How Your Brain Learns a Rudiment, and Anything Else

Think about the first week of anything new. A new job: new software, forty new names, acronyms nobody explains, and a presentation due Friday. A new language, a new routine, a new role at home. Nothing is hard on its own. All of it at once is a lot, and that is the first clue to how the brain learns a new skill.

I see the same thing on a drum stool. The hardest part of learning a paradiddle isn’t your hands. It’s your desk.

Here’s what I mean. When a drummer meets the paradiddle for the first time, I can see them trying to hold five things at once: the sticking (right, left, right, right; left, right, left, left), the accent on the first note of each group, the tempo, the count, and the notation on the page. Their hands aren’t the problem. Something has to fall off the desk, and usually it’s the very thing we were trying to learn.

There is solid learning science under that feeling, whatever you’re learning, and it’s the same science I built Practicing Musician’s curriculum on.

Your working memory is a small desk

Cognitive load theory starts from a simple observation: the part of your mind that holds and works with new information right now, your working memory, has a small capacity. Long-term memory, by contrast, is enormous (Sweller, 1988; Sweller, van Merriënboer, & Paas, 1998).

That difference explains a lot about practice of any kind. Everything new has to sit on the small desk while you work with it. Everything you’ve already learned well lives in the big filing cabinet, and you can pull it out as one organized chunk. An experienced drummer doesn’t think “right, left, right, right.” They think “paradiddle,” and their attention is free for the groove, the band and the room. A nurse in her tenth year doesn’t think through each step of a routine task; her attention is free for the patient.

So the beginner and the expert aren’t doing the same task with different skill. The beginner is doing a much heavier task: holding every piece on the desk at once.

The learning science behind Practicing Musician puts it plainly: the more complex the task, the less room you have to take in anything new. That’s why we design every lesson around what a learner already knows, and why each new idea gets the desk to itself.

One thing at a time

The second principle is the one most of us resist, at work and at the drums: you can’t really do two new things at once.

What feels like multitasking is mostly switching. Research on task switching finds that moving between tasks costs you time and accuracy, even when you know the switch is coming and have time to prepare for it (Monsell, 2003). Your attention goes back and forth, and each trip has a price.

In practice, that means the most useful question you can ask before you start is: what is the one thing?

For the paradiddle, I’d split it like this, and a new talk splits the same way:

1. Sticking only. No accents, no metronome. Say it out loud as you play: “right left right right, left right left left.” Slow enough that you never have to stop and think. For a talk: the words only, out loud, no slides.
2. Then the accent. Only when the sticking is boring. Now the sticking lives in the filing cabinet, and the accent can have the desk. For a talk: the lines you want to land.
3. Then the tempo. Turn the metronome on, a little below where it feels easy. For a talk: a timer.
4. Then the music. Move it around the kit, or into a groove. For a talk: stand up and give it to one friend.

Each step is one thing. Each step frees space for the next. That’s how every Practicing Musician micro-lesson is built: one concept or skill at a time, developed across several lessons, instead of a whole unit’s worth of ideas arriving together.

Knowing why

The third principle is the one that makes the first two stick, for a new habit as much as a new rudiment: we pay attention to what we recognize as relevant.

Researchers who study interest describe two kinds: the interest you bring with you, and the interest a situation creates (Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000). You can’t control the first one for anybody else. You can design for the second.

One study I come back to often asked high school science students to write, a few times over a semester, about how what they were learning connected to their own lives. Compared with a control group, those students reported more interest in science and earned higher grades, and the difference was clearest for students who hadn’t expected to do well (Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Nothing about the science changed. What changed was that the students could see why it mattered.

In music, “why” is usually something you can hear. The paradiddle exists because it lets you switch which hand leads without crossing your arms, so you can move around the drums smoothly. Once a student hears that in a groove, they practice it differently. It stops being an exercise and starts being a tool. Outside music, it’s the same move: a new system at work stops being busywork the day you see what it saves you.

The learning science behind Practicing Musician calls this saliency: it should be obvious what is being learned and why it’s worth learning.

What this looks like at your next practice session

You don’t need a drum for any of this. A speech, a golf swing, a language, a new system at work, a new daily routine: the desk is the same size. (I wrote about why music’s lessons travel so well in If It Works in Music, It Works Everywhere.)

1. Write the one thing at the top of the page. One skill, in one sentence: “Even paradiddles, both hands,” or “Order lunch in Spanish without notes.” If you can’t write it in one sentence, it’s two things.
2. Make it slow enough to have spare attention. If you’re straining to keep up, the desk is full. Slow down until you could hold a short conversation while you do it, whether that’s the sticking or the new software.
3. Say why before you start. One sentence: “I’m practicing this because it lets me…” move around the kit, or run Monday’s meeting without reading my notes. If you can’t finish the sentence, find out before you put in the hours.
4. Add a layer only when the last one is boring. Boring is a good sign. It means the skill has moved off the desk and into the cabinet. When the sticking is boring, add the accent; when the opening of your talk is boring, add the slides.

Your attention is one of the most limited things you bring to practice. I’d rather you spend it on one thing you understand than scatter it across five you don’t.

Next in this series: why doing something over and over, by itself, isn’t enough, and three changes that make practice last.

Sources

Hidi, S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2000). Motivating the academically unmotivated: A critical issue for the 21st century. Review of Educational Research, 70(2), 151–179. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543070002151

Hulleman, C. S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2009). Promoting interest and performance in high school science classes. Science, 326(5958), 1410–1412. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1177067

Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 134–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00028-7

Practicing Musician. Foundational learning theories. https://practicingmusician.com/learning-theories/

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. G. W. C. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10(3), 251–296. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022193728205