Practice – Iwama Ryu Aikido Australia

‘Myelin is a sheath, it literally forms an electrical tape-like wrapping around the wires of our brain, our axons, the neurons that form chains in our brain and the myelin is what wraps them. And just like electrical tape wraps any wire it serves to insulate electricity, it makes it move faster down the wire and it prevents it from leaking out into the surrounding tissue. And the magical thing about myelin is that when we practice we get more of it and I talked about this with a neurologist at the National Institute of Health and he referred to myelin as sort of broadband for our brain.

Every beautiful skill is actually a circuit that’s in our brain. We talk about muscle memory, muscles don’t actually have memory, muscles are very dumb they only do exactly what our circuits tell them to do and myelin is how we build fast accurate circuits. All the speed that we see in motion, all the speed of thought that we see, all the beautiful fluency that’s created by very fast, very accurate electricity and myelin is the way we make our electricity and move faster and more accurately. The scientist said we have to rewrite the old saying – practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes myelin and myelin makes perfect.

There was a great study of pianists and they measured the myelin in their brain before and after several hundred hours of practice and what they found was that the myelin growth was proportional to the hours of practice. So every hour earned them a certain amount of myelin, every hour spent working hard earned them a little more accuracy, a little more speed.’

Minnesota-based journalist Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code
ABC Radio National 5th November 2011

Read the full transcript of ‘Practice makes perfect’ here.