Your Brain Isn’t Built for Consistency – Here’s How to Make That Work for You

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to reproduce your signature exactly the same way every single time?

Or play a G major scale exactly the same way twice in a row (never mind 10 times)?

These are both pretty straightforward tasks. So doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume that if we put in enough hours, we should eventually be able to achieve a consistent level of performance 100% of the time?

At least, that’s what the maxim “practice makes perfect” seems to promise us.

So…why are none of us there yet?

As a kid, I used to wonder…was I just not working hard enough? Was there some trick or hack or tweak that I had overlooked? Was my pinky just too short? My chinrest too flat?

Or…gulp…was I just not talented enough?

Well, it turns out that even elite athletes can’t perfectly reproduce the same exact movement patterns with machine-like consistency. Because it appears that our brain isn’t wired for that kind of consistency – no matter how much we practice.

Wait, what?!

So is practicing ultimately just a cruel exercise in futility?

Muscles vs. brain

When we miss a shift or play something out of tune despite nailing it the last 8 times in a row, the natural assumption is that our muscles screwed something up. That our hands, arms, embouchure, body, etc. did something wrong during the movement itself.

And that may very well have happened, but our muscles are only part of the equation. Our brain plays an important role in the movement planning stage – before our muscles even begin to act.

A study!

Seeking to learn more about this potential source of variability, a team of researchers at Stanford (Churchland et al., 2006) designed an experiment to measure the relationship between brain activity occurring before muscle movements, and small variations occurring during the movement itself.

Monkeys reaching, slow and fast

To do this, they trained a couple monkeys to reach for different colored dots on a screen at two different speeds – “slow” and “fast.” The monkeys learned to sit in front of a screen, wait for a green or red dot to appear, and when given a cue to go, reach and touch the dot to get a reward. If they reached slowly for a green spot, they’d get some juice. And if they reached quickly for a red spot, they’d earn some juice too.¹

Meanwhile, as the monkeys were reaching for dots and earning juice, the researchers monitored the activity of neurons in two specific motor-related parts of the brain².

Where is the variability?

Over the course of thousands of reaches, an interesting picture began to emerge. Despite being motivated to perform as consistently as they could (because, you know, there’s juice at stake!), rarely were the monkeys’ reach speeds exactly the same. And as the researchers predicted, these small variations in reach speed were correlated with small variations in the monkeys’ brain activity, occurring hundreds of milliseconds before the monkeys even moved a muscle.

Through some pretty intense number crunching and statistical whizbangery, the researchers were able to estimate that about 50% (and possibly more) of the inconsistencies in reach speed were attributable to variability in the brain during the action planning stage of movement.

So what does this mean for us?

The planning stage

So to bring this back to our scales and etudes, even though it’s easy to assume that something went wrong during the execution part of a shift, the results suggest that it’s just as possible that something went wrong before the shift even began, when our brains were planning the movement.

At first glance, this sounds like bad news. But it’s actually not. I promise!

Flexibility trumps consistency

The researchers suggest that our brain isn’t wired for consistency, but rather, for flexibility.

“The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again. The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you’ve never done before.”

~Mark Churchland

And when you think about it, this actually makes pretty good sense. Because how often do we need to perform something in exactly the same way?

Sure we want to play in tune, with good sound and rhythm, but often, we have to play it slightly louder, or slower, or in a way that matches a different acoustical setting. Or with the pitch slightly sharper or flatter depending on what our colleagues are doing.

Imagine how limiting it would be if we could play a passage well, but only if we are sitting, not standing. Or at exactly quarter note=114, but not at 113 or 115? Or on a piano with a light touch, but not with a heavy touch? Or with a great reed, but not with anything less than that?

After all, the best musicians or athletes aren’t those who can reproduce an exact and unvarying motor pattern under ideal, unchanging circumstances, but who can achieve the desired end result in many different ways, irregardless of the circumstances.

So what are we to do with all of this? Could it have any implications on how we approach our daily practice?

Takeaways

Well, for one, this natural variability does NOT mean that practicing is futile. The more we practice, the more consistently closer we can get to technical excellence. What’s important, is that we avoid getting too obsessed with playing a passage in exactly the same unvarying way, but rather, focus on being more flexible and resilient in achieving our desired result despite the inevitable variability.

For instance, I could never get my serve toss in tennis to go to exactly the same place, but I could still get the ball in, despite the slight imperfections of my toss.

Or, I might never be able to recreate the exact positioning of my violin at an angle of 105.4 degrees relative to the floor, with my pinky finger 3.2 centimeters above the E string 6 degrees right of center, and my index finger shifting up on the A string towards 8th position starting with .56 lbs per square inch of pressure decreasing to .34 lbs per square inch – but I could still get the parallel octaves in tune, even with cold, clammy hands, because I practiced doing so in dozens of different ways, instead of trying to identify the single “perfect” way to execute this shift.

The value of this kind of variable practice has come up in many other studies we’ve looked at here, from this 2016 study in which the addition of variable practice led to twice the improvement of the regular practice group to this interview with violist Toby Appel who explains how he doesn’t practice what he’s going to do on stage so much as he practices all the things that he might do on stage.

Another takeaway

This is a little more tangential, but I think it’s also helpful to appreciate that peak performances are not fully under our control. Those days when everything goes right, and we can’t miss do feel pretty awesome…but there’s some luck involved too. For more on this, I highly recommend watching the humorous 99U talk How to Overcome the 3 Fears Every Creative Faces (the speaker gets into this around 5:58, but do watch it from the beginning for context!).

Optimal performances, on the other hand, are more under our control. These are the occasions when things go as well as they possibly could have, given the circumstances – which still feels pretty terrific.

I’m reminded of a story the late Stephen Clapp once told me about a performance he gave at Aspen one summer. As he and his colleagues were walking off stage, rather than stewing over missed notes or other imperfections, the violist in his ensemble remarked, “You know, that’s about as well as I could have played that today.”

He said that this comment always stuck with him, given the stature of the violist. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but this does seem to be a healthier way of looking at one’s performance, no? 😁

References

Churchland, M. M., Afshar, A., & Shenoy, K. V. (2006). A central source of movement variability. Neuron, 52(6), 1085–1096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2006.10.034