How to Learn Skills Faster

The super Mario effect, the backward replay window, and why 15 minutes of mental rehearsal a day can add 35% to your strength gains.

With Andrew Huberman

"You want to perform as many repetitions as you possibly can at least when you're first trying to learn a skill." — Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman, on the episode

Andrew Huberman spends this episode taking apart the two most common myths about skill acquisition: the Hollywood idea of instant mastery and the self-help idea that it just takes 10,000 hours. Neither holds up against the neuroscience of how movement is actually built, through upper motor neurons, lower motor neurons, and central pattern generators that each need a different kind of input to change. The operating model he lays out instead is about repetitions and errors, not time on the clock, and about what happens to the brain in the minutes right after you stop training. This protocol pulls the mechanisms and numbers he gives for accelerating that process, from the super Mario effect experiments to the data on mental rehearsal.