We Don't Learn By Repetition
One of the most common quandaries that befall aspiring musicians is how to get better at your instrument. This will lead the earnest inquirer to perform google searches, interview teachers or parents, or even read books on the subject, where they will, no doubt, hear the clichéd and platitudinous advice “just practice.” And while not altogether unhelpful—especially for true beginners—this is, unfortunately, where the advice begins and ends. No further explanation is ever provided even for more advanced students. I, for one, am quite sure that the reason the advice never goes anywhere else is not because no one since the dawn of humanity has ever been able to come up with anything even slightly more clever, but rather because of laziness on the part of the inquired-of. Whatever the case may be, however, the fact remains that the first and only advice anyone will ever tell you if you want to get better at something is “practice.”
When glib answers such as this are the norm, musicians are frequently lead to self-gaslighting. “Well,” says he/she. “If (teacher, parent, mentor) says that all I have to do to get better is practice, then that’s what I have to do.” This thinking, accompanied with the inevitable minimal results that “just practicing” yields, eventually leads to a panoply of harmful habits and beliefs including (but not limited to):
Obsessive and compulsive practicing.
Feeling guilty whenever you’re not practicing.
Believing you’re “better” than others because you practice more than they do.
Believing you’re “worse” than others because you practice less than they do.
Neglecting your life in favor of practicing.
Believing that your not getting better is the result of your not practicing hard enough.
Because teachers, mentors, and parents refuse to come up with more nuanced advice when it comes to improvement, students are forced to either come up with their own, or enslave themselves to the tyranny of the practice room. It never occurs to these instructors that surely this couldn’t be the correct way to practice if excessive and exorbitant amounts of time are required to yield even the most modest of improvements, or perhaps that it could be problematic because its one consistent output is building detrimental habits that cripple the students’ outlook on life sometimes permanently. No, they continue to insist that “practice” is the way to get better.
All evidence to the contrary be damned.
The main problem with this line of thinking can be summed up by noting that the word “practice” is singularly vague. “Practice” could mean all kinds of things—even helpful things—but most of the time, it is understood to mean repetition. We can demonstrate that this is the case by pointing out that many music teachers require a report on the amount of time practiced each week from their students, rather than a report on how much better they are this week than last. Indeed, it’s often touted as fait accompli that human beings learn by repetition. This in spite of the fact that insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
A Philosophical Proof that Humans Do Not Learn by Repetition
Throughout the course of my thinking on this topic, I’ve determined that repetition has no effect on someone’s ability to learn. Allow me to elucidate.
In order to measure what effect repetition has on the act of learning, we must design some experiments that control for other potential inputs, such as paying attention. In this spirit, please consider the following scenarios:
Suppose that it’s late at night, and you’re exhausted. You’re reading a book, but you can barely keep your eyes open. To your surprise, you realize that you have no idea what your book is talking about anymore, so you go back a few paragraphs and start again. A few minutes later—again, to your surprise—you realize you once again have no idea what your book is talking about. So you go back a few paragraphs and start again—et cetera.
You’re in the middle of an attempt to learn a second language, and you’re flipping through index cards with vocabulary on them. You’re multitasking, though, and you have three pots on the stove that need tending to, a podcast on in the background, and you’re trying to plan the dinner party that’s tomorrow night. Despite all the distractions, you manage to get through your deck 10 whole times! But wait…you don’t remember seeing that particular word before. How strange.
You’re practicing your instrument. You’ve been practicing all day, but the concert is tomorrow, and you’re not good enough (yikes!). So, in desperation, you commence playing a passage you’ve already played 1500 times before now—but you still always mess up on just this one part over here—in the hopes that perhaps the 1501st time you play it will be the time it finally sticks.
Let’s examine each of these instances one at a time. In the first scenario, it’s conceivable that the person after having read the passage 5 or 6 times could remember some details. However, it is impossible to separate this gleaning of information from the person’s ability to pay attention in this experiment. We can, however, note that under normal circumstances, it only takes a single time of reading a passage before learning what it contained; we don’t need repetition at all. We can conclude from this that paying attention is responsible for 100% of the information gleaned in the everyday occurrence, and infer from this that paying attention is the causal factor in the above scenario also. If repetition were the determining factor in learning, we should see that the person knows what’s in the paragraphs regardless of how much they were paying attention. Instead, we see the opposite.
In the second scenario, similarly to the first, it is not beyond the bounds of reason to assume that this person remembers some or even many of the cards that are in his/her deck. Just because he/she couldn’t remember one of the cards offhandedly doesn’t mean that he/she didn’t memorize a lot of them. But again, we can’t assume that this remembrance comes by virtue of the repetition. Under normal circumstances, someone could conceivably go through the deck of cards only once and remember a majority of them as well. We cannot, therefore, conclude that the repetition did anything to assist in this process.
And again, in the final scenario, we have a musician struggling to perform a passage accurately despite the large amount of repetitions he/she has undergone in the past. Let’s suppose that this musician does end up perfecting the passage before their concert the next day. In all likelihood, this new found ability came either after a “light bulb” moment, or a careful analysis of what exactly was causing him/her to make the mistake in the first place and correcting that. Shall we conclude that either of these happenings were the result of hitting a magic number of, say, 1539 repetitions? I should hope not.
In all of these instances, I’ve demonstrated that repetition is not the mechanism by which human learning occurs, and is, in fact, of no utility whatsoever in achieving these ends. To say otherwise would be tantamount to superstition.
Objection #1: All of this doesn’t mean that repetition can’t help you learn when you are paying attention.
Eh-hem. Yes, it does mean that, actually.
Consider another thought experiment: your car won’t start, so you open the hood to look around. You then decide to try some percussive maintenance by hitting the engine with a wrench. Amazingly, it doesn’t work. You do this several more times to no avail. After a while, your friend shows up with some jumper cables. After jump-starting your car, it starts again! After this, would we conclude that hitting the engine with a wrench did anything to help the problem? No. The isolated, independent variable in this experiment is jump-starting the car.
Put in more general terms, if we have demonstrated that something (let’s call it “A”) is unhelpful in achieving some objective (let’s call it “B”), the only way to include A in the achievement of B would be to introduce another factor (let’s call it “C”). If A + C = B faster or better or more completely than C = B alone, then we can conclude that A is helpful in conjunction with something else. If A + C = B and C = B with no difference in speed or degree of attainment, we must conclude that the effect of A is nil. Furthermore, we can demonstrate that C = B is the case with regards to repetition by replacing some variables here. If A is repetition, B is learning something, and C is paying attention, there are countless examples of C leading to B without any need for A, some of which have been enumerated above. We can conclude from this that repetition provides no beneficial effect to human learning.
Objection #2: Suppose that a person didn’t learn everything about a given topic on the first try. Would repetition then be the causal factor in learning?
Not quite.
If someone was trying to learn a topic and only learned, say, 80% of the material, repetition is obviously going to have to occur in order to get to the desired 100%. This does not mean that repetition is the cause of the learning, though. Repetition was not the cause of the original 80%, correct? So why would repetition then be the cause of the remaining 20? Another way to think about this is in terms of “attention paid.” If enough attention was paid to learn 80% of the material the first time, a further amount of attention—not a further amount of repetitions—must be paid to garner the last bit of information.
Objection #3: What about habits and muscle memory?
I’ve already mentioned this multiple times before, but just because a habit is something we do repeatedly, doesn’t mean that repetition was the cause of learning to do whatever the habit is. The same goes for muscle memory. Just because someone is able to do something without thinking about it, doesn’t mean that repetition was the reason they learned to do it in the first place. Most adults do not need to think about where their mouth is on their face in order to place food inside, but most infants do need to think about this. Eventually, the infant learns to do this action so well that thinking is no longer required. Was this learning a result of the repetition? I’ve demonstrated heretofore that this cannot be the case.
Objection #4: What if someone forgets?
Just because repetition happens or needs to happen doesn’t mean that repetition is the learning mechanism. Please see my arguments under Objection #2 for further explanation.
Objection #5: In order to build muscle, someone will need to lift weights repetitiously. This is an example of learning by repetition.
Building muscle is more complicated than just lifting weights, but for the sake of this example, let’s suppose that that’s the only thing that needs to happen. Even with this concession, this is not an example of learning by repetition. For instance, it is also correct that human beings need to eat repetitiously in order to continue living, but no learning is occurring in this example. No learning is occurring by lifting weights to build muscle, either. This isn’t to say that learning how to lift weights isn’t learning (that would be absurd), only that the act of lifting weights and building muscle itself is not learning.
Objection #6: Suppose that someone is playing a passage on their instrument, and they mess up at this one part. They go back and try again, and again, and again until they eventually get it. This is an example of learning by repetition.
You’re very close. Repetition is often conflated with many other words to mean something that it does not actually mean, and that is the source of the confusion in this statement. To clarify this misconception, we must make the distinction between experimentation and repetition.
For example, if Edison is attempting to make the light bulb, and he performs the same experiment on 1000 different filaments, his actions might appear to be repetitious (and maybe they are in some sense), but they are not completely. Each cycle of the experiment produces new information, and that production of new information is what makes this an experiment, not a repetition.
However, if Edison is attempting to demonstrate that alternating current is dangerous and he performs the same deadly experiment on 1000 different elephants, this would be repetition. The difference is slight, but significant. In the first experiment, Edison is switching out the independent variable, gaining information each time. In the second, Edison is just murdering elephants; there isn’t any more information to gain from killing a second elephant, and that is what makes this repetition.
Similarly, if a musician is making progress over time, we can conclude that they are gathering feedback from their playing, and they are employing this new information in their next attempts. If the musician gathers feedback but does not employ the new information in their next attempts, or does not gather feedback at all, this would be repetition.
***Side note: Many musicians (and students of an array of other skills) fall into the trap of thinking that they are experimenting when they are, in fact, merely repeating. A good rule of thumb to avoid this is to recognize when you’re making progress (regardless of how slow). If there is progress, there is experimentation. If there is none, it is repetition. Being able to pinpoint exactly what information you’re gathering and how it’s affecting your progress is even more helpful in this matter.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that indiscernible amounts of progress are still progress. The progress should always be noticeable and measurable.
Please also don’t make the mistake of thinking that because improvement is very slow or slight, that progress is absent. Musicians should develop their powers of observation enough to be able to detect even the most minor of improvements to avoid this folly.***
Objection #7: No one is actually saying that repetition is the way human beings learn. Everyone knows that other stuff is important too.
The key word here is “too.” That word suggests that repetition is still in some way important. My argument is that it is of no utility whatsoever. Repetition has no effect. At all. Every person can eliminate it from every equation involving human learning without changing anything.
As for the statement that no one actually believes that people learn by repetition, even the phrasing employed in the wording of this objection indicates that this notion is indelibly implanted in our societal philosophy. That tiny word “too” carries a lot more weight than its three letters justify.
Many further arguments against the indisputable reality that human beings do not learn by repetition can be summed up as examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Case closed.
Why This Matters
“Alright,” the objector finally concedes. “So we really don’t learn by repetition. But surely you’re exaggerating the bad effects this has on the development of musical abilities. Why did you spend so much time and energy refuting something that doesn’t even really matter that much?”
Because it does matter. Each time a musician spends a mere 10 minutes attempting to learn something by way of repetition instead of something that could actually help, that’s 10 minutes of time wasted, 10 minutes of energy wasted, 10 minutes of not improving which can lead to discouragement (which can lead to quitting!), 10 minutes of gaslighting, 10 minutes of guilt-tripping, 10 minutes of being subject to the despotism of tyrants (yourself potentially included), 10 minutes of slavery. In short, repetition constitutes a waste of human life. And if that isn’t something to be uniquely concerned about, I don’t know what is.
Paying Attention: The Magic Ingredient
The observant among you will probably have noticed at this point just how frequently the phrase “paying attention” has come up in our study on why we don’t learn by repetition. Let’s discuss why this could be.
I’ve demonstrated in the above analysis that any attempts to learn that only involve repetition are only effective when we’re unable to disentangle that learning from one’s ability to pay attention. In other words, when we learn something, we’re paying attention; when we don’t pay attention, we learn nothing. This remains true even when we’re trying to overcome bad habits. If a habit is an action that has become unconscious, the way to stop doing this act is to bring the unconscious back to the conscious. This is done by paying attention. If someone messes up the same passage every time they play it on their instrument, one could say that that person has a bad habit. To overcome this, the person must stop brushing past that part like it’s nothing, determine what exactly is causing the problem, and then fix it. Fixing the problem might take a few tries, but again, this is experimentation, not repetition.
Conclusion
The fact that repetition does nothing to help achieve the ends of human learning is demonstrably, unassailably, and irrevocably true. This myth has been completely busted. We can further conclude that in order to become the musician you want to be, you must practice intentionally, and intelligently, as repetition is in no way a suitable substitute.
All of this does not mean that “paying attention” is the only thing required to learn, nor is repetition the only way to interpret the phrase “practice.” The purpose of this article is merely to demonstrate that repetition is not a factor in human learning, and that paying attention is. For some ideas of what constitutes good practice, see my other piece “10 Tips on Practicing.”