FIONA MACDONALD2018-02-05 00:45Powered by DThe key to learning a new motor skill - such as playing the piano or mastering a new sport - isnt necessarily how many hours you spend practisingbut the way you practiseaccording to a 2016 study.2016Scientists have found that by subtly varying your trainingyou can keep your brain more active throughout the learning processand halve the time it takes to get up to scratch .The research goes somewhat against the old assumption that simply repeating a motor skill over and over again - for examplepractising scales on the piano or playing the same level on your game over and over again - was the best way to master it.Insteadit turns out there might be a quicker (and more enjoyable) way to level up.What we found is if you practise a slightly modified version of a task you want to masteryou actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practising the exact same thing multiple times in a row said lead researcher Pablo Celnikfrom Johns Hopkins University.Pablo CelnikThe researchers figured this out by getting 86 volunteers to learn to a new skill - moving a cursor on a computer screen by squeezing a small deviceinstead of using a mouse.86The volunteers were split into three groupsand each spent 45 minutes practising this.45Six hours laterone of the groups was asked to repeat the same training exercise againwhile another group performed a slightly different version that required different squeezing force to move the cursor.6The third group only completed the first training sessionso they could act as a control.At the end of the training periodeveryone was tested on how accurately and quickly they could perform the new skilland predictablythe control group did the worst after their one training session.But the surprise was that the group that had repeated the original training session actually did worse on the test compared to those who had mixed things up and trained in new areas - in factthe group that modified their training did twice as well as those whod repeated the original skill.So how does that work?The researchers believe its due to something called reconsolidationwhich is a process whereby existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge. Its long been suggested that reconsolidation could help to strengthen motor skillsbut this is one of the first experiments to test that hypothesis.This is also why the researchers gave the participants a 6-hour gap between training session - earlier neurological research has shown thats how long it takes for our memories to reconsolidate .66Our results are important because little was known before about how reconsolidation works in relation to motor skill development. This shows how simple manipulations during training can lead to more rapid and larger motor skill gains because of reconsolidation said Celnik.