Article: "Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions"

The 2016 article is from John Hopkins Medical and summarizes some research done there on learning motor skills.

     “What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row,” says Celnik. The work, described in the Jan. 28 edition of the journal Current Biology, has implications not only for leisure skills, like learning to play a musical instrument or a sport, but also for helping patients with stroke and other neurological conditions regain lost motor function, he says.

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     Celnik says the alterations in training have to be small, something akin to slightly adjusting the size or weight of a baseball bat, tennis racket or soccer ball in between practice sessions. Current studies by Celnik’s team, still underway and not yet published, suggest that changing a practice session too much, like playing badminton in between tennis bouts, brings no significant benefit to motor learning.

     “If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation,” he says. “The modification between sessions needs to be subtle.”

The formal paper published in Current Biology is available online: "Motor skills are strengthened through reconsolidation" by Nicholas F. Wymbs, Amy J. Bastian, and Pablo A. Celnik.