Today I was listening to my favorite: the Huberman Lab podcast. To be honest I have been hooked to it for the past few months. I have been extremely surprised by the matching between the topics and my personal interest in improving my life. The topics are high-level accurate biological information on humans, and it has proven to be extremely useful to me.
In the episode about "How to Learn Skills Faster", Huberman told me about a scientific study that demonstrates that the ability to learn a motor skill faster has to do with the number of repetitions per unit time. I have thought and concluded the same before. In my Ph.D., I stated that the success of your Ph.D. depends upon the number of experiments you get to do (correlation). It applies beyond the lab and to many different areas.
Inside of the study, Huberman reported that the decreased number of repetitions per unit time had to do with a message of warning that something was at stake and you may lose it. Having something at risk will reduce the number of trials. I link this phenomenon to performing an action when fear is a factor. Fear would slow me down and not keep up a high number of reps per unit time.
Now, the self-help layman literature would immediately translate the success of learning a skill to the success of winning at something. They could be correlated. If learning to do perfect free throws means you could use it in an NBA final, then they are connected, but we should not make these connections so easy.
What is my takeaway? implement a high number of reps to learn a motor skill fast. If stakes are low just go for it, do not get stopped by a mental barrier. On the other hand, I recall the times in my Ph.D. when samples were a limited resource so we had to act with caution. Interestingly, I saw people succeed by burning through a large number of samples, and others by being extremely cautious. It is just anecdotical, not scientifically proven - but if I had to choose, I would burn intelligently through the samples as soon as I can leading to a high number of reps per unit time.