Old saw may be true: Practice does make perfect

Joke: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Answer: Practice, practice, practice.

Tucked into our brains are the mysterious channels of memory: The kind that finds keys, remembers the route across country, knows how to ride a bike, recalls Grandma’s red dress, and relives that special Christmas when brother came home from college.

All of these kinds of “remembering” represent special kinds of memory, one of which is called “procedural memory.”

According to Rebecca Rupp, author of Committed to Memory (Crown, 1998), procedural memory is a process of knowing how. It is procedural memory that lets us, after many years, swim or type without thinking about the keys.

Some say it is procedural memory that makes experts and geniuses, more than genetics, more than brain power, more than special gifts.

In fact, if you have 10 years and complete dedication, no matter what age you are, procedural memory can probably make you an expert at something, or get you very close to it.

Practice can compensate for age-related declines in motor abilities and general reaction time, according to a study at the University of Potsdam in Germany. The study showed that older dedicated professional musicians, those who practiced consistently and constantly, performed equally as well as their younger peers.

Procedural memory has been said to create champions. Researcher Michael Howe, writing in New Scientist, argues that ordinary people can be brilliant if given sufficient practice to build up procedural memory.

One example is a group of 18th-century orphans taught the violin by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. The children came from impoverished backgrounds of extreme deprivation and sorrow before being taken into a church-run orphanage. Nonetheless, after years of instruction by the famous composer, a stunning 30 percent of the orphaned girls developed prodigious musical abilities — a far higher percentage of musical prodigies than would be found in the average population of girls.

Practice, it seems, really does make perfect.