Ifyou have ever tried a new sport or attempted learning a musical instrument, youare well aware that the hardest part is getting started. Once you figure outthe technique, the skills return fairly easily, even if they are not used forlong periods of time. Most experts attribute this to “muscle memory”， which means the brain remembers the action and can recallit when needed. Now some researchers from John Hopkins University believe thereis another factor that may be as important in recalling previously learnedmotor skills—the errors made while learning the task.

Thestudy led by Reza Shadmehr, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, involvedasking volunteers to play a simple video game: hitting a red target dot with aslightly smaller blue dot, similar to playing virtual games. What the gamersdid not know was that as soon as they mastered the game, the researchersreprogrammed it by moving the blue dot slightly off­course, thereby forcingthem to restart the learning process. What the scientists observed was thatthough the volunteers did make mistakes every time the game was changed, theygot successively faster at mastering it.

Shadmehrbelieves that this has something to do with the fact that in addition todelivering the task to muscle memory, the brain is also recognizing each wrongmove and learning how to correct it. He compares it to having a coach thatpoints out the mistakes and makes suggestions on how to improve.

Whatsurprises the scientists most is that making mistakes not only trains the brainto perform better at a specific task, but also helps it learn faster fromerrors, even when the mistakes are made while learning a completely differenttask. The researchers believe that the brain keeps a general database of errorsanddraws_onthem whenever a new motor skill is being learned, toensure that mistakes are not repeated. This helps make successive learningprocesses much faster.