Dr. Andrew Huberman

The adaptation...

occurs, of course, in a very similar way to resistance training, different mechanisms, but there's a delay in adaptation, you get better.

It's just that with resistance training, you can kind of sense the change before the change occurs because of the enhanced blood flow of the muscles.

With endurance training, you sense the limit of your ability and then you exceed that limit subsequently.

Now, in terms of cognitive learning, the same thing is basically true.

If you want to get really technical about it, the computational biology, the modeling of this says that if you want to learn something, probably setting the difficulty of what you're trying to learn to about...

85% correct trials, 15% error trials is probably ideal.

What does that mean?

It means if you're trying to learn a new piano piece, you know, or you're trying to teach that to a child, if they're not starting from scratch, let them play something that they know pretty well and then introduce a small percentage, maybe 10 to 15, maybe 20%.

You don't have to be exact about this.

of novel material that's hard for them to learn.

But yes, it is the focused, deliberate attempt to learn something that creates that sense of underlying agitation that is the trigger, the stimulus for neuroplasticity.

This makes sense.

If you could complete something, if you could do something, a scale of music,

a physical task, speaking a new language.

If you could do that, why would your nervous system ever change?

And how does your nervous system know if it's supposed to change?

Your nervous system doesn't know successful trial versus failure trial.

I've tried many times to learn other languages and I'm modestly terrible at Spanish, but if I were to try and get better, my nervous system doesn't know when I'm failing.

It has no idea.