Mastering any physical skill takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. But what does practice actually do to make us better at things?

 

Fill in the gaps in the video extract with

the words in bold below:

 

superhighway                 attribute            wrapped            ease      mastering

quantify             pathways           affect                  edge                   stimuli

 

1.……………… any physical skill, be it performing a pirouette, playing an instrument, or throwing a baseball, takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more 2. …………. , speed, and confidence.

So what does practice do in our brains to make us better at things? Our brains have two kinds of neural tissue, grey matter and white matter. The grey matter processes information in the brain, directing signals and sensory 3. …………. to nerve cells, while white matter is mostly made up of fatty tissue and nerve fibres. In order for our bodies to move, information needs to travel from the brain’s grey matter down the spinal cord through a chain of nerve fibres called axons to our muscles.

 

So how does practice, or repetition, 4. …………. the inner workings of our brains? The axons that exist in the white matter are 5. ………….. with a fatty substance called myelin, and it’s this myelin covering, or sheath, that seems to change with practice. Myelin is similar to insulation on electrical cables. It prevents energy loss from electrical signals that the brain uses, moving them more efficiently along neural 6. ………………. .

 

Some recent studies in mice suggest that the repetition of a physical motion increases the layers of myelin sheath that insulates the axons. And the more layers, the greater the insulation around the axon chains, forming a sort of 7. …………….. for information connecting your brain to your muscles. So while many athletes and performers 8. ……………. their successes to muscle memory, muscles themselves don’t really have memory.

 

Rather, it may be the myelination of neural pathways that give these athletes and performers their 9. ………… with faster and more efficient neural pathways. There are many theories that attempt to 10. …………… the number of hours, days, and even years of practice that it takes to master a skill. While we don’t yet have a magic number, we do know that mastery isn’t simply about the amount of hours of practice. It’s also the quality and effectiveness of that practice. (…)

 

Now watch the video (0:00-2:21)

to check your answers:

 

 

Key: 1. Mastering; 2. ease; 3. stimuli; 4. affect; 5. wrapped; 6. pathways; 7. superhighway; 8. attribute; 9.edge; 10. quantify

 

Glossary

 

• inner – inside or contained within something else
• sheath – a covering for the blade of a knife
• edge – an advantage over other people (have the edge over)
• to allot – to give a share of something for a particular purpose
• to unravel (a mystery or puzzle) – to gradually solve, explain it; work out the answer to it

 

Practice makes perfect

Read the article and decide if the sentences below are true or false:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/practice-doesn-t-always-make-perfect/

 

1. The study suggests that time spent practising is the sole determinant of success in various fields.

2. The concept of deliberate practice was popularised by a psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson.

3. The research indicates that practice time has a significant impact on academic performance.

4. The authors of the study believe that innate abilities are likely to influence high-level performance.

5. The text says that personality traits have no bearing (=influence) on achieving success.

6. The findings reveal that chess players benefit more from practice than individuals in other disciplines.

7. The study concludes that success is entirely dependent on the amount of practice one undertakes.

 

Key: 1F; 2T; 3F; 4T; 5F; 6T; 7F

 

Match the words in bold in the sentences 1-6 to their synonyms a)-f) below:

 

1. It takes many thousands of hours of hard work to get to the top—yet time alone is not enough if you lack the other attributes necessary in your discipline.

2. In 1993 psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues argued that success was not a matter of talent but rather what they termed deliberate practice, an idea that Malcolm Gladwell popularized as the “10,000-hour rule” in his book Outliers.

3. On average, practice time accounted for just 12 percent of the variation in performance.

4. And success, of course, does not always scale with performance—getting to the top also depends on personality, determination and simply being in the right place at the right time.

5. Effective practice is consistent, intensely focused and targets content or weaknesses that lie at the edge of one’s current abilities.

6. Studies have shown that many top athletes, musicians and dancers spend 50-60 hours per week on activities related to their craft.

 

a) correlate

b) called

c) profession

d) however

e) made up/constituted

f) regular

 

Key: 1d); 2b); 3e); 4a); 5f); 6c)

Watch and revise!

 

Mastering Anything

Effective Practice Tips

 

https://www.cloud.worldwideschool.pl/index.php/s/n7TQ6oT3zwaTnpZ

 

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