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Practice makes perfect, the adage goes. Maybe not terrible advice, but it suggests we should stick to one thing and do it over and over — supposedly for 10,000 hours, if you believe the unsubstantiated hyperbole of author Malcolm Gladwell — until we achieve perfection. Problem is, the adage fails to consider how the range of our abilities can converge to make us better at a given skill, sport, hobby or profession.
The best way to get better at one pursuit is often to work on something totally tangential or even entirely unrelated, multiple studies have shown.
The findings are based in part on a theory called mutualism, and a new experiment adds to other research to reveal its tremendous potential for kids and adults of all ages — anyone who wants to get better at something or just keep the mind sharp and productive.
Mutualism is discussed by scientists primarily in relation to cognitive abilities (we’ll get to the sports stuff below). It holds that successful learning is dependent on a range of skills and knowledge that complement each other — that our various intellectual abilities enhance the others as they all improve.
A strong vocabulary cultivates better reasoning skills, for example, which in turn makes it easier to learn math, according to a study that examined the cognitive abilities and progress of hundreds of children across several years. “We found that having good vocabulary to start with made children’s problem solving develop more quickly,” the scientists concluded. “It also worked the other way around: being better at problem solving meant children were quicker to learn new words.”
Mutualism plays out in this circular fashion across a wide range of skills and cognitive abilities — and not just when we’re young.
“People often think that the best way to get better at something is to simply practice it over and over again, but robust skill learning is actually supported by variation in practice,” says Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, PhD, a researcher and professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Stine-Morrow and colleagues recently conducted an experiment to test the value of mutualism in older adults, ages 60 to 87, specifically how it can improve working memory.
The working memory in our brain is like random-access memory (RAM) in a computer. It holds the information you take in while your brain is on and keeps it handy for immediate access, prior to sifting and sorting and shuttling some of it off to your brain’s hard drive and putting the rest in the trash folder — most of which happens while you sleep. In reality, much of your working memory is even more ephemeral than that. Stine-Morrow offered the example of “holding a recipe in mind while you search the fridge for ingredients.”
Working memory tends to decline naturally with aging, so there’s tremendous interest among scientists in devising ways to maintain and improve it.
At the beginning of the four-week study, Stine-Morrow’s team tested volunteers’ working memory by measuring how long they could remember one set of facts while reading unrelated material.
The participants were then split into four groups to do different types of cognitive training.
The people in Group №3, who did multiple cognitive training tasks, ultimately outperformed all others in a repeat of the initial reading/memory task. It took them some time to find their groove, however.“They needed to work for it,” Stine-Morrow explained. “Mixed practice did not directly lead to better performance; it led to better learning. That group was the slowest to improve on the reading span task, but they ultimately reached the highest peak.”The results of this experiment, detailed earlier this year in the journal Intelligence, speak to the advantage of mutualism only narrowly. “We have demonstrated the broad principle of mutualism through the small lens of how it applies to working memory,” Stine-Morrow said. “If you scale up this principle and combine it with different kinds of skills, that could demonstrate broader effects.”Other research has indicated far broader applications for mutualism and mixed practice, however, including for physical skills.
Stine-Morrow points to a 1978 study in which two groups of kids practiced tossing bean bags. The first group practiced on a single, fixed target. The second group, which practiced on targets at multiple distances, improved “significantly” more than the first group, the researchers reported back then.
World-class athletes, meanwhile, are more likely to have played multiple sports as kids, and to have started their main sport later and spent less time practicing their main sport, compared to national-level athletes, a 2021 review of 51 international studies found. The world-class athletes also improved more slowly as they progressed from childhood sports to the professional level.
Nobel prize winners were found in the same analysis to be more likely than winners of mere national awards to have had multidisciplinary experience, and to have progressed in their fields more slowly.
“The findings suggest that variable, multidisciplinary practice experiences are associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence,” the researchers concluded in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Mutualism has notable practical potential for all of us as we age, when working memory and other cognitive skills begin to decline. It’s also a reminder that we’re never too old to kickstart the brain. In a study last year, 33 volunteers who were 55 and older were sent back to school to take adult-ed classes in which they learned three previously unfamiliar subjects for three months. In before-and-after tests, general cognitive scores doubled and tripled. The fact that they were learning specific new things made their brains work better overall.
If we were to boil all this down to a recipe for learning or improving any life skill, we’d add a heaping helping of variety, the best spice.
Meanwhile, mutualism stands as an alternative theory to traditional ideas of intelligence.
“It challenges the prevailing view that intelligence — typically measured as an array of intercorrelated abilities — is an inherent property of individuals that is reflected in everyday performance,” Stine-Morrow told me. “Rather, mutualism suggests that intelligence emerges through interaction with complex environments that allow the exercise of mental skills in varying constellations and in varying contexts.”
Heady stuff. I’m going to go study up on something totally unrelated, then come back and read that again.
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