Besides aiding factual learning, desirable difficulties can also help you to master motor skills, like playing a musical instrument. The current dogma is that music practice should be a disciplined but highly repetitive affair, where you spend lengthy sessions practising the same few bars again and again until you play them to near perfection. Instead, the Bjorks’ research suggests that you would do far better to alternate a few different excerpts of music, spending a few minutes on each one. This will cause you to refresh your memory each time you come back to the exercise or excerpt.
