What if I told you there’s a way to improve your practicing
efficiency and get healthier at the same time?
It’s true: recent research has
shown that moderate exercise right before learning a motor skill improves learning.
The study, published this month in the journal PLoS ONE, had
three groups of people learning a motor skill task that involved using a force
transducer to move a cursor through a kind of maze on the screen. One group had to run on a treadmill for 30
minutes right before learning the task, the second group also ran on the
treadmill but then got a one-hour break before doing the maze task, and the
third group had a leisurely walk instead of exercising.
The researchers found that the people in the running group
were the best learners, while the people who just walked or who ran and then
rested learned at about the same rate. The
researchers actually looked at two different kinds of information about how the
people learned: the number of errors
they made, and the speed at which they completed the task. These two aspects of performing a motor skill
are usually inversely related. Think
about playing a complicated piece of music:
if you play it slowly, you will make fewer mistakes. If you play it quickly, you’ll make more
mistakes. This is known as the
speed-accuracy trade-off, and it applies to pretty much everything we do. So does exercising before learning alter the
speed or the accuracy of the motor skill, or both?
The study found that the speed at which people moved the
cursor on the screen was not affected by exercising. Instead, people who exercised right before
the learning the motor skill made fewer errors than those who didn’t exercise. In other words, exercising increased accuracy
but not speed of the motor skill.
Why does exercising help learning? It’s been known for a while that, in general,
exercise increases neuroplasticity – the capacity of the brain to change. It’s thought that exercise increases the
levels of hormones and growth factors that foster the chemical changes underlying
learning. But most of the previous
studies have looked at the effect of exercise on declarative memory, the memory
for facts and events, rather than motor learning. Here we can see that exercise also boosts
motor skill learning, the kind of learning that we do when we sit down to
practice our musical instruments.
So you might consider going for a run or a bike ride before
your daily practice session. We all know
exercise is good for us, but it’s also good to know that it’ll help us learn
our scales and pieces better.
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