm working on a complex piece I'll spend several days in a row struggling through it and feel like I'm regressing or at best, making baby step progress.  Then if I take a day or two away from it, when I return it feels like I've progressed by leaps & bounds.  In my adolescent days I always felt when I was struggling that it was because I wasn't working hard enough so I'd try to push myself more (usually with negative results).  My mother would always tell me about the law of diminishing returns.  Being older now I understand about limits to what a person can absorb and I usually know when its time to move on.  But what I'm curious about is how/why this works the way it does.  I do recall hearing from someone once that subliminally, you're actually learning the most when you're struggling (though you don't realize it).   I assume this has happened to other people.  Why is that ?  What is the process thats going on ?  Does the time away clear one's head of the negatives & frustrations ?    I can't believe its that simple though....

[danny elfboy]

What is going on actually is that you're learning while you're not absorbing information.
Consider the learning process made of two stages.
In the first one you read, listen, tastes, touch and gain information through your senses.
This doesn't mean though that you're processing those information.
The process by which those information are memorized, process, cleansed and so on occurs at night or in other words after the absorbing information stage.

So let's say you have chapter 1 to study.
You would learn a lot more by reading it once or twice and then forgetting it and moving to something else until the second stage processed those information for you.
You would learn far far less if you stubbornly tried to memorize and understand that first chapter immediately reading it 10 or 20 times and wondering why after so many times you haven't still learned it.

The truth is that after 10 or 20 times you've exceed your CNSF levels (central nervous system fatigue) and are actually entered in a process of unlearning. So you've not only wasted a lot of precious time by trying to learn in the wrong way, but the little you've struggled to learn that day you're actually losing.

There have been few schools in scandinavia, private and experimental, that applying this knowledge allowed their students to achieve in 2 years what others achieve in 5 years and this by working less.

[johnk]

Learning requires time for the brain to make new neurone connections and store information in the right memory cells. This largely occurs during sleep as a result of the 'trying' that occurs during the previous practice. I teach students to do 5 repetitions of hard passages  (sometimes 10 but not more) and that its the trying that counts, not whether they actually master the difficulty. They should notice it will be easier next time.

[dmc]

Fascinating.

Actually it dovetails with things I've gleaned over the years.  I seem to recall from a college Psych class where it was determined that there is an optimum brain wave frequency for absorbing information.  When we are stressed, the brain wave frequency increases to a point beyond the optimal learning window.  This explains why we tend to remember small details from an entertainment experience (we are more relaxed) vs a work-related one.  So to apply this to dannyelf's example of trying to reread a chapter 10-20 times, one would probably be more stressed due to a sense of urgency to absorb every detail (why else would you read something that much ?).

Thanks both of you !

[lostinidlewonder]

The simple explaination I have found to this "post practice improvement" is that during practice you do not realise you have "got it" and you keep practicing. It is difficult to measure when you have actually mastered a difficult passage, some people never can understand when that happens and it is only after coming back to it after a few days that they realise, oh I can actually do it.

Some people have slight inaccuracies to their phrase and it randomly pokes it head up. This randomness can sometimes cloud the perception as to when you have acquired mastery over a passage. The randomness can however be somewhat subdued after a break from practice. I also believe you can always pin point what is hindering your playing, thus there is always a clear path you can set out to master a passage, and inaccuracies become less random.

I noticed this type of post practice improvement in my own playing when I was young and constantly tried to control it. Because I don't like the idea of improving without conscious control. So then now when I practice I know immediately if I have mastered it or not, and whether subtle inaccuracies are because of lack of focus and lack of pinpointing the core reason for the mistake.
     When I play a phrase I feel the general muscular memory associated with it, then I will go back and level out the inaccuracies. It is like laying concrete, you dump it in a pile, you roughly spread it out, then you make it smooth. Most people stop at the dumping and rough spread and leave the smoothing out to time.

"Complex pieces" are pieces which are full of ideas we have not much experience with. Because of this it can make progress slow. However as we relate new movements to old movements we will make faster progress. Everything new can be related to something old, that is the key to my practice of pieces with ideas I haven't seen before (which are getting much less and less as your repertoire increases)

[dan101]

There's wisdom in some of the responses that you've been getting. You do actually learn and process information when you're not practicing. That's why you often find yourself humming a tune that you've been practicing, without even knowing it. Your brain works overtime in order to make sense of it all.

As for regressing when practicing, you must keep a cool head. Making mistakes when learning a piece is the number one way to go 'backwards'. If you find yourself getting frustrated, either stop for a while or channel that frustration into a cool-headed determination to practice effectively. Good luck.

[dmc]

As for regressing when practicing, you must keep a cool head. Making mistakes when learning a piece is the number one way to go 'backwards'. If you find yourself getting frustrated, either stop for a while or channel that frustration into a cool-headed determination to practice effectively.

Absolutely.  When I mentioned frustrations, I was referring to my younger, more impatient days.  I didn't have NEARLY the wisdom I do now....

[anna_crusis]

I'm hoping some teachers might have insight into this.

When I'm working on a complex piece I'll spend several days in a row struggling through it and feel like I'm regressing or at best, making baby step progress.  Then if I take a day or two away from it, when I return it feels like I've progressed by leaps & bounds. Why is that ?  What is the process thats going on ?  Does the time away clear one's head of the negatives & frustrations ?    I can't believe its that simple though....

It's because knowledge has a tangible physical reality. Your brain stores information by creating electrochemical patterns that link up cells like a join-the-dots picture. It 'grows' knowledge like a spider building a web. It simply needs time to finish this process, usually a day or so.

Think of it as watering a plant. If you expect something to happen instantly, you'll be frustrated and disapointed, but if you wait a day or two you'll see it has grown a bit.