Practice, Practice, Practice

Like many young children before me, I was introduced to the world of music by the urgings of my parents. I hardly knew that I was agreeing to spend countless hours of the next decade in front of the piano. It wasn’t enough that I had to spend an hour every week with a teacher. Also like many young children before me, I had the most trouble with practicing outside of lessons. The first few weeks alone were spent playing scales over and over and over until my head felt numb and I had missed all of my favorite television shows. It didn’t get any better even after we moved past simple scales. The tune to Lightly Row will forever be etched into my brain. ‘It will get better,’ I thought foolishly, as I penciled in my hours on my practice chart, ‘Once I learn all the notes, I can teach myself and I won’t have to practice ever again!’ It wasn’t the first time that a six-year-old was wrong.

What naïve, six-year-old me did not know was that musicians never stop practicing. Gary Marcus, author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning spoke to multiple successful musicians and discovered that not a single one of them is done practicing. Although they have reached success in their particular art, none of them claimed to have mastered it. Marcus likens music to a lifelong journey, and one can only advance on this journey if one practices constantly. With practice, I had progressed from Lightly Row to simplified minuets. What I learned years later was that those beginning months of repetitive scales, as tedious as they were, were crucial for forming good habits, like properly placing my fingers on the keyboard, finding the right keys, and establishing a successful practice regime. For Marcus, who learned to play the guitar, this translated to proper posture with the instrument, navigating the fretboard, etc.

But what exactly begins in these first few sessions and continues on with the rest of one’s musical career? Yi Zuo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues conducted a study with mice that related practice with changes in the nervous system. Mice were separated into different groups. The first group of mice performed the same job every day. A second group had to perform two jobs at the same time, a third was placed in a cage full of different toys, and the fourth was left alone. Zuo and her colleagues found that the mice that did the same job every day grew more dendritic spines that were clustered together, thereby strengthening the connections in the brain that relate to the specific task. In contrast, those that did two jobs, were placed in cages full of new toys, or were left alone did not grow nearly as many clusters. Though these latter mice did form new spines on their neurons, the clusters were not nearly as numerous.

Zuo and her colleagues witnessed the actual growth of new dendritic spines through their microscope. On the first day the mice started the task, they observed one new spine, and by the fourth day, there was another that had sprouted next to it. Of course, we are not mice, but the human brain works in very similar ways. Thus, physical evidence was found that supported my piano teacher’s motto of ‘Practice, Practice, Practice.’

However, to grow these clusters of dendritic spines, one must first practice. We are not mice under the control of neurologists, destined to perform the same tasks day after day. Humans must be motivated to practice. Even if six-year-old me had known about and understood neural plasticity, she would have probably still found constant practice dull and repetitive. Marcus describes several music teachers in his book and their methods of keeping their students interested. Many, like my own music teacher, motivate their students using stickers and praise every time a song is perfected. One noteworthy teacher that Marcus writes about is Michele Horner, who not only keeps lessons interesting, but also involves the students’ parents. Teachers, musical or not, are charged with jobs such as catching minute mistakes, keeping their students interested, and exuding positivity. When dealing with sullen students like myself, these jobs become very difficult. But it is through these patient individuals that students like Marcus and me learn to better understand the language of music. Six-year-old me did get something right: it will get better. Musicians are never done practicing, but the more they practice, the farther they go in their lifelong journey.

Jabr, Ferris. "Spine Tuning: Finding Physical Evidence of How Practice Rewires the Brain." Scientific American. 16 Apr. 2012. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/16/spine-tuning-finding-physical-evidence-of-how-practice-rewires-the-brain/>.