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.

A researcher I know, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, conducted a seminal study of blind people learning Braille for the first time and mapped how their brain function seems to change during the process. He spent a year following test subjects who took Braille classes five days a week, Monday through Friday. On Mondays and Fridays, he would use high-powered magnets to map out what part of each student’s motor cortex was dedicated to supporting their index finger—the digit that reads text by scanning raised dots on a piece of paper.

What he found was that most weeks it was easy to see a change from Monday to Friday as more and more space in the motor cortex was taken up by the increasing skill of the index finger. But then subjects rested over the weekend, and the Monday maps were back down to the baseline size. It took a full six months before the Monday maps began to change gradually, a process that seemed to plateau at ten months. But what’s most striking is that once those Monday maps were well established, his research subjects could take two months off—and come back with no changes to those Monday maps.

What does all this tell me? A couple of thoughts:

• The six-month rule: When you’re learning a new skill, you better give it a good six months before you expect to see a lasting change—something that reflects the impact of structural differences in your brain.
• My delay may or may not be a problem: I started my guitar lessons about seven months ago. That may be long enough ago to have created the changes in my brain that can handle a delay. But there’s no definite answer here. Did I practice as much or as diligently as those blind people practiced Braille? Definitely not. So I’ll just have to see how it goes from here.