Practice Improves the Potential for Future Plasticity

Learning something new is hard. It doesn't matter what it is, from motor skills for martial arts to musing about Mozart's motivations, the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, and abilities is challenging. We can be trying to do something new or even reassembling and repurposing disparate bits of knowledge we already have. Regardless of the context, learning takes us out of our comfort zone and into discomfort while we try to kickstart the neuroplasticity that will take us forward.

Priming plasticity with prior practice

But can you get better at learning how to learn? This is basically the question that Jamie Kweon, Megan Vigne, Richard Jones, Linda Carpenter and Joshua Brown at Butler Hospital and Brown University were interested in answering with their research. These folks wondered if the effort and training that musicians and athletes undergo to learn and acquire skills has a more generic benefit of being better at learning in general.

We already know that learning motor skills produces changes in brain structure and function. Folks who have trained for a long time show these changes and acquired neuroplasticity.

From Mozart to Martial Arts Moves

In groups of musicians, athletes, and untrained "control" participants, the researchers used repetitive brain stimulation and pharmacological manipulation known to be related to the cellular basis of skill learning. The idea was to see if excitability of the brain related to motor activity was different in those who had intensively trained to learn skills and those who had not. They found that there was no inherent difference in general excitability between the groups. However, when the brain stimulation and pharmacological conditioning designed to enhance neuroplasticity, the musicians and athletes had a much more powerful response.

The overall "findings suggest that motor practice and learning create a neuronal environment more responsive to plasticity-inducing events". It seems that deep history of skill learning allows for a better ability to switch to an enhanced learning mode. Since this was a cross-sectional study, it would be great to see an experimental study measuring such changes over time.

In any case, this interesting result has big implications for designing strategies and paradigms for learning in general but also for "psychotherapy and rehabilitation...including recovery from neurological disorders...like stroke rehabilitation, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or clinical rTMS". This includes translation to other brain areas and "networks, such as those theoretically targeted with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex rTMS for depression".

Yearning to Learn How to Learn

When I came across this study it brought to mind something related to this that I've seen so many times over the years. And this has been in both my own practices of physical activity especially in martial arts, but also teaching martial arts across the lifespan. A big part of what people learn at the beginning of training is actually how to learn the thing they're doing. Once they get that down and achieve some level of neuroplasticity related to learning the tasks they're trying to do, their learning going forward is enhanced and proceeds at a different rate than it did in the beginning.

I have seen this across many decades of teaching martial arts and also in my own practices and learning. In recent years I've expanded my repertoire to include more Chinese martial arts. The teaching methodologies of these traditions differ wildly from my prior experiences in Japanese and Okinawan martial arts. A big part of my ability to learn those new traditions was actually understanding how to "learn the learning". In each case, once I worked through the hard work of learning how to learn, subsequent training was easier to do.

A takeaway is that steady work and dedication to learning skills and abilities will lead to better learning in the future. We just have to endure the upfront discomfort in the brain for beneficial long-term gain. This applies whether we are learning how to play guitar, apply a wrist lock, or implement strategies in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Like all things, it gets better with practice, and present practice can enhance future plasticity.

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2023)