Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sphardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Today were going to introduce a concept which can be used for a lot of things. It can be used for tennis and golf, and it can be used on working on your character traits, but it will take some time to develop, so today's class is just an introduction to this concept.
We've all heard the expression, Practice makes perfect. There's a psychologist named Malcolm Gladwell who has done research that shows that expertise is developed over 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Some may argue that you don't need 10,000 hours, you need 5,000- but everyone agrees with this concept that you need to practice. How does that work?
I'll use an easy example- if you want to learn how to jump rope, you keep on practicing and practicing and practicing, doing the same movement again and again and again and again, building up your coordination until you're able to jump rope, or ride a unicycle or anything else.
This is not only for physical activity. It could be giving a presentation. If I give the same class or presentation many times, it goes more smoothly. It's less stiff and awkward. Another example is driving. The first time you learn how to drive, you put your hands on the steering wheel, stiffly turning like the instructor told you to. Turn the wheel once, then holding your hands together a second time. It’s clumsy until after many, many repetitions. Now you're up to changing lanes, highway driving and texting at the same time. It becomes automatic. How does that happen?
Practice makes perfect, through a process called myelination. I first heard this term at a convention a few years ago, and it was fascinating. We need a little science background: We have, in our brains, something called neurons. These are the cellular building blocks of our brains, and they contain something called dendrites. If you remember science, they’re like little hairs at the end of the neuron, that receive signals from other neurons, and they process those signals. Then there are long cables, called axons, that interact with other neurons, and send electronic signals.
If you want to pick up your finger, a message from your brain goes down through the neurons, and sends it and sends it and sends, pick up your finger…the nerve impulses are sent down, and that's the way the neurons communicate, so to say. It's like a row of dominoes stacked closely together. When a neuron fires, it's like knocking down the first domino in a long chain. In milliseconds, this process repeats from neuron to neuron until they reach their destination. Of course, all of this happens at incredibly fast speeds.
When you repeat something many times, what happens is that, as the saying goes, Cells that fire together wire together, which means if you keep on firing again and again, they're going to repeat more. How does that work? Whenever an electric impulse is sent through a copper wire, for example, you'll notice a plastic coating around the outside of that wire, because in order for the electric impulse to get to its destination efficiently, it needs to be properly insulated, so that you don't lose electricity. The same thing happens in our brains, and that's where this concept of myelination comes in. Our brains contains gray matter. That's what the neuron cell bodies appear as. But there's also white matter, and the white matter is myelin, which is fatty tissue that covers the long axons that extend out of the neurons.
Every time you repeat something, it wraps more myelin around the axon and causes the impulse to go that much faster. So what's really happening? This is fascinating to me. When you're jumping rope again and again and again and again, it's not happening in your hands.
It's not happening in your arms or in your elbows or in your feet. It's happening in your brain. Every time you do it, you're wrapping another layer of insulation around that wire. And that way it can happen faster and smoother, by wrapping again and again and again.
This is all an introduction. You may have to review it a few times if you're not a science major.
I always was amazed that in order teach an older person to balance, they have to to go physical therapy and stand on one foot and lean over. They said that this way if a person loses his balance, he’ll be better able to catch himself. I often questioned this practice. What in the world? Just because you're standing on one leg now, that helps your balance? Just because I'm balancing now, how will that help me later? How does that work? The answer is, when you are practicing balancing, you are repeating and repeating the electrical impulses necessary and it happens faster. That way, we continue to strengthen when we're repeat. As people get older, their myelin starts getting weaker and sometimes things start happening more slowly. That's why we have to do all that extra exercise and physical therapy.
So basically, this is our takeaway:
Practicing skills over time causes those neural pathways to work better in unison, via myelination. To improve your performance, you need to practice frequently and get lots of feedback so you practice correctly and enhance the right things.
That's our introductory science course on how practice makes perfect.
Have a wonderful day.