How Neuroscience Can Help You to Make Fewer Mistakes

The one thing all of us want as harpists is to not make mistakes while we play. We will practice for hours trying to get rid of those errors, but sometimes it can feel like no matter how much we practice, it’s not making a difference.

If that’s been happening to you, the problem isn’t you, it’s the way you practice.

What most students don’t realize is that learning requires specific processes in the brain. If we don’t facilitate those processes, we’re going to keep making mistakes and stalling our progress. Today, I’m going to explain how learning actually works in the brain, how you can apply that to your practice, and the one crucial step most students overlook.

How the Brain Learns: Neurons That Fire Together, Wire Together

First, you need to understand what’s happening in your brain when you learn a piece of music.

In your brain, you have cells called neurons. Whenever you do or experience something, these neurons activate. In neuroscience, there’s a famous expression: "Neurons that fire together, wire together."

When neurons fire, pathways form between them to pass electrical signals. Each time those neurons fire, the pathway gets wrapped in a substance called myelin. This reinforces the connection, much like an electrical wire getting thicker and more insulated.

Each time you play a set of notes correctly, you wrap that "wire" in another layer of myelin. The more you repeat it, the thicker that wire becomes. When your brain tries to tell your body what to do, the electrical signal will always take the easiest path - the one that has been reinforced the most.

Here's what you need to remember: whatever you’ve done the most times is what you will remember later.

If you're working on a difficult spot and it takes you ten tries to get it right, you have played it wrong nine times and correctly only once. In your brain, the "wrong" pathway is currently nine times stronger than the "right" one. To ensure you play correctly in the future, you must complete enough correct repetitions to make the right path the strongest one available.

How to Apply This in Practice

To use these principles effectively, you need to create an environment where it is possible to play correctly more often than not. We do this through "Chunking."

1. Pick a Small Segment

Don't start at the beginning of the song. Pick a tiny "chunk"—perhaps just one measure or even the transition between two measures. You want it to be small enough that you won't get distracted or tired by the time you get to the music you want to target

2. Play Slowly (Maintain Control)

Playing slowly gives you more time to think and in turn, gives you a better chance of playing correctly.

When choosing your speed, pay attention to how you feel. Have you ever run down a hill so fast that your feet can barely keep up and you're just trying not to fall? We don’t want practice to feel like that. You should feel totally in control. If you don't, play slower or make the chunk smaller. Or both!

3. The Power of Repetition

Once you can play that small chunk correctly, repeat it correctly 3–5 times. This is the most important part! You are thickening that neural pathway. Once a chunk is solid, you can gradually move on to larger two or four-bar segments, and repeat those 3-5 times correctly as well.

The Crucial Last Step: Practice Placing

There's one last step that many students overlook, and it can be one of the most powerful ways to improve your playing and reduce the number of mistakes and hesitations in your performance.

If you can’t play a chunk without a long pause, even at a slow speed, you must "Practice Placing."

Just like it sounds, to do this, you need to practice moving your fingers from one group of notes to the next strings they need to land on.

Something I always tell my students is that the hardest part of playing the harp is getting to the strings; once you’re there, you’ll be fine.

So much of playing the harp is in the movement between notes, and that movement also has its own neural pathways that need to be strengthened in order to be reliable for you.

• How to do it: Play the notes right before a difficult jump, then move your hand to the next set of strings and freeze.

• The Goal: See how fast you can get your fingers on the strings, but don’t play the notes yet.

• The Rule: Once you can land the placement confidently 3–5 times, then you can return your attention to actually playing the notes.

Is Five Times Enough?

So, if you play something correctly five times, will you never make a mistake again?

Well... Probably not.

Remember that each repetition makes it a little more likely that your brain will be able to send the correct signal when you ask it to.

To play correctly, we need the correct pathway to be a LOT stronger than every other option.

To be truly "bulletproof," you need dozens of correct repetitions to solidify the learning. It’s a good idea to spend several days practicing the same chunks to keep building that myelin.

If you do make a mistake in the future, don’t feel like a failure. A mistake is simply an indicator that those neural pathways aren’t as strong as they need to be yet. Keep wrapping the yarn, keep thickening the wire, and the progress will follow.

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