Neuroplasticity & Guitar Learning

Are you an older learner? Here's the latest science to help you learn guitar faster!

Most of this information comes from two amazing podcasts by Huberman Lab called “How to learn faster by using failures, movement and balance” and another called “How to learn skills faster.”

Andrew D. Huberman is an American neuroscientist and associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Neurobiology. He knows his stuff and references numerous studies during the episodes. His work is fascinating on many levels, and an amazing fun twist in the tail makes for a very interesting and mega-effective practice system!

In this lesson, I hope to summarize the key points related to practicing music with as little as possible use of the technical terms. Most of you have heard the term “neuroplasticity” before, but let's start with a basic definition.

What's Neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the ability of neurons in the brain to grow, adapt and reorganize to function in a different way than they had previously, usually as a response to some direct experience. Neuroplasticity will help you learn guitar faster and better!

Children learn things quickly because their brains are filled with chemicals that allow neural pathways to change and grow quickly and easily. These chemicals decrease steeply around the age of 25 and get less and less as we get older. :(

If you’re under 25 and reading this - please make the most of your youth and try to get a broad education that includes music, languages, meditation, math, science, and physical dexterity. You don’t ever get to learn things as easily - so make the most of it!

How to Trigger Plasticity

Triggering plasticity as you get older takes effort or necessity! I found it fascinating that I have been teaching beginners using many of his suggested approaches; I just didn’t fully understand why they were so effective. Super cool to get some scientific validation.

If you really need to learn something to survive (hunting for food?), you’ll learn that skill amazingly quickly. I’m not sure it’s quite important enough, but I noticed that I learned skills ‘on the band stand’ much quicker than I would at home. I used to play at a late-night jazz piano bar with a great piano player. He’d call a tune I didn’t know, but somehow I could find my way along and learn the melody and chord changes very quickly compared with my regular home practice.

For sure, I made many blunders, but I suspect the need to not shame myself helped me ingest the music faster. I’m not certain I’d triggered plasticity, but it seems likely.

Failure Triggers

The key finding from Huberman is that failure triggers plasticity and that you should aim to do as many repetitions as possible of any given exercise and not worry about making mistakes. Noticing the errors will help create a neuroplastic state, and when you get the exercise right, you will get a Dopamine surge which your brain will understand as a sign that the correct action was made.

It’s very important to rest after doing the exercise (30 seconds to a minute or more) to allow your brain to ‘digest’ the information, and it will miraculously manage to focus on the correct version and remove the versions with errors. It’s important to sit quietly with your eyes closed, not scrolling social rubbish on your phone! The rest time appears much more important than I’d previously thought and works as a consolidation of the practice and will be further solidified when you sleep! Quality sleep is very important in the learning process.

There are different layers to this as you progress. When you start, it’s important to focus on any errors you make. As you get more experienced and better at the skill, you should focus on one (and only one) aspect of the skill for each practice session.

In my experience, this holds true for physical skills more than mental and technical knowledge. So for chord changes, strumming, string bending - that kind of skill - the many repetitions with lots of mistakes is likely to be the most effective way to learn, especially for older learners.

But I don't think making mistakes is a good idea for theory or knowledge-based activities, like learning scales. Experience has shown me that learning something correctly the first time and not making mistakes, and then using The Spacing Effect (more on that another time!) is the best way to learn things like scales - but the triggering plasticity before you start that kind of practice makes it even more effective - and the way to do it is hilarious and crazy good!

Failure to frustration is a great way to trigger the release of the brain chemicals that allow neuroplasticity. Continually getting something wrong (making errors) helps start the plasticity chemicals pumping; feeling frustrated apparently helps too! But the OMG moment was when he explained that when you fail at something repeatedly and get frustrated by it - the ‘plasticity chemicals’ that are released stay in the system for an hour or more! And importantly:

💡 The thing you failed at does not need to be what you want to work on!

For reasons I didn’t fully understand, a movement that requires balance is particularly good for triggering the plasticity chemicals. So if you want to trigger these brain chemicals that promote neuroplasticity, you need to find a balance-based movement that you are not good at. One that you are likely to get frustrated by after 7-10 minutes. Might be standing on one leg. Might be standing on one leg but up on your toes. Might be doing a handstand. Handstand on a wobble board… You won't get the benefit if you can do it confidently already! So you need to find something challenging. And change it when it stops being difficult.

I know. This sounds crazy!

So, this sounds crazy, right? And I wouldn’t have believed it unless it had come from such an eminent scholar in the field… but attempting to do a handstand for 7 minutes and getting frustrated trying to do it will help you learn guitar a lot faster for the following hour.

So, I suggest learning complex technical stuff like scale patterns for post-handstand practice and going super hard on repetitions. Don’t worry about mistakes in all physical skill exercises.

💡 If you want more detail on the exact chemicals released and how it all works, then you should check out Huberman's podcasts. He’s got tons of fascinating stuff on other things too!

I hope you found this interesting and that it might help you on your guitar journey!

Don't miss my other Effective Practice lessons presented in each Grade 3 module!