If you’re hoping to learn something quickly, scientists may have found the way to do it.
Basically, it involves practising the same task – like playing a piece of music, or developing your tennis backhand – but with slight variations.
It’s slightly counter-intuitive as you might think it would work best just to repeat it again and again until muscle memory makes it come naturally.
But according to researchers at John Hopkins University, you could master things twice as quickly by adding in a slight variation.
The practice has to be similar to take advantage of the trick, but not exactly the same. So far example, you could play the piece of music at different speeds or in a different key.
Or to improve your tennis stroke you could use rackets with a slightly different weight and size.
In a statement, the team said their findings came from teaching volunteers an abstract task and giving them different ways to practice it.
They asked 86 people to move a cursor on screen by squeezing a mouse rather than sliding it on a desk. To succeed, they had to move the cursor to different parts of the screen.
One group of volunteers didn’t practice at all, one repeated the same training session and a final group practiced again but with a slight change to the pressure needed to move the cursor each time.
When all the volunteers tried the first task again, the group that practised with modifications did twice as well as the group that just repeated the task (and the group that didn’t practise did worst of all).
‘What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row,’ Pablo Celnik, an author on the study, said.