I’m super excited to have special guest Dr. Molly Gebrian join me for this two-part blog series, to talk about her book, Learn Faster, Perform Better. Dr. Gebrian is a professional violist with a background in neuroscience, and a faculty member of the New England Conservatory.
Learn Faster, Perform Better draws from a wealth of neuroscience and motor learning research to devise practice approaches that help us learn music more effectively. By understanding how the brain processes, stores and retrieves information, practice methods that are designed to leverage our natural brain functions efficiently leads to superior learning outcomes. Thoroughly researched, yet explained in an intuitive and accessible way, Dr. Gebrian lays out how to translate the theory to the practice room. She gives highly practical (and easily implementable) strategies for tackling specific technical challenges and planning practice routines that are grounded in decades of scientific knowledge and research studies. Whereas her findings bolster many practice strategies that have long been known in music pedagogy, they also debunk some traditional approaches that have been proven, sometimes counterintuitively, to be ineffective. In my view, being empowered to reassess existing practice approaches in light of the science, and to not only know how to practice but understand why it works, is one of the key takeaways from her book.
The Importance of Taking A Break
A biggest and perhaps most foundational topic of the book is the role of rest in learning. The brain learns by strengthening synaptic connections between neurons, building neural pathways that encode the new information, and myelinating axons to expedite electrical signals sent from your brain to your body. These processes occur on their different timescales and happen only when the brain is resting. By giving your brain adequate rest at appropriate times, you allow it to do its job properly so that you can retain the new skills better over time.
How much rest is needed, and when? Drawing on research studies, Dr. Gebrian showed that breaks of various lengths have their peculiar benefits: from 10 second microbreaks, to quick 5 minute “watercooler” breaks, to spacing practice sessions apart through the day, these breaks engage different brain processes involved at different stages of learning, thereby facilitating improved memory retention. The book provides many fantastic concrete applications of this neuroscience, including how to optimally schedule one’s daily practice sessions to incorporate the necessary breaks, as well as structuring each session using techniques such as interleaved practicing and cycling through distinct pieces.
In reading her book, what struck me was how much of it resonated with my own self-experimentation with applying motor learning theory to piano. The majority of research studies focus on sports, and we both acknowledged that more formal studies are needed for music learning. Both our discoveries regarding how to translate the science to the practice room came about through self-experimentation. Dr. Gebrian tells of how the elimination of concertizing pressures during the start of the pandemic freed her to try the science on herself, risk-free, and needless to say, the investment to revamp her practice strategies paid off tremendously. For myself, I drew from my past experience in figure skating, having seen my coach methodically applying the science to my training, and tried to adapt the same thought process to piano practice.
Several topics in the book align with my own blog writings—external attentional focuses, imagery and auditory imagery, variation training. I’ll reserve these topics, as well as some piano specific questions, to Part 2 of this book review and interview. But I’ll now cover a very powerful approach to learning which I personally had not yet paid sufficient attention to: the superpower ability of the mind to learn, just by thinking.
Mental Practice
Mental practice is a strategy of practicing inside our heads without moving or making any sound… [and involves] hearing and feeling everything you need to be aware of when you play your instrument, but inside your head without actually doing it.
– Learn Faster, Perform Better
To the uninitiated, it sounds like black magic: the mere act of thinking about playing something makes you able to conjure it into existence—that is witchcraft! Not so, actually, as Dr. Gebrian demystified in her book with neuroscience studies showing that mental practice stimulates the brain to develop very similar neuronal activity as does physical practice. That is why mental practice is so powerful: a study on non-musicians showed that, under a specific experimental set up, the mental practice group was able to play a new scale as well as the physical practice group. Call it brain magic!
When mental practicing, you should be able to feel every minute detail in your head, such as which fingers are playing, the spacing between them, the weight of your arm or instrument, strength of the touch, and even the musical tone and sonic quality that you want to produce. “I’ve mental practiced many times on airplaces, but most of the time, it is done as part of my regular practice session,” Dr. Gebrian explained. “I mental practice a passage first and make sure I can hear and feel it in my mind the way I want, before trying it on my instrument. Anything that didn’t work on my instrument, I put back in my mind and mental practice again. So I’m going back-and-forth between mental and physical practice.”
Dr. Gebrian’s book is an invaluable resource of practical tips and pointers. She provides concrete suggestions on how to leverage strategic rest breaks, lay out a practice plan for which repertoire pieces to practice and when (because we’re usually working on multiple pieces at once), incorporate mental practice into your daily practice routine, and more. She also debunks many myths and suggests alternatives that are supported by neuroscience. One of my favorites is the “old way/new way” method: no longer do you have to be resigned about your bad habits being too deeply ingrained to kick, instead, simply juxtaposing it against the good habit you want to learn allows your brain to build a distinct neural pathway for the new habit, so that you now have the agency to choose to use the new pathway rather than fall back into the old pathway.
All of these takes deliberate effort and active engagement by the learner. Dr. Gebrian reminds us that effective practicing is itself a skill that takes practice and experience. Start small and work up from there. Even if it doesn’t feel like the traditional notion of what practicing constitutes (i.e. hacking away at your instrument for hours on end), it is worth considering that if the purpose of practicing is to get better, then whatever you do that makes you improve is practicing.
I close Part 1 of this book review with the very first question I posed to Dr. Gebrian: how did she manage to land a faculty position at a top music conservatory with a role primarily in teaching students how to learn? “It just happened organically because of the pandemic,” she explained. Having received a lot of requests from various music institutions and groups for Zoom workshops, including repeat invites from NEC, NEC came to see the value of her work enough to create a position specially for her. It is truly encouraging to see a music conservatory taking leadership in embracing interdisciplinary fields in its curriculum!
Q&A Candy (Part 1)
As part of the interview with Dr. Gebrian, I posed a set of Q&As which I transcribe here, lightly edited for brevity.
1. Can you explain what’s meant by “learning faster”? Does it result in learning deeper?
Learning faster usually results in shallow learning, and I wrestled with that for the title of my book. Many musicians use practice strategies that are not very effective, and because of that, they end up practicing mindlessly, reinforcing mistakes, and taking forever to learn things. But when you learn things on a really deep level using good learning strategies, you do end up learning a lot faster and a lot deeper. In the short term, it might feel that this is a really slow way of learning, but in the long run over weeks and months, it’s way less total time spent than it would have taken otherwise.
2. What’s your advice for learners to re-evaluate their existing practice methods in light of the science and learning theory?
My book is a fire hose of information, that’s probably also brand new to many people. It’s easy to get overwhelmed even if it makes sense to you and you want to try it. Like, now I have to overhaul my whole practicing and everything I’ve been doing? That can lead to paralysis. Rather than changing everything all at once overnight, I advocate to pick one thing in my book that seems most interesting to you, and just do that one thing. That is already going to be better than what you were doing. Integrate that into your regular practicing, and then pick something else to try next. Over time, your practicing will change to become more effective.
3. What if you receive advice that contradicts the science?
There’s a lot of bad advice out there that’s been passed down over the generations, purely out of tradition, that has no basis in science or that has been thoroughly debunked by the research. What I have observed is that when students quietly set aside contradictory advice and start practicing in ways that are more aligned with how we actually learn, they start making more progress. Their teacher would see that and may be open to knowing what the student did differently.
4. Can you walk us through how to recognize the milestones of each stage of the learning process, and how we might aim for the next stage?
It would have been really convenient if I had this nice line that tells me, here’s this, then here’s this, then here’s this. In truth, and this may sound unsatisfying and vague, it really comes from experience, intuition and experimenting. Everybody is different in terms of how different stages feel. A good indication that you’re ready for the next stage is when things start feeling easy and boring. Because we learn the most when we’re right outside our comfort zone, if you’re feeling too comfortable, it’s probably time to make yourself uncomfortable, at least a little bit. Most people have one of two tendencies: they either err on the side of being too safe and stay inside their comfort zone for too long, or they err on the side of getting way too far outside their comfort zone way too fast and finding that things exploded on them. Whichever yours is, learn to recognize when you’re falling into your tendency and to adjust accordingly: to step outside your comfort zone or to take a step back and go a little bit slower.
If you enjoyed Part 1 of this book review and interview with Dr. Gebrian, don’t forget to subscribe to my email list, and stay tuned for Part 2. I will be covering more fascinating topics from her book and interview, including some piano-specific challenges, and share more Q&A candy!
Meanwhile,
- Read the full interview transcript.
- Purchase the book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/7NtzIPB
- Check out Dr. Gebrian’s website:
http://www.mollygebrian.com/
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