“How Much Should We Practice?”
GITS reader Matias Caruso sent me this email:
Hello Scott,
A writer from Argentina here.
I’m writing you because I just read a scientific study which appears to confirm that, just like you always say, reading scripts and watching movies is as important as writing in order to become a better writer.
An excerpt: “Although we currently assume that the only way to improve is to constantly practice — in technical speak, the act of practicing provides a “permissive signal” that allows the accompanying stimulation to “drive learning” — this research demonstrates that we can also improve through mere exposure.”
Apropos given this writing mantra I posted yesterday: Read scripts. Watch movies. Write pages. An excerpt from the article:
Somewhere, right now, a little kid is fighting with his parents about how much he needs to practice the piano. Or maybe it’s the clarinet. I fought with my parents about practicing everything. I didn’t want to practice my major chords, or my tennis swing, or my multiplication tables. I insisted that I already knew how to do it — I’d just done it — so why did I need to do it again?
Well, it turns out that 10 year-old Jonah had a point. There’s a brand new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience by a team of scientists at Northwestern (first author Beverly Wright) that investigates how much deliberate practice can be replaced with periods of “additional sensory stimulation,” or passive listening.
The experiment went like this: A large group of subjects was taught a difficult auditory discrimination task. Then, they practiced. And practiced. Every subject in the task performed 360 trials of the task per day for at least six days. But here’s where the interesting differences begin: In one follow-up regimen, listeners performed an unrelated task in silence. In another regimen, subjects performed that same task while listening to relevant stimuli in the background. In the final regimen, subjects didn’t get a break, but instead practiced the same auditory discrimination exercise over and over again. We’ll call this the nothing-but-practice group.
So which group improved the most? It turned out that you needed to be exposed to the relevant stimuli. This meant that the group which practiced the unrelated task in silence didn’t improve. However, these experiments also demonstrated that listening to relevant background stimulation could be just as effective as slaving away at the task itself, at least when the subjects had practiced first. In fact, the scientists found that we don’t even have to be paying conscious attention to the stimuli — subjects still benefited from the stimulation even when distracted by an entirely unrelated task. I emailed with Andrew Sabin, one of the co-authors on the study, who summarized the results:
A great deal of previous work has shown that simply presenting the stimuli to the participant is usually not enough. They actually have to do the task. This is where our group comes in. Basically, what we say is, yes you do have to do the task, just not for the whole time. The main result is that if you practice for 20 minutes, and then you are passively exposed to stimuli for 20 minutes, you learn as if you have been practicing for 40 minutes. You can cut the effort in half, and still yield the same benefit. This finding could be important for clinical training programs, such as the ones that attempt to treat language-based learning disorders.
That’s pretty much on target with one of the points I make: By immersing yourself in films and screenplays, you get a kind of Gestalt understanding of cinema, knowledge that sinks in at various levels of your consciousness and subconsciousness. It’s one way, I think, that you develop critical instincts about story — structure, characters, dialogue, theme and all the rest.
For more of the article, go here.
And thanks, Matias, for forwarding me the link. Interesting stuff!