Brian Johnson explains interleaving: mixing up your practice instead of repeating the same thing over and over. A baseball pitcher throws fastballs and curveballs from different distances, not fifty fastballs in a row. The messier approach builds real skill, while repetitive practice just feels easier and tricks you into thinking you've learned.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another optimize +1. In learning 101, we talked about a concept scientists call inter leaving. The basic idea is simple. If you want to learn something, you're better off varying your practice rather than grooving one identical rep after another. For example, they've done research on baseball players. If you throw someone 15 curveballs in a row that than 15 fastballs in a row, they'll feel like they're doing really well, but they won't actually be improving the skills they need for an actual game when they don't know what's coming. Scientists call that the fluency illusion. And it's actually one of the greatest threats to effective learning, the interleaving approach. It's a random assortment of fastballs and curveballs that keeps the batter constantly guessing and thereby developing the actual skills he or she will need come game time. Of course, that doesn't look as pretty or feel as good as the easier, more common approach when you know what's coming. But alas, that's where the learning occurs. And well, that's what I was thinking about when I was practicing my Zen in the art of spear throwing during one of my 15 minute breaks after a 90 minute deep work session, I was throwing from one location about 25ft away, again and again and again. Now the race distance is something like 20 to 30ft and I occasionally backed up and did it from a further distance. But then I realized I needed to make every throw from a different distance to inter leave the distances and avoid any potential fluency illusion. Check out our notes on make it stick and how we learn from for more on the science of how all this works. But for now, know this. Whether we're talking about math problems or basketball free throws or whatever, we'd be wise to vary our practice. For example, rather than do one type of math problem 10 times in a row, mix it up with other types. Rather than shoot free throws from exactly the same spot, rep after rep, move forward a bit, back a bit, to the right, a bit, to the left a bit, etc. It sounds weird, but science says it works better, so that's today's plus one. What are you trying to master these days? Any way to step out of the comfort zone of the fluency illusion and introduce a little more randomness to optimize the rate at which you improve your skills? High fives and let's do this.
