Effective Practice

TED-Ed Recap

Posted by Tomy Jaya on May 26, 2017

Background

I’ve gone through Learning How To Learn course in Coursera a while back. I even read the book A Mind for Numbers by the lecturer. Nevertheless, every now and then, you just need a refresher on this super important topic. To try to make it stick longer this time, I’m making a recap of the TED-Ed video How to practice effectively…for just about anything.

Recap

“Muscle Memory” is mostly attributed to myelination of neural pathways (insulation of axons to make more efficient neural pathways).

Quality defeats quantity when it comes to practice.

What constitutes an effective practice:

  1. consistent
  2. intensely focused (targets contents or weaknesses)
  3. practice the edge of one’s current ability
  4. minimize distractions
  5. start slowly, and gradually increase
  6. frequent repititions with breaks
  7. have multiple daily sessions with limited duration
  8. “imagine” practicing