How to learn a new skill or form a new habit
Tags: How To, Habit Building, Skills Development, Learning, Neuroscience

In this blog post we are going to discuss an approach about how to learn a new skill or form a new habit. We will discuss the scientific experiment that was conducted on a set of people learning Braille. Before going in let me give a brief introduction of the scientist who carried out this experiment,

Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, is Professor of Neurology and an Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Pascual-Leone ranks number 1 among authors worldwide in the specific field of “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” and “Noninvasive Brain Stimulation”. Pascual-Leone is a world leader in the development of transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS) for application in cognitive neuroscience and for therapeutic applications in neurology, psychiatry and neurorehabilitation.

Concepts to know

Brain-Map : When we do a certain type of work, an area of the brain is responsible for its execution. Suppose Frontal lobe controls the Motor moments, Occipital lobe controls vision. Once we map the type of work with the responsible area of the brain, we have a brain map.

Pascual-Leone conducted an experiment on visionless people learning to read braille.

This experiment continued for a year and the subjects studied Braille five days a week, for two hours a day, followed by an hour of homework. The first findings were that when human beings are learning a new skill, plastic change occurs in the brain.

Pascual-Leone started measuring Brian maps every Monday and Friday. The brain maps on Monday and Friday look entirely different. The brain maps that were taken on Friday showed large changes, but when they were taken again on Monday (after the rest) the maps were back to the normal baseline. This continued the same until six months, after six months something unusual started to happen. Once they hit the six-month mark of continuous learning, the opposite started to happen. The Friday brain maps were increasing but not as much as they were in the beginning and the Monday maps started to upturn gradually. At the end of ten months the increase has been stopped, and they got stable. The pace at which the subjects could read the Braille correlated with the Monday maps. After completion of the ten months the students took a two-month off and re-started the training, the brain maps were as they were when they have taken on last time.

The difference in the brain maps on Monday and Friday explains that when we are learning/doing new stuff, two things will happen. One strengthening of the existing neural connections which were noticed in Friday maps and Two the formation of the new neural connections noticed in Monday maps.

So while learning a new skill or forming a habit we need to prepare our mind to spend at least six months to make it obvious and not “21 days”.

If this post excites you, I highly recommend reading Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself

“What do you think?”

Sources:

Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself

https://www.pri-med.com/globals/Faculty/P/pascual-leone-alvaro.aspx