The Neuroscience of Practicing: A Conversation with Dr. Molly Gebrian

The Time to Practice podcast is back with new episodes for Fall 2024! We’re excited to be talking once again to Dr. Molly Gebrian, who is a violist with a background in Neuroscience and the author of the new book Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing.

This episode is packed with ideas you can use in practice, and I hope it will inspire you to read her new book to learn more. You can also follow along with Dr. Molly Gebrian’s September practice challenge, which is happening this month on both her Instagram and Youtube pages (links below). 

You can read more of Dr. Molly Gebrian’s bio here on her website.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did!

To Listen to the full episode you can find the Time to Practice Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Audible or your favorite podcast platform. You can also listen directly from the link below: 

Highlights from our Conversation include:

” . . . that was my approach as a kid growing up. I don’t remember if I talked about it the last time I was on here, but at some point when I was maybe 10 or 11, somebody gave me a sheet that had maybe 10 different practice strategies on it, and I remember hanging it on the wall next to where I would practice and any problem I had, I would just do all 10 of them, not applying them strategically. But that was sort of my introduction to the idea of practice strategies rather than just playing things through. And you’re absolutely right, many people either never get taught any strategies. They’re just told by the teacher, oh, you need to practice more. Okay, well what does that mean? Or they’re taught what their teacher was taught, and these things are passed down and many things are useful.

There’s many things that science have found are very, very effective that teachers have kind of intuited themselves, but there are also lots of practice strategies that are really counterintuitive and advice that isn’t as helpful is passed down and it kind of just gets in everybody’s way and makes us frustrated.”

I mean, most people have a teacher, but most of your time with the instrument is spent by yourself in the practice room, not with your teacher, or if you’re a child spent with the parent and the parent is guiding the practice.

And the way that we do music learning is it’s very self-directed most of the time because of this, you do all your practice and then once a week you have your lesson. And if you don’t understand how the brain learns the most effectively, it’s very hard to use that time in the practice room. Well, right. A lot of things like I was just saying about how the brain learns that are really counterintuitive that I don’t know that most people would kind of stumble into on their own, and there’s all sorts of messages that have been passed down.

On why it’s important to think and talk about how our brains learn:

“We were just talking about that actually go against how we learned. And so there’s all these sort of cultural messages in the culture of practicing that we’re taught that actually we need to get rid of because they’re not helpful. And so part of what I try to do in my work is to bring this science, what scientists who study, how the brain learns, how the brain works to bring that knowledge to musicians so we have a better understanding of that and to translate it into really practical terms so we can figure out, okay, what does this look like for me in the practice room so I can make the best use of my time? We all have limited time, we don’t have endless amount of time to practice. And I for one, hate having my time wasted. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves. Things that are inefficient just make me want to tear my hair out. And so finding ways to practice that are not wasting my time, that are not ineffective are really important to me personally. I want to share that with people. That’s what lies at the base of what I do.”

On the importance of taking breaks:

“. So especially in classical music, there’s this culture of you should be practicing all the time. And I mean, in our culture in general, not just classical music, practicing the idea of taking breaks, you don’t do that. You’re lazy if you take breaks. You should be working hard all the time. You should be productive all the time if you’re taking breaks. No, that’s bad. You’re being lazy. You’re not committed to this. But what the science actually finds is that not only are breaks good, they’re absolutely necessary for learning, and that actually we make the most progress while we’re taking a break, which is the most counterintuitive thing in the entire world. It flies in the face of everything we’ve ever been told. It kind of flies in the face of our own experience of the world. If you think about practicing or studying or in a training for a sport while you’re actually doing this practicing or studying or whatever, that’s when it feels like you’re making the progress.

But that’s not actually true. You’re just giving input to your brain. And then when you take a break, your brain takes that input and it makes actual physical changes in the brain that are necessary for learning to happen and for you to get better. You can’t actually get better at anything if nothing changes in the brain. And if we don’t take breaks, the brain doesn’t have a chance to do that. The analogy I often make is with road construction, if there’s potholes all over the street and they need to fix the street, you can’t have cars driving on it while they’re trying to repave the road. They have to shut it down for a little bit, repave the road, and then you can drive on it, and it’s a much better experience for you as a driver, that’s exactly the same thing as the brain. The brain needs you to take a break so it can do that reconstruction, and then when you come back, you’re at a higher level of skill. But I mean, that’s a really strange message for a lot of people to hear. You need to take breaks, you should practice less probably so you have more time for breaks, and if you take more breaks, you’ll get better faster. I think that just explodes people’s worldview in general.”

You can hear our whole conversation by listening to the episode using the links below, or read the transcript below.

Links in this episode: 

Dr. Molly Gebrian’s Website: https://mollygebrian.com/

To find the Link to buy the book & find the workbook: https://www.mollygebrian.com/music-and-the-brain

Connect with Dr. Molly Gebrian on Instagram

Dr. Molly Gebrian’s YouTube Channel

Connect with Christine on Instagram

Support the Podcast!