The way to practice anything that many people may think is true turns out to be not effective
Hey guys, today I wanna share with you the most popular article read by my Japanese friends on my blog. If you are really interested to read it, please click to the link below, which is written by Japanese though:) Wish it would be helpful for intelligent you guys to learn Japanese.
This article is based on one website below. Having said that, however I contained some related articles that may be helpful for you to understand more easily and practically.
When I learned to practice this way, my music got better, my fingers became to move faster and improved other abilities related to make music as well. (I play the violin btw.)
So how do you pracrtice these days?
Have you ever experienced that the improvement you made yesterday vanished only in one night and have you been disappointed because of this phenomenon? Or have you taught by your teacher that you should practice (or I can say repeat) one very short excerpt to make your practice effective? Researchers call this type of practice "blocked practice" and they explained that "blocked practice" is not effective, which really surprised me (and maybe you guys also). However, if you change your mind and the way to practice, you can make your time double, which means your practice effectiveness will be doubled.
Why your practice time taking very long changed to be the waste of time the next day?
When we really change, we are not to make a lot of repetitions, but to pay shrp attention to what you are really doing. Nevertheless, even if you repeat one thing in all of your time, your brain do not really work in the end.
This phenomenon is already confirmed by infants. If you show one same thing to infants, they cannot keep paying attention to it, which experts call "Habituation".
But, once you change the thing, your attention fully comes back.
This is the same for adults. If you use fMRI(functional magnetic resonance imaging), you can figure out that activity of your brain decreases when the same stimulus is repeated. Rather when you get a number of new stimulus, your brain works so hard that you can really practice effectively.
Blocked practice schedule & Random practice schedule
1. Blocked practice schedule
This type of practice is to repeat one shor excerpt until you can perfectly acquire one skill. Before the end of your repetition, you won't practice other excerpts. It seems really logical, but it is not in terms of long schedule practice.
2. Random practice schedule
In this type of practice, you have to restart different tasks in short time. It is important not to practice the same excerpt. To restart different tasks is not so easy as to repeat the one same excerpt. However, there is the point.
What makes this practice effective is you need to reconstruct your brain when you start new task. The more your brain actually work, the longer your practice effectievness will be.
Certainly, if you consider one-day practice, since you spend very long time practicing one very short excerpt, the blocked practice shedule might be effective. But, a lot of studies shows the random practice schedule consistently makes a long-term result. Since many different components of your practice interfere each other, your brain works very hard, which is the phenomenon called "contextual interfere effect".
Actual data that proves the effectiveness of random practice schedule
https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1994-hall.pdf
The link above is the study that researchers searched for the relationship between the baseballplayer's way to practice and the result in 1994.
In twenty practice sessions, players practiced two ways. As a result, although players in blocked practice schedule got 25% better, other players in random practice schedule got 57% better than very first time. This research suggests that random practice schedule is more than twich as effective as blocked practice schedule. This result was the same for other fields such as music. In the experiment, random practice schedule was also good for making goals and concentration.
How to utilize random practice schedule?
Constant and very long practice for one very short excerpt do harm to your practice effectiveness. So it is reasonable to pick two or three excerpts you really want to practice today, set the alarm for short distinct time and keep changing your practice pattern.
You can make the pattern like below:
time where to plactice
3m excerpt A
3m excerpt B
3m excerpt C
3m excerpt A
3m excerpt B
3m excerpt C
3m excerpt A
etc...
If you want to maximize the contextual interference effect, you can make your practice more complicated like below:
time where to plactice
3m long tone, scale
3m excerpt A (rhythm variation 1)
3m arpeggio
3m long tone, scale
3m excerpt B (rhythm variation 1)
3m long tone, scale
3m excerpt A (rhythm variation 2)
3m arpeggio
3m excerpt B (rhythm variation 2)
etc...
Variation is infinate and exact time length is not the point. Restarting many tasks so that your brain works well is more important.
If you feel tired during your practice, think about your practice schedule and you may improve your practice effectiveness.
Thank you for reading all the way to the very end of this article. Hope you will enjoy your pragress by making your practice more effective and also hape to see you soon, thank you.
