Learning principles: knowing ‘why?’

Most students, and many professional musicians waste a lot of their practicing time. What a shame.
It is possible to help your youngster get more out of a practice session and spend less time (yippee!) in the process if you know how humans learn, recognize the inhibitors to learning, and realize the importance of motivation.

Essentially we can differentiate between three kinds of memory The first, the ultra- short-term memory or sensual memory, has a limited retaining capacity and can therefore only store little information for a very short time. It can receive approximately 15-16 information units (Bit) per second, and keep this for ten seconds, that brings us to 150 - 160 Bit for assimilating new information. All input taken in through the senses, impulses perceived through the eyes, ears or skin, “circle” first in the form of electric current (oscillation) in our brain, where they cease after 10 - 20 seconds... Lack of interest (motivation), the absence of reference possibilities (“I’ve seen you before!”) or additional distracting perceptions (such as pain) stops the electric circling of the information without it being stored permanently.

The second type of memory, the short-term memory, is the conscious and operative memory, in which the information gets processed. Each "information-unit" remains in the short-term memory for app. 20 minutes, before it is taken into the long - term memory. Unless repeated or rehearsed, the material will be deemed unimportant and forgotten before it is assimilated into long-term memory.
The short term memory also has a restricted capacity. In the case of information that is too dense and/or is learned too quickly after learning something else, a part of it gets “lost”, that is, it isn’t taken into the long-term memory: which part remains is a matter of chance. So: don't learn too much, too quickly and take short breaks! This will hopefully remind instructors to avoid presenting too much too quickly!

The long-term memory consists of a change of molecule structure. The transformation of information from the short-term memory into the long-term memory requires a certain, undisturbed time. Therefore, pauses can be seen as an anchoring of information. Experiments also suggest that learning is most effective if it is distributed over time.

In order to illustrate, I draw a sketch for my pupils of a head with a funnel going into it. If too much information is forced to be taken in, without the necessary pause, a large part of the learned material gets lost (overflow!). You must not only believe it, you must also trust that the brain works for you during your breaks! To the same extent that you gain trust in your brain, this trust will also develop in yourself and in your own abilities!

The key to making a particular stimulus a permanent part of your long-term memory is to review it repeatedly over a long period of time. Information from short-term memory is stored in the long-term memory by rehearsal. The repeated exposure to a stimulus or the rehearsal of a piece of information transfers it into long-term memory. It doesn’t matter how briefly the information (what we’re trying to learn) has been residing in our memory, by recalling the information during these few seconds, we can save the new impressions from fading.

Stimuli that are not reviewed in this way become gradually weaker with time. Writing
things down allows you to review them over a period of time and so make them part of
your long-term, permanent memory.

Studies have shown that a stimulus enters the long-term memory (it is "learned") after it has been conscientiously observed +/-7 times. If this process is repeated over a period of time (say, the stimulus is observed seven times a day for a period of five days) the long-term memory gradually becomes stronger and stronger—a "permanent" memory.

But if an "incorrect" stimulus is first learned (you’ve learned it wrong!), it then takes an
average of 35 (!) repetitions to learn the "corrected" stimulus. Learning it right the first
time is five times easier than re-learning after learning it incorrectly
So if, in the beginning, you stick with sections that are small enough that you can "memorize after plus/minus seven times," you will be working with sections that are small enough to fit comfortably in your short-term memory.

If in your practice you play sections of your pieces that are longer than your short-term memory capacity, the beginning of the passage will have "slipped out" of your short- term memory by the time you reach the end of the passage. This overloading of the short-term memory disrupts the whole memory process.