Dr. Tommy Wood

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1,133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Tommy Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Huberman Lab · Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

The simple answer is what the study showed was that 10,000 hours was the average amount of time that an expert violinist had spent practicing by the time they reached 20 years old.

That's what the study showed.

They weren't even experts by that point.

That was how much they'd practiced, you know, essentially in their youth.

So...

that number of hours doesn't even translate over to true expertise in violinists in this one specific example.

So I don't think there's some fixed number of hours required.

It is interesting, other parts of that study kind of looked at the practice routines of these expert violinists.

And what they found was that they tended to practice for about two sessions of 60 to 90 minutes a day.

And I think that's a pretty good rule, right?

If you're going to do something hard, you're pushing beyond your current skill level, focusing for 60 to 90 minutes, maybe with a couple of breaks in there a couple of times a day, that's probably about as much as most people can do.

And I think that also relates to how we perform on a day to day basis in other areas of life, right?

We kind of expect that we can go to work and we can work really hard for eight hours straight during the day.

But like, the brain doesn't really work like that.

If we're doing hard, cognitive work, right, you're being you're focused and highly challenged, as you might be if you're a

a future virtuoso on the violin and you're trying to really practice and push yourself, you can only really do that for chunks of 20 to 30 minutes, maybe a couple of times at the break.

So that's why Pomodoro, even though there's no good studies on the Pomodoro technique, for those time periods,

you know, 25 minutes for the five minute break a few times, they do kind of fit into that kind of rhythm.

That translates over to multiple areas where we might want to use our brains.

And just remember that hard cognitive work and that process of learning can only really happen in those kinds of size of chunks if you want to do them sustainably.

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