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10,000 hours to perfection

Nature Neuroscience volume 16, pages 1168–1169 (2013)Cite this article

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A study reports that a metabolic measure of synaptic activity in the motor cortex becomes dissociated from neural firing rates after extensive practice in a behavioral task, suggesting an increase in efficacy of synaptic inputs.

It is widely accepted that expertise takes practice—hence the '10,000-hour rule' that intense practice for up to 10 years distinguishes expert performers from the merely good1. But what is the neural consequence of such extended practice in a particular domain? How are knowledge that is learned and skills that are gradually refined reflected in neural activity? For obvious reasons, there are few studies of the effects of very long-term practice on architecture or function in the human brain. Perhaps the most extensive are longitudinal studies that last weeks or months—well short of 10,000 h. For example, the acquisition of juggling skills over 6 or 12 weeks leads to changes in the volume of gray matter in visual motion areas and to changes in the white matter linking these motion areas to parietal sensory motor regions2. More typically, studies report the effects of a few tens of hours of practice spread over several days. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Picard, Matsuzaka and Strick3 report the neural outcome in the monkey of training that lasted months and years.

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Figure 1: 2DG uptake maps of the motor cortex.

Katie Vicari

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  1. Chris Miall is in the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.,

    Chris Miall

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  1. Chris Miall
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Correspondence to Chris Miall.

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Miall, C. 10,000 hours to perfection. Nat Neurosci 16, 1168–1169 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3501

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