A Second Guitar Lesson: The Six Month Rule

What happens if there’s not enough time to do this?

This post is about the neuroscience of learning. And I will get to that. But first, a brief interlude about delays, stops, and starts. Jinxed by my last blog entry about learning the guitar, I just went through a month when I really didn’t practice. Three weeks of being super-busy, then Thanksgiving holiday week travel when I couldn’t bring the instrument.

Delays can be fatal when you’re trying to make a change or when—like me—you’re trying to learn a new skill. It’s pretty easy to find examples of projects and change efforts that were delayed in an attempt to kill them off, as far back as ancient Rome and as recently as the Wall Street reforms under Dodd-Frank.

So what does a delay mean for learning a new skill? Maybe something like my slowly developing musical dexterity? Studies in neuroscience, and specifically neuroplasticity, suggest that it all depends on how long you’ve been at it. There’s pretty good evidence that once you’ve been working on a new skill for more than six months, your brain is much more tolerant of delays.