In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explore how to improve motor skill learning and proficiency—whether for athletic performance, learning an instrument or refining any physical skill. I explain practical tools to build skills, including how to structure learning sessions to focus on repetitions, use internal feedback systems and learn from errors—key elements for accelerating progress. I also discuss strategies such as visualization, metronoming, idle time and the impact of supplements like alpha-GPC and caffeine on performance. This episode provides valuable insights for anyone looking to accelerate and optimize their motor skill development. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. We want to hear from you. Take our quick survey to help improve Huberman Lab. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/lmnt Mateina: https://drinkmateina.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Learning Motor Skills 00:01:10 Building New Skills, Tools: Open vs Closed Loop; Focus 00:03:58 Sponsor: LMNT 00:05:15 Skills & Realistic Expectations, Super Mario Effect 00:09:34 Tube Test & Brain, Tool: Increase Repetitions 00:12:19 Importance of Errors, Framing Effect, Neuroplasticity 00:14:39 Sponsor: AG1 00:15:43 Learning Session Protocol, Tool: Idle Time Post-Learning 00:19:44 Movement Speed, Ultra-Slow Movements 00:21:49 Skill Proficiency & Errors, Tool: Metronoming 00:24:16 Sponsor: Mateina 00:25:42 Mental Rehearsal & Limits, Tool: Visualization 00:28:24 Skill Learning & Supplements, Alpha-GPC, Caffeine 00:32:14 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures
Chapter 1: What are the key elements to learning motor skills faster?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. Today, we're going to talk about and focus on skill learning. We are going to focus on how to learn skills more quickly, in particular motor skills.
So if you're interested in how to perform better, whether or not it's dance or yoga, or even something that's just very repetitive like running or swimming, this podcast episode is for you.
We're going to go deep into the science of skill learning, and we are going to talk about very specific protocols that the science points to and has verified allow you to learn more quickly, to embed that learning so that you remember it, and to be able to build up skills more quickly than you would otherwise. Let's talk about the acquisition of new skills.
Chapter 2: How do open loop and closed loop skills differ?
These could be skills such as a golf swing or a tennis swing, or you're shooting free throws, or you're learning to dance, or you're learning an instrument. I'm mainly going to focus on athletic performance. There are basically two types of skills, open loop and closed loop.
Open loop skills are skills where you perform some sort of motor action and then you wait and you get immediate feedback as to whether or not it was done correctly or not. A good example would be throwing darts at a dart board. So if you throw the dart, you get feedback about whether or not you hit the bullseye, that's open loop. Closed loop would be something that's more continuous.
So let's say you're a runner and you're starting to do some speed work and some sprints and you're running and you can kind of feel whether or not you're running correctly or maybe even have a coach
and they're correcting your stride, that's closed loop because as you go, you can adjust your behavior and you can adjust the distance of your steps or you can adjust your speed or you can adjust your posture. You're getting feedback on a moment to moment basis. There are essentially three components of any skill that involves motor movement. And those are,
sensory perception actually perceiving what you are doing and what's happening around you then there are the actual movements and then there's something called proprioception and proprioception is often discussed as kind of a sixth sense of knowing where your limbs are in relation to your body now skill learning has a lot of other dimensions too
But those are the main ones that we're going to focus on. So anytime we learn something, we have to decide, is it open loop or closed loop? The second question should be, what should I focus my attention on? Auditory attention, visual attention, or Should I focus on where my limbs are relative to my body or should I focus on the outcome? Okay, this is a critical distinction.
You can decide to learn how to do a golf swing or a dance tango and decide that you are going to focus on the
movements of your partner or the positions of your feet or maybe you're going to sense the position and posture of your body which is more proprioceptive okay so you have to allocate your attention and i'm going to tell you how to allocate your attention best in order to learn faster so these are the sorts of decisions that you have to make so we can really simplify things now i've given you a lot of information but we can simplify it basically open loop or closed loop that's one question and what am i going to focus on and then your neurology will take care of the rest
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Chapter 3: What is the Super Mario Effect and how does it relate to learning?
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pack so now I want to talk about realistic expectations somewhere in Hollywood presumably it got embedded in somebody's mind that instant skill acquisition was possible that you could take a particular pill and you would suddenly have a skill and I love movies but it simply doesn't exist Then the self-help literature created another rule called the 10,000 hours rule.
And frankly, that doesn't really match the literature, at least the scientific literature either. I like it because it implies that learning takes time, but the 10,000 hours rule overlooks something crucial, which is that it's not about hours, it's about repetitions.
Now, of course, there's a relationship between time and repetitions, but there are some beautiful experiments that point to the fact that by simple adjustment, of what you are focused on as you attempt to learn a new skill, you can adjust the number of repetitions that you do, you adjust your motivation for learning, and you can vastly accelerate learning.
Some of you may recognize this by its internet name, which is not a scientific term, which is the Super Mario Effect. The Super Mario Effect relates to the game Super Mario Brothers, but you'll see why at the end.
But basically what they did was they had 50,000 subjects, which is a enormous number of subjects, learn a program, essentially taking words from a computer program or the commands for a computer program that were kind of clustered in a column on the right,
and those commands are essentially they essentially translate to things like you know go forward and then if it's a right hand turn in the maze then go right and continue until you hit a choice point etc so it's a bunch of instructions but the job of the subjects in these experiments were to organize those instructions in a particular way that would allow a little cursor to move through the maze successfully
It takes some skill. You have to know what commands to give in what particular order. And they made that very easy. You could just assemble them in a list over onto the right. Now, there were two groups and some one half of the subjects, if they got it wrong, meaning they entered a command and the cursor would move and it was the wrong command for this little cursor to move through the maze.
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Chapter 4: Why are errors crucial for skill learning?
So the experiment that I want to tell you about is called the tube test. Here's the experiment. You take two rats, you put them in a tube, or two mice, you put them in a tube. And mice and rats, they don't like to share the same tube. So what they'll do is they'll start pushing each other back and forth, back and forth. Sooner or later, one of the rats or mice pushes the other one out.
Now you take the winner, you give it a new competitor, and what you find is that the mouse or rat that won previously has a much higher than chance probability of winning the second time. In other words, winning before leads to winning again. Three years ago, there was a paper published that examined the brain area that's involved in this.
Turns out it's a particular area of the frontal cortex, for those of you that want to know. And they did a simple experiment where the experimenters increased or decreased the activity of this brain area in the prefrontal cortex, a little sub region of the prefrontal cortex. And what they found is if they stimulated this brain area,
a mouse or rat, regardless of whether or not it had been a winner or loser before, became a winner every single time. So what is this magic brain area? What is it doing? Well, the reason I'm bringing this up today and the reason I'm bringing it up on the heels of the Super Mario effect is that stimulation of this brain area had a very simple,
and very important effect, which was it led to more forward steps, more repetitions, more effort, but not in terms of sheer might and will, not digging deeper, just more repetitions per unit time. And the losers had fewer repetitions per unit time.
So the Super Mario Effect, this online experiment, and the tube test, which has been done by various labs and repeated again and again, point to a simple but very important rule, which is neither the 10,000 hours rule nor the magic wand Hollywood version of learning.
but rather the neurobiological explanation for learning a skill is you want to perform as many repetitions per unit time as you possibly can, at least when you're first trying to learn a skill. The winners are always generating more repetitions per unit time. It's just a repeat of performance, repeat of performance, even if there are errors. And that points to something vitally important, which is
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Chapter 5: What role does idle time play post-learning?
Reps are important, but making error reps is also important. In fact, it might be the most important factor. So let's talk about errors and why those solve the problem of what to focus on. Because as I said earlier, if you want to learn something, you need to know if it's open loop or closed loop, and you need to know what to focus on, where to place your perception.
And that seems like a tough task, but errors will tell you exactly what to focus on. And the reason is that the errors actually cue your nervous system to two things. One, to error correction, And the other is it opens the door or the window for neuroplasticity. Errors tell your nervous system that something needs to change.
So if you are performing a task or a skill, like you're learning how to dance and you're stepping on the other person's toes or you're fumbling or you're not getting it right, those errors are opening the possibility for plasticity. If you walk away at that point, you've made the exact wrong choice. Without errors, the brain is not in a position to change itself.
Errors actually cue the frontal cortex networks, what we call top-down processing, and the neuromodulators, things like dopamine and acetylcholine and epinephrine, that will allow for plasticity. So these... cue the brain that something was wrong and they open up the possibility for plasticity. It's what's sometimes called the framing effect. It frames what's important, right?
This isn't about motivation to learn. This is about how you actually learn. So the key is designate a particular block of time that you are going to perform repetitions. Work for time and then try and perform the maximum number of repetitions that you can do safely That's going to be the best way to approach learning for most sessions.
I will talk about other things that one can do, but making errors is key. And this isn't a motivational speech. I'm not saying, oh, go make errors. Errors are good for you. You have to fail in order to win. No, you have to fail in order to open up the possibility of plasticity, but you have to fail many times within the same session.
And those failures will cue your attention to the appropriate sensory events. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens.
As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health, and performance. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast or even knew what a podcast was, and I've been taking it every day since.
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Chapter 6: How can supplements like alpha-GPC and caffeine enhance performance?
I find that AG1 greatly improves all aspects of my health. I simply feel much better when I take it. AG1 uses the highest quality ingredients in the right combinations, and they're constantly improving their formulas without increasing the cost. Whenever I'm asked if I could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? I always say AG1.
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So science points to the fact that there's a particular sequencing of learning sessions that will allow you to learn faster and to retain the skill learning. And it involves doing exactly as I just described, which is getting as many repetitions as you can in the learning session, paying attention to the errors that you make,
And then the rewards that will be generated, again, these are neurochemical rewards, from the successful performance of a movement. And then after the session, you need to do something very specific, which is nothing. That's right. After a skill learning session, there's a replay of the motor sequence that you performed correctly
And there's an elimination of the motor sequences that you performed incorrectly, okay?
So to be very clear about this, after I finished the training session, if I do nothing, if I just sit there and close my eyes for five to 10 minutes, even one minute, the brain starts to replay the motor sequence in a way that appears important for the more rapid consolidation of the motor sequence of the pattern. and to accelerated learning.
So you have this basic learning session and then a period of time afterwards in which the brain can rehearse what it just did at the beginning of learning any skill. And as we approach from uncertain to skilled to mastery, we want to reduce uncertainty. And that's really what the nervous system is doing. It's trying to eliminate errors and hone in on the correct trajectories.
If you perform a lot of repetitions and then you use a period immediately after, we don't really have a name for this post-learning kind of idle time for the brain. The brain isn't idle at all. It's actually scripting all these things in reverse that allow for deeper learning and more quick learning.
But if we fill that time with other things, if we are focused on our phones or we're focused on learning something else, we're focusing on our performance, that's not going to serve us well. At least it's not going to serve the skill learning well. So please, if you're interested in more rapid skill learning, try introducing these sessions. They can be quite powerful.
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