I stumbled across a series of videos by a Dr. Molly Gebrian yesterday. In them, she talks about the importance of taking breaks when you're learning something. The mind needs time to put structures in place to accommodate the new learning, so we need to take breaks to allow it to do that.
She compares it to road work: You have to shut down the road in order to repair it. I also think of it as being like pouring concrete. Once you've poured the concrete, you absolutely need to stay off of it for a while so it can harden and thus become useful. If you pour it and then you keep walking on it, trying to even it out here and there, you'll end up with a mess. Similarly, we need to let our brains "cement" the new information before we can build on it.
Forced Practice Breaks
I think there could be something to this idea. When I was in college (and even during COVID), I would practice several hours a day, sometimes several times d day, but I was often frustrated at how slow my progress seemed. Now? I'm lucky if I can get in a whole hour of practice each day (and even then, it's broken up into a few minutes before work, a few minutes after work, and a few minutes before I go to bed). But I'm learning, and even memorizing, more efficiently and effectively than I have in the past. The music I'm learning isn't any easier than what I was doing before. I just seem better able to learn and memorize.
Maybe those forced breaks between practice sessions have been good for me.
An Experiment
I'm going to do an experiment with contrary-motion minor scales. I can play them all, but I'm stumbling a bit with a few of them, particularly B minor, F# minor, and Eb minor. Currently, I'm playing the similar/contrary motion scales for majors and minors in all keys on alternating days. I'll keep doing that, but I'm only going to include the minors that are easy for me. But in addition to that, I'm going to spend a little extra time on one of those minor scales each week. I'll do three days of focused practice on, say B minor, and then take a day off. And then on the fourth day, I'll add B minor to my regular exercise and see if it's improved.
If it has, I'll do the same thing with F# minor. And since I know my two readers will be sitting on the edge of their seats, wondering if my experiement works. I'll report the results next week. Meanwhile, here is the first of the videos on taking breaks.
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