I had the chance to sit down with Dr. Molly Gebrian, author of Learn Faster, Perform Better, for an in-depth interview about her book, and beyond. We covered many fascinating topics—external focuses, imagery and analogies, piano-specific learning challenges and other learning theories, to name a few—and ended with a round of Q&As to gleam her insights and advice for music learners looking to improve their learning process and practice habits.
Some of the interview content has been included in my two-part book review series, and I was originally not planning to release the interview recording. But the raw interview turned out to be just pure gold, so I felt I had to transcribe it for the broader audience. Below is the transcript of our hour-long discussion, lightly edited for clarity and readability.
— Chia Ying Lee
CYL: I thought we could start off with introductions for each other’s background. I’ve watched several of your other video blog interviews and you were frequently asked to do your regular bio background so, no offense, we’ll skip over that, but I wanted to ask you two things. What prompted you to write this book, and what’s the circumstance in which you found a faculty position that’s focused on learning?
MG: That’s right, I’ve talked about my background many times, so we don’t have to do that. With the book, I’ve always been a voracious reader, and it was sort of in the back of my mind my whole life that it would always be fun to write a book someday, but not as a tangible thing. Then when I started presenting on these topics about 10 or 15 years ago, people would say, “have you written a book? You should write a book!” I’m like I don’t have time to write a book. And then the pandemic happened and I realized that if I’m going to write a book, now is the time because I didn’t have any concerts and if I were to write a book I wouldn’t be able to practice to the amount that I was before. So I realized at some point in 2020 that if I’m going to do this I need to do this now. So I wrote it in the summer of 2021 and my plan was just to write it first and then see if somebody wanted to publish it. But in February 2021, I got an email from one of the acquisitions editors at Oxford University Press who had seen some of my videos who thought this would be a really good topic for a book, and my reaction was, funny you should ask because like that’s the plan this summer. So it was nice that I didn’t have to go find a publisher. If the pandemic hadn’t happened, I don’t think I ever would have written it because I don’t think I would’ve had time. So that’s where the book came from.
In terms of my position at NEC (New England Conversatory), that was also a product of the pandemic. Early on in the pandemic, music schools were scrambling to figure out how to teach music on Zoom, and at that point lots of people knew about my work from seeing me present at conferences and other places. So I started getting emails from people asking if I would be willing to do a presentation on practicing for my studio, my orchestra, whatever. And I started doing that more and more, and one of the places that contacted me was New England Conservatory because I was a student there and they knew me and my work. At most schools, these presentations were just a one-time thing, but NEC started having me back every single semester to do presentations and workshops via Zoom. Then at some point, the conversation became that NEC thought it would be great to actually have me there rather than doing these individual workshops on Zoom, which was something I would love to do, but they would have to create a position for that. So it was in the works for a couple years, and finally my position is part funded through a grant that NEC got to support me as well as a bunch of other programs they are doing. So that’s how it just happened organically because of the pandemic, and it’s been really really wonderful getting to teach there.
CYL: That is amazing. From my own background in academia, I know how hard it is to get funding. And your position is also very unusual. I know some faculty departments have, for example, piano pedagogy programs, but something that’s really focused on—and not that you’re not focused on the music itself—but something focused on non-music science and theory as well, that is unusual.
MG: Very unusual, yes, and NEC as an institution, with jazz and the whole CMA major, has always been very unusual in that it’s not just classical music like in other conservatories. The conservatory has always had a broader focus and in a way it’s not super surprising for me, but on the other hand, it’s really surprising that a school of music would put money behind something like this and say, this is important for our students and we want to pay somebody to do this. Because you’re right, money is very hard to come by in academia and schools of music don’t do this kind of thing. So props to NEC for realizing that this is important. In my opinion, every school of music should have a required class for students to learn how to practice, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
CYL: I agree. So to give a bit of my own background. I went to Michigan and I studies in the piano performance department. My own teacher actually was the head of pedagogy, and he knew how to teach pedagogically. So I learned my technique from him, I learned how to practice from him, but I didn’t learn the actual pedagogy part of it. Only now, much later on, which I came to after having taken a complete break from piano to figure skate for 10 years, did I start to wonder at that. My skating coach introduced me to this whole theory of motor skill learning. I came back to piano and I was practicing in my old ways, which wasn’t wrong, but I started finding connections when I’d be practicing a certain way and realized, hey, there’s actually a reason why it works. So that was like a lightbulb that went off in my head and that was the reason why I started my blog. I’m pretty sure there are other areas that utilize this, but coming from skating, I think that domain transfer is pretty unique as well.
Right now I’m kind of like a wannabe learning theory person just because I barely have time to read literature, and sometimes I might read something that makes sense and then I read something else contradictory and of course in research that’s always contradictory views on the same thing. So there’s so much to sift through and interpret and synthesize, it’s a challenge.
MG: I agree and I think there’s a lot we still don’t know. There are contradictions, absolutely, but there’s so much we also don’t know and that makes it more difficult as well, because it’s not like the answers are all out there and we just have to go find them. The fact is that the answers are not all out there.
CYL: For sure, and I’ve been trying to educate myself on all this literature, but at some point in time, I’m finding that, (A) That’s not my main job so I don’t have endless amount of time to read literature, and (B) I do not have a lab to try to do experiments. The experiments are on myself…
MG: Same! Myself and my students.
CYL: [laugh] so just having the opportunity to meet and talk with other people who are doing their own self-experiments, find ideas and directions for where in the literature to look. My personal background is in math, I did music and math in college. So I have next to no knowledge of neuroscience other than what I read on Google. So apologies in advance if what I say is silly.
MG: Not at all!
External Focuses of Attention
CYL: I had a gigantic list of topics I’d love to discuss with you. Let’s start out on external focuses of attention. This is one of my favorite topics because it is a very prominent learning tool when I was figure skating. Think of the stereotypical things like skating around the cone. We also use other physical objects that serve as external focuses, also a lot of imagery, because in performance we don’t actually have the cone there so we have to imagine a lot of things in our head. So this was a big topic. To start, what are your thoughts on the use of imagery or mnemonics in music practice? Have you done any of those with your students? Also to clarify, especially for people who are less familiar, what’s the difference between internal and external focus. When it comes to imagery, since imagery is in your head, why is it an external focus?
MG: I think the terminology isn’t very clear if you don’t know what it means, but the way that I typically explain it to students is that internal focus is focusing on specific muscle movements of your body, whereas external focus is focusing on something outside your body, or the effect you want your movement to have. The analogy that I often make that really helps people understand what this means is learning to speak a second language: if you’re learning another language and you hear a native speaker say a word that you don’t know, you ask them to say it again slowly, and you would repeat the sound and try to mimic the sound. That’s an external focus but the native speaker would not ever say, well, you put your tongue here on your teeth and then you do this with your lips. If that’s what you’re trying to emulate, that would be so confusing and it would be so hard to figure out how to say a word that way. That’s an internal focus. And we’ve all had that experience where you mimic the sound rather than thinking about what you are doing with your mouth and your tongue. So I think we have an intuitive understanding of that. With the question of imagery, yes, imagery is an internal thing, but it’s not focusing on the specific muscle movements of your body. That’s why in a lot of the literature on internal versus external focus, they talk about the importance of using analogies to understand how to do something because that gives you a bigger more unified image that communicates to your body what to do, rather than like do this, do this, do this? One of my favorite examples is from one of Gabriel Wulf’s studies1 that gives an example of the internal focus feedback and then the equivalent external focus feedback, and the external focus feedback is something like, move your arm like you’re whipping a horse [gesturing]. It’s a very clear image, whereas the internal focus feedback is to accelerate the movement of your arm, first the shoulder then the upper arm then the end, and… it’s hard to follow what you’re supposed to do. Whereas with the imagery of using a whip, OK, obviously I know how to do that.
CYL: It’s so coincidental that you raise this particular example, because just last weekend at my piano lesson, my teacher was explaining to me a concept that he called the whiplash, which is a specific technique to get power for big chords, like for triple fortes. He said, “just do the whiplash” and I asked, “what’s the whiplash?” The interesting part of the exchange that followed is that he started explaining to me first using internal focuses: how the hand should move, how the elbow should move, how the shoulders should move, and I thought, yes of course, that’s just like using a whiplash. And ultimately what stuck is the image of the whiplash. Once I understood what I needed to do, I stopped thinking about the internal focuses and just thought about the analogy, and it works.
MG: Yeah, I have always taught using a lot of analogies because my teacher in undergrad, who is really important for me as a teacher, used all sorts of wacky analogies that were really helpful, and I think I probably got that in my own teaching from him, but when I when I first read the literature on internal versus external focus I realized “oh that’s why work so well!” And so now I try to cultivate that in my teaching and come up with as many analogies as I can to help students understand not only this is what it feels like, but this is what you should be doing with your body.
CYL: Agree, we definitely should talk about this process of re-evaluating some of these traditional practice methods: what works? What wouldn’t work? But let’s come back to that later, and continue with external focuses. With analogies it seems to tie very closely to the idea of using mnemonics to cue or trigger certain movement patterns.
MG: I was curious what you meant by mnemonics. When I think of mnemonics, I think of something like “Every Child Deserves Fun” for remembering the notes on the staff or something like that. I think you mean something else.
CYL: Yeah, like colors of the rainbow would be “Richard Of York…” and however the rest of that goes, yes is a form of mnemonics, but I’m going by the dictionary definition, which is simply a word or phrase that encapsulates a more complicated meaning2. So in that sense, I would consider the whiplash as a mnemonic.
MG: Got it. The reason they work is that brains really like information put into some kind of package like that. Brains have a hard time with information that feels disconnected and random, like your arm or your wrist or your elbow, which all feels like separate pieces of information that are hard to integrate. But if you have something to unify it, such as the whiplash, it is much easier for your brain to hold onto that information and so as learners, and certainly as teachers, I think we really need to do that for our students, that we’re not presenting a whole bunch of little slices of information but that exists under a large umbrella as a concept. Because then it’s easier to understand and remember.
CYL: Do you encounter situations with students where you might describe something, tag it with a word or imagery, but the student doesn’t quite get it. My observation is that imagery is very personal, so that my teacher might call it a whiplash, but perhaps I might call it something else.
MG: Yes, all the time. All my students know I have five or six different analogies for the same thing because something that resonates with me may not resonate with the students at all. It may not mean anything to them. So for any given thing I have lots of different analogies to describe the same thing that I have learned over the years, and usually one of these is going to work for them. But if none of those work I’m pretty good at coming up with new ones on the spot. The other thing I do is, once a student starts to get it even though I can tell my analogies were not working, I’ll ask them to describe what is their analogy for what this feels like or sounds like. Sometimes students’ analogies are so good that I’ll steal them; other times it just doesn’t compute for me at all. But it doesn’t matter. It computes for them and I can see that they are doing it correctly or getting the sound that we’re going for or whatever. So yeah, I’m always encouraging students to come up with their own analogies and having them describe it back to me using their own language. And then whatever that analogy is, even if it doesn’t make any sense to me, I make a note of it to make sure that I continue to use that analogy with them going forward.
CYL: Wow, you’re a very diligent teacher!
MG: Yes, because it means something to them. I had a student for a couple years in Arizona with whom we were really working on getting a deep rich sound and when he finally got it, I was “okay none of my analogies really worked for you, but now you have it though so how do you describe that?” And he went “yeah it sounds like a golden string sound,” and he explained this very complicated analogy that didn’t mean anything to me, but that doesn’t matter. I keep notes on all my students on my iPad so I wrote it down, and after that anytime he wasn’t quite finding his sound I would remind him “you’ve lost your golden string sound” and he’s like “oh my gosh you’re totally right” and that was all I had to say, because it was a meaningful concept to him.
CYL: It would be fantastic to have you as a teacher! For me, my initial exploration of learning theory, right after I came back from a long break from piano, happened when I was without a teacher for some time, and I had to develop a lot of these methods myself. Sure, I did a couple of one-off masterclasses, and the teacher would say something, but as the learner, it fell on me to be the one to translate the teacher’s instructions into what makes sense for me. That involves some degree of active learning, and it’s also important as the learner to recognize that this kind of personalization is necessary. But it’s even more helpful to have a teacher who can support that.
MG: Exactly. I understand the world through language and language is really important to me, but at the same time I recognize that for things that have to do with how it feels or how it sounds, language breaks down at a certain point. You can’t actually describe it in words. So any student is going to have to translate what their teacher says even if their teacher tries to be as precise and multifaceted with their language as possible. But I agree with you that as teachers we have a responsibility to figure out if our student is understanding what we’re saying, and try to use language that means something to them rather than the language we’ve always used. I’m sure this is true for piano too, but there’s all sorts of things in string playing, and words that are commonly used, that I think do not translate at all to a student who doesn’t already know what that feels like. We always talk about weight in the bow arm and in transferring weight into the string. If you don’t know what that feels like, that word “weight” means absolutely nothing. And once you figure it out, that isn’t what it feels like at all—it does not feel like your arm is heavy. So I haven’t used that word for years because I discovered that this word does not translate. It’s used all the time in string teaching, but for a student who’s never felt what it should feel like, “weight” communicates a totally wrong concept. But there’re these traditions of ways things are described and people don’t stop to think, “Wait, I know what this feels like but if I didn’t, is that actually what it feels like?” I don’t think it does. We need to find new language.
CYL: Maybe it’s different from what you would do as a string player, but in piano playing, there’s also the concept of using arm weight. But at the end of the day, “weight” is basically just jargon.
MG: Exactly if you don’t know what it means or what it feels like, it really does not communicate very well what you should be doing.
Piano-specific Learning Challenges
CYL: Let’s transition to talking about piano. My target audience are piano learners, most of them adult amateurs and maybe also piano teachers who could use some of these ideas, but really my perspective comes from that of the learner. In piano there are a lot of things that are peculiar to piano, though I’m pretty sure these are musical concepts that all instrumentalists encounter. Things like spatial awareness of the keyboard—frequently we don’t get to look at our hands, especially if we’re looking at the score. Things like polyrhythms, say triplets in one hand and quadruplets in the other. There are mnemonics for that to help. What are the neuroscience considerations and what does learning theory say about spatial awareness, rhythms, polyrhythms, trying to get our hands moving in completely orthogonal directions…?
MG: Right. With spatial awareness, the visual component of it does seem to be very piano-specific because the keyboard is so visual in the way it’s laid out; whereas for me as a string player the fingerboard, well, there’s nothing really to look at. And so the visual component of it—even if you’re not looking at your hands because like you said, you can’t look at both hands at the same time and sometimes you don’t look at either one because you’re looking at the page—seems to be especially important for keyboardists and it informs the spatial awareness and proprioceptive awareness of where you are in space. Also for keyboard, you guys are moving much more than a string player. (I’m obviously moving, but it’s kind of more contained to one place.) So yes, the concept of proprioception, knowing where your body parts are in space, is a really important sense. Afterall, it’s a really important skill that we all have, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to make our way around the world. Some people have a better sense of that than others, but it can be developed.
MG: What I find would help, especially for people whose spatial or proprioceptive sense seems to be fuzzy or not very well developed, is mental practice: can you feel in your head where you are on the keyboard? Can you feel the shape of the chord or whatever in your hand and feel the topography of the keys under your fingers? Can you visualize that in terms of what it looks like on the keyboard? For me as a string player, if I imagine in my mind where I am on the fingerboard, it’s not visual the way it is for piano, but I do know exactly where I am in a spatial sense. And when students don’t have that, it’s really hard for them to play in tune and get around the instrument. But mental practice seems to really help develop those skills. What the research on mental practice shows is that even novices who are pretty new to something, if they mental practice, it gives them a mental representation—that’s what it’s called—that’s much richer and more well developed and looks more like someone who has far more experience than they actually do, versus a beginner who has not done mental practice. So it just builds out the whole concept of what you’re doing in a way that’s really really helpful, because if you can’t know where you are on the instrument by feel, it’s really hard to play. Knowing where you are by feel is relying on muscle memory too, versus looking at it, and muscle memory is really really strong. I mean, we all know this, you do something as a kid, ride a bike, ski, whatever, and then come back many years later and maybe at first you’re a little rusty, but instantly your body remembers how to do it. I think especially for pianists, because the keyboard is so visual, it’s too easy to rely on your eyes for knowing where you’re going. String players will try to do this too, that if we have a big shift, people will look at the fingerboard to know where they’re going, but actually if you can train it to know where you’re going by feel, it’ll be a lot stronger and stick with you better because of how powerful muscle memory is.
CYL: That makes a lot of sense! Mental practice is one of the things which I kinda do sometimes, not very diligently, but I’ll be more diligent about it now!
MG: Yes, it’s so powerful. Sometimes people have never heard of it before other times, but more commonly people dabble in it a little bit but not really. People are always amazed when they start to do it intentionally and as part of their practice, how quickly it solves problems and how quickly it clarifies things. Whenever I work with students, especially someone who’s never really mental practiced before, I have them mental practice something specific, walk them through that, and then have them play it on their instrument. Their reaction is like “whoa I can just play it now!” Yeah you can and that’s how it works. It’s really cool.
CYL: Just want to clarify something about mental practice: is it the case that you’re either sitting still or maybe you have some movements but you’re not actually at the piano or you’re not holding your viola while doing it, and it’s something you do away from your instrument?
MG: Not necessarily. I mean, you can: I’ve mental practiced many times on airplanes, and I am not sitting there with my viola on the airplane. But most of the time, the way I mental practice is as part of my regular practice session and I’m holding my viola because I’m practicing so typically the way my practice sessions work is, whatever I am working on, I mental practice it first, and I make sure that I can hear it and I can feel it in my mind the way I want. If there’s anything that’s not clear or anything that’s not right, I fix it in my mind first and then I try it on my instrument. Anything that didn’t work on my instrument, I put back in my mind and mental practice it again. So almost all the time when mental practicing, my viola is in my hands because I’m going back-and-forth between mental and physical practice.
CYL: There’s a common technique amongst pianists we would practice a passage with eyes closed. This sounds different from mental practice, though, like it would require visualization of the keyboard, yet it still involves actually playing right?
MG: Right, that’s different. If you’re actually playing, then that’s different. Another thing pianists will do is to play one hand and in the mind play the other such that you’re not actually pushing the keys down. That’s also not mental practice because you are actually moving, but that is sort of a hybrid between playing vs mental practice because one of the hands doesn’t have any sound coming out and so you have to know in your mind what’s supposed to be happening without getting the feedback from the instrument in the way that you normally would.
CYL: I see. So when playing with eyes closed, there’s the component of the actual feedback as a tactile sensation, and obviously the auditory part of it as well, whereas with mental practice you’re not actually getting any feedback from the instrument at all.
MG: That’s right. All of it’s happening in your mind and you know that the feedback you’re getting from your mind is accurate. That’s such a weird thing to say, because you’re not actually getting feedback, but I can know in my mind if I’ve just played something out of tune, I can know in my mind if I just used a bad sound because I know what it feels like to use my bow in a way that won’t produce a good sound. It’s not physical feedback from the instrument, but it’s feedback from my mind to know when it wasn’t right and I need to try again.
CYL: Let’s move on… what about polyrhythms, the piano learner’s nightmare?
MG: Ha, exactly. With polyrhythms, that’s something you guys have to deal with. Me, as a string player, it’s very rare that I have to play polyrhythms with myself. But with polyrhythms, you definitely have to understand them as a composite, so like if you’re doing two against three, and you’re trying to think two in one hand and three in the other, it’s never gonna work. But if you’re thinking, bum-ba-ba-dum [gesturing], and in the hands alternating that way, it becomes easier. So for any polyrhythm, you have to figure out how the composite sounds like if you put these two rhythms together. If you think of them as separate things, it’s never going to work. It’s similar to what we were talking about before, that the brain needs things under a large umbrella instead of separate pieces of information. For 2-against-3 and 3-against-4, those are common polyrhythms, and there’re mnemonic devices for them. 3-against-4, I can’t remember the common one…
CYL: I know that one: “pass the god-damn butter!”
MG: Yeah right, that one! For more unusual ones, like I’m playing a piece for viola and piano right now that has a whole bunch of five over two and I have to play the five. I don’t have to play the two in the middle there, but the two does come halfway through note number three in the five and the piano is not playing five, so I had to learn how to hear and feel that composite of 123 and 45 to know where to place my five. If I just try to understand it as this is a five and this is a two, that’s never gonna work. There are apps now that you can put in literally any polyrhythm you want and it will play it for you so you can hear the composite, and then either you have to come up with a mnemonic for yourself or just memorize what the composite sounds like and play it as a composite.
CYL: That’s cool. That definitely is the challenge. I’ve heard of different claims with having to hear what the three sounds like and hear what the four sounds like, and having two separate channels going in your brain…
MG: I disagree with that because that’s not how brains work. In order to play it, you don’t want to be thinking the 3 is this and the 4 is this. You need to be able to play the composite as a unit and listen to the 3 and listen to the 4 separately, yes. But you don’t want to be thinking of them separately in order to execute it.
Other Learning Theories
CYL: I also want to bounce off talking about ensemble playing. Pianists don’t frequently get to play in ensembles and that is such a big pity. That in itself is such a good learning experience. I was curious exactly where that fits into the overall learning theory, and that’s why I had raised a question about other learning theories. For example, I read about Ecological Dynamics, and in some sense ensemble playing also has some elements of Ecological Dynamics, right?
MG: Yeah, that’s usually applied to team sports and things like that. Classical music performances are often rehearsed before you go to perform whereas for a soccer game, you don’t rehearse the soccer game and then go perform the soccer game. It’s something that’s constantly changing in the moment and that’s a different set of skills than getting up and playing a piece of music. But you’re right that ensemble playing is closer to that than playing by yourself.
CYL : I’m also reminded that you had a video on a really funky way of modifying the metronome use to randomly skip or omit beats. Can that also be viewed in the lens of ecological dynamics?
MG: It’s interesting. I’ve never considered it in that vein. I don’t know the ecological dynamics area of the research very well, but what I know is that it’s usually applied to situations such as a soccer game where you need to improvise in the moment. If you think of a soccer game as an improvisation in a way, since you don’t know how the game is going to go, like you have your soccer skills and you have your tactics and strategy, but you don’t actually know what’s gonna happen in the game and you as the person in the game have to react in the moment to do what’s happening. That’s a very different set of skills than the skills that we use as classical musicians. I would say jazz performers who are improvising in the moment would be much closer to a soccer game. Or, I’ve seen ecological dynamics applied to something like rock climbing where you have to adjust to the conditions of the moment, and rock climbers study what they’re going to climb first, they don’t just improvise it on the spot. For classical musicians, it’s a much more controlled environment in that we’re not reacting to totally novel things happening in the moment in the way that you would in a soccer game.
MG: Now the metronome thing is a way to test your rhythmic understanding and your internal sense of pulse in a way that’s different than just having it on the beat, but it’s not about reacting in the moment to unpredictable input. Even if the metronome is clicking randomly, you should have your internal sense of pulse steady and the metronome just confirms if you’re steady or not. But with ensemble playing, especially in a performance, yes you rehearse, yes you know how everything fits together, yes you’re performing this rehearsed memorized thing, but obviously things always go differently in performance and you do have to react in the moment. That’s why performance run-throughs in front of a low stakes audience are important because you can’t really practice those skills of adjusting in the moment to what’s happening in your environment outside of that environment and those are important skills to have as a performer.
CYL: That definitely clarifies a lot of things for me. Also as pianists, we can’t bring our pianos with us, so the general strategy is to practice on as many different instruments as possible.
MG: Exactly, that’s one of the extra variables that you guys have. Do you know the book The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle? It’s great. The reason I bring it up is, he doesn’t use any of the terminology that we’ve been talking about, but he does talk about this and there’s one chapter in particular where he talks about a soccer game, versus a gymnast rehearsing their routine and then performing, or a figure skater performing their program. Those are different skills in the brain, though the underlying neurological mechanism is largely the same. It’s just different skills and the way that he talks about it in the book is great and really accessible. Anyway it’s a great book. You might enjoy it.
CYL: That’s next on my reading list!
Q&A Candy
CYL: We have barely 15 minutes left and there were a ton of topics we didn’t get to. But I did want to run through the Q&As that will help me structure the interview portion of the book review.
MG: I’ll talk fast!
CYL: So the first question, can you explain what’s meant by “learning faster”? Does it result in learning deeper? For context, there’s a lot of obsession with and peer pressure around speed learning, “I learnt XXX piece in 2 weeks.”
MG: Yes, you said that learning faster usually results in shallow learning, and I agree with you, and that’s something that I wrestled with for the title of my book. I think that a lot of musicians use practice strategies that are not very effective and they end up practicing mindlessly and reinforcing mistakes over and over and over, and it takes them forever to learn things because of that. 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. So sometimes in the short term, like in the practice session itself, it might feel that it is taking a lot longer and that this is a really slow way of learning, but in the long run over weeks and months, it’s way less time than it would take so that’s what that means. Thank you for that question!
CYL: I wrote a sentence in one of my blog posts, “Variation Learning is not for the impatient learner.”
MG: Yeah! That’s a great sentence!
CYL: OK, next question. What’s your advice for learners to reevaluate their existing practice methods in light of the science and learning theory?
MG: Great question. I think that my book in particular is like a fire hose of information. It’s just a lot of information and a lot of it is probably brand new to a lot of people if they’ve never thought about this stuff before. It’s really easy to get overwhelmed, even if you read my book and feel that this makes so much sense and want to try this. Like, now I have to overhaul my whole practicing and everything I’ve been doing? That can lead to paralysis and throwing it all out because it feels like too much. And so what I advocate to people is, specific to my book, pick one thing in there that seems interesting or intriguing to you or makes a lot of sense to you, and just do that one thing. You don’t have to change everything all at once overnight. Just change one thing because that’s going to be better already than what you were doing. Integrate that and have that become part of your regular practicing, and then pick something else to try next. Over time, your practicing will change and will be more effective, but you don’t have to do it all overnight.
CYL: That’s fantastic advice. One related question is, maybe this is off the record [laugh], what if your teacher’s advice contradicts learning theory?
MG: That’s a really difficult one and I struggle with that. I never want to say to someone that their teacher is wrong because that feels really professionally disrespectful. At the same time, a lot of teachers are wrong and there’s a lot of bad advice out there that’s been passed down over the generations that has no basis in anything and it’s been thoroughly debunked by the research and it’s only been passed down because it’s tradition and nobody thought to examine it. So I think that’s a really tricky one. What I have observed is that when students ignore their teachers who are giving them bad advice and start doing things that are more aligned with how we actually learn, they start obviously making more progress and their teacher sees that. And their teacher sees like, “oh, you sound really good, you’re doing a lot better than you were,” and either they don’t care to know what caused that or they ask the student what are you doing differently and then the student will tell them and then maybe the teacher‘s mind will be opened to “oh maybe there’s another way.” But I think that’s a really really tricky thing because there is a lot of really terrible advice out there around practicing that has no basis in anything.
CYL: You said it perfectly, very diplomatic.
MG: My approach with everything is that I’m just providing information for people. I’m not making anybody do that and I’ve had students who don’t want to do that. That’s fine—it’s not my life, it’s your life. I know it will make your life easier, but you don’t have to do anything whatsoever. I’m just giving you the information, so do with it what you will. So yeah, I try to be diplomatic and hands off in that way.
CYL: Next question, can you walk us through how to recognize the milestones of each stage through the learning process, and how we might aim for the next stage.
MG: That’s a really good question too. It would have been really nice if I had this nice line, like, here’s this, then here’s this, then here’s this. I think that that comes from—and this is going to sound so unsatisfying and vague—it comes from experience, intuition and experimenting. I think that everybody is different in terms of how different stages feel. I would say a good indication that you’re ready for the next stage of things is that things start feeling easy and boring, and you don’t wanna do it anymore in the way that you have been or that you can do something without really thinking that much about it. Because we learn the most when we’re right outside our comfort zone, so if you’re feeling too comfortable, it’s probably time to make yourself uncomfortable, at least a little bit. But it is something that I think everybody also has 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. Both of those approaches are not the greatest (for me it’s definitely staying inside my comfort zone for too long) and so whatever your tendency is recognizing, “OK, this is my tendency, I’m falling into my tendency right now, time for me to kind of step outside my comfort zone” or for somebody on the other end, like “I was trying to tap way too much way too fast that’s why it all exploded, I need to take a step back and go a little bit slower.”
CYL: That makes so much sense. You also allude to the fact that as learners we have to gain experience which takes time, and we have to be active participants in the process. Which leads to my next question, a bit of a devil’s advocate: on the one hand there needs to be trust in the process, even if we don’t see immense improvement immediately, like how a child grows slowly. But on the other hand, could some of these practice regiments just become a rote formula?
MG: For sure, and I think most people actually practice according to a rote formula where they’re not actually thinking. In my mind, good practicing is active problem-solving in the moment: looking at what is not working for me in a very broad sense, what do I want to achieve, how can I try to get there? Most people are never taught to practice or they have one or two practice strategies that they apply to literally everything. Say, some people were told at some point that it’s good to practice in rhythms, so they practice everything in rhythms. No, that’s like using a hammer for every single thing and you might need a screwdriver sometimes. Rather, really looking at the problem at hand, what are you noticing in your playing that’s not working for you. Is it a specific technical problem? Are you not able to be as expressive as you want on stage? Those have very different solutions obviously. Looking at that and having this large bag of tools that you can draw from to find the tool that is good for this problem. Maybe it’s the perfect tool, problem solved, great. Maybe that tool worked in the past but it’s not working now. I think that’s often where people get stuck. They have a tool that worked really well for some things but then it didn’t work in a specific instance yet they just keep trying to apply that tool. No, look for a different tool. So, I think that always being creative and adaptable with problem-solving in the practice room is the way to go, because the minute you get stuck on one way of doing things, that’s when it’ll stop working for you.
CYL: Totally agree, and I like the analogy of a toolbox too. Next question: do adults, and mostly I’m thinking of amateur adults, learn differently from children?
MG: The answer to this is both yes, and no. No, in that our brains are all human brains that obey the same principles of how we learn. That being said, the job of a child’s brain is to learn, so that they don’t die, basically—evolutionarily—and children’s brains have a different neurochemical soup that allows them to absorb information more readily than adults. Anybody with young children in their lives knows that they absorb the most random facts about all sorts of things. They don’t even try, they just absorb it. Whereas adult brains typically can’t do that with the same facility as kids, so as adults we need to have much more intention and focus in our practicing versus kids. Like, will kids learn a lot faster if they use all the practice methods and stuff that I talk about in my book? For sure, but they don’t need them in the way that we do as adults because their brains are supposed to just soak up as much as they possibly can with minimal effort.
CYL: I really like your answer because there’s a common misconception especially in figure skating that adults prefer to learn “analytically”. But no, we don’t learn motor skills analytically.
MG: Right. The difference in that regard is that as adults we have hopefully developed prefrontal cortices, and kids don’t. And the prefrontal cortex is how you apply the analytical way of thinking. That’s why a lot of times, child prodigies have a hard time making the transition to an adult professional because they didn’t have a prefrontal cortex when they were little and so they couldn’t do that analysis or rumination. They were just relying purely on muscle memory and intuition. And when the prefrontal cortex comes online and it starts doing its job, then they start getting in their head and overthinking things. And it’s not that you can’t do these things as an adult. It’s just that the prefrontal cortex is really helpful but can also get in the way. You have to learn how to use it effectively without letting it get in your way.
CYL: Very interesting! A bit of a related question to the previous one is about kicking bad habits. From my personal experience with both piano and figure skating, I started off learning bad technique, and had to completely revamp my technique at some point, and it took… well, the magic number is 2 years. What timeline should we be expecting to overcome bad habits? I’m thinking especially since it gets demoralizing when it’s really hard and takes a long time.
MG: What you said is about right in my experience too. I had a lot of bad habits in my playing that I had to get rid of, really deeply ingrained bad habits that I had to totally re-learn. I would say it took about a year-ish to be able to do the new habit reliably in the practice room and not fall into my old habit, but it took another year or maybe more before my new habit was there all the time like in lessons, performance and high-pressure situations. And that for me was the most frustrating part of the process—I can do this fine in the practice room, so why is this old habit coming back like the minute I get on stage? But it’s normal when we’re under pressure to revert back. So yeah, for a deeply ingrained physical habit, I would say the two year timeline seems accurate. I mean, I can’t put any literature, but that’s accurate in my personal experience and also from observing students.
Unfortunately, we reached the top of the hour with one Q&A question left to go, but Dr. Gebrian kindly sent her reply to the question via email.
CYL: You talked about goal setting for practicing and for the preparation process for a big performance. What about goal setting for a performance itself? People like to say “just play and see what worked and what didn’t”. What’s a better approach?
MG: I think it can be very helpful to set a goal for the performance because otherwise it’s too easy to fall into a perfectionistic mindset. My goal used to be “play everything perfectly” and so I was always disappointed. For a long time, my goal in performance was to control my performance anxiety better than I had in the previous performance. So even if I still didn’t control it very well, if it was at least better than the last time, that was a success. I think this is a more realistic, healthier way to set goals. These days, my goals for performance usually center around expression, taking risks, and connecting with the audience. I think if we have realistic, achievable goals for performance, it helps us stay focused on what’s actually important to us while on stage, rather than getting into a negative spiral when we make little mistakes here and there.
Footnotes
- Wulf G, McConnel N, Gärtner M, Schwarz A. Enhancing the learning of sport skills through external-focus feedback. J Mot Behav. 2002 Jun;34(2):171-82. doi: 10.1080/00222890209601939. PMID: 12057890.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12057890/ ↩︎ - The formal definition of mnemonics is that they are cognitive strategies or techniques that facilitate encoding, storage, and retrieval of information in memory by creating meaningful associations, structures, or cues beyond the raw material itself. ↩︎
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