Are you tired of trying to up-skill and taking forever to do it? Tried a bunch of different techniques and been frustrated at every turn?
Well there’s a better, faster way to build skills, and though it’s always a challenge to try learning something new (and there’s no way of getting around the fact that it takes time), there’s a way to make a skill stick quickly that you’ve probably never heard of.
It’s called “error repetition.” And yes, that means you’re doing something wrong, but it turns out our brains actually benefit from this experience.
Thrust into the spotlight by renowned neuroscientist and Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Huberman, error repetition taps into a key area of our brain associated with learning, and helps us subconsciously connect the dots between doing something the incorrect way and doing it the correct way.
A great example of how error repetition helps skill development in real life is something that’s been termed the “Super Mario Effect”. YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober coined this term in a 2018 Ted Talk after conducting an experiment in which 50,000 people attempted to code their way out of a maze that he and his team developed.
Half of the participants when they coded an unsuccessful move were served the following message: “That didn’t work. Please try again.”
While the other half of the group were told: “That didn’t work. You lost 5 points.”
Interestingly, the group which received an invitation to try again were 16% more successful than the group that was told that they lost points. The “try again” group also had more attempts on average per move (around 2.5x more tries) than the points loss group.
The key takeaway for Mark was that just like in the game Super Mario, the focus on trying again ultimately led to players experiencing higher degrees of success. In Mark’s words “When it comes to games like this, no one ever picks up a controller for the first time and then, after jumping into a pit thinks, ‘I’m so ashamed, that was such a failure’ and never want[s] to try again…the focus and obsession is about beating the game.”
In essence, when our brain is stimulated to repeat an action, we’re more likely to get it correct, to win, or to succeed at a task.
You’ve probably heard of dopamine. It’s a neurotransmitter that your brain releases when it gets a kick out of something enjoyable. For example, entertaining content, ingesting sugar or fat, or doing something correctly for the first time.
According to Dr. Huberman, this dopamine trigger from doing something right is very important to building skills with error repetition. And in order to maximize our brain’s dopamine response to doing something right, it’s also important to keep our baseline dopamine levels low before starting a training session (e.g. not taking a supplement that increases motivation before training). That way our brain will reward us with a huge dopamine hit when we accomplish whatever it is we’re trying to do.
Now the entire premise of skill acquisition through error repetition hinges on that one word: repetition. The more you can practice a skill (even incorrectly), the faster you’re going to learn it, so do it as often as you can.
Try and set aside time for training sessions daily, or even every couple of days—they don’t have to be long, you just need to get plenty of reps in!
The last thing you need to do to give yourself the best shot with error repetition is to do absolutely nothing after a training session. You might think of this as “digesting” what you just learned (you may also just feel tired and need a break—that’s a not a bad thing!).
There’s scientific support for this idea of doing nothing after training a new skill, too. A part of our brain called the hippocampus does this weird thing where it replays a sequence of events backwards after we train to help us determine what we did wrong and what we did right (so we can do it right again the next time). Crazy, right?
Sadly, there’s no magic skill pill we can take, but there are a few ways we can maximize our time and effort when it comes to learning something new. Use these tips the next time you want to learn something and we’ll be surprised if you don’t notice some improvement in how quickly you’re able to master a new skill.
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Are you tired of trying to up-skill and taking forever to do it? Tried a bunch of different techniques and been frustrated at every turn?
Well there’s a better, faster way to build skills, and though it’s always a challenge to try learning something new (and there’s no way of getting around the fact that it takes time), there’s a way to make a skill stick quickly that you’ve probably never heard of.
It’s called “error repetition.” And yes, that means you’re doing something wrong, but it turns out our brains actually benefit from this experience.
Thrust into the spotlight by renowned neuroscientist and Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Huberman, error repetition taps into a key area of our brain associated with learning, and helps us subconsciously connect the dots between doing something the incorrect way and doing it the correct way.
A great example of how error repetition helps skill development in real life is something that’s been termed the “Super Mario Effect”. YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober coined this term in a 2018 Ted Talk after conducting an experiment in which 50,000 people attempted to code their way out of a maze that he and his team developed.
Half of the participants when they coded an unsuccessful move were served the following message: “That didn’t work. Please try again.”
While the other half of the group were told: “That didn’t work. You lost 5 points.”
Interestingly, the group which received an invitation to try again were 16% more successful than the group that was told that they lost points. The “try again” group also had more attempts on average per move (around 2.5x more tries) than the points loss group.
The key takeaway for Mark was that just like in the game Super Mario, the focus on trying again ultimately led to players experiencing higher degrees of success. In Mark’s words “When it comes to games like this, no one ever picks up a controller for the first time and then, after jumping into a pit thinks, ‘I’m so ashamed, that was such a failure’ and never want[s] to try again…the focus and obsession is about beating the game.”
In essence, when our brain is stimulated to repeat an action, we’re more likely to get it correct, to win, or to succeed at a task.
You’ve probably heard of dopamine. It’s a neurotransmitter that your brain releases when it gets a kick out of something enjoyable. For example, entertaining content, ingesting sugar or fat, or doing something correctly for the first time.
According to Dr. Huberman, this dopamine trigger from doing something right is very important to building skills with error repetition. And in order to maximize our brain’s dopamine response to doing something right, it’s also important to keep our baseline dopamine levels low before starting a training session (e.g. not taking a supplement that increases motivation before training). That way our brain will reward us with a huge dopamine hit when we accomplish whatever it is we’re trying to do.
Now the entire premise of skill acquisition through error repetition hinges on that one word: repetition. The more you can practice a skill (even incorrectly), the faster you’re going to learn it, so do it as often as you can.
Try and set aside time for training sessions daily, or even every couple of days—they don’t have to be long, you just need to get plenty of reps in!
The last thing you need to do to give yourself the best shot with error repetition is to do absolutely nothing after a training session. You might think of this as “digesting” what you just learned (you may also just feel tired and need a break—that’s a not a bad thing!).
There’s scientific support for this idea of doing nothing after training a new skill, too. A part of our brain called the hippocampus does this weird thing where it replays a sequence of events backwards after we train to help us determine what we did wrong and what we did right (so we can do it right again the next time). Crazy, right?
Sadly, there’s no magic skill pill we can take, but there are a few ways we can maximize our time and effort when it comes to learning something new. Use these tips the next time you want to learn something and we’ll be surprised if you don’t notice some improvement in how quickly you’re able to master a new skill.
