Even Top Performers Have Flaws, And That Might Be A Good Thing

Don’t tell the piano teacher, but practice doesn’t really make perfect. A virtuoso musician may seem to nail every note, but actually there are tiny variations in even the most skilled performance.

These variations in fine motor movements may represent the nervous system’s equivalent of a bit of static on a phone line: something that can’t be completely controlled but is nothing to really worry about either.

But another line of thinking suggests that subtle variability might be useful, because it forces the nervous system to adjust, and to learn through trial and error which adjustments are an improvement and which are not, thus maintaining an optimal performance.

This possibility was explored by Evren C. Tumer and Michael S. Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, using another virtuoso performer: an adult male songbird, the Bengalese finch.

Like many other songbirds, these finches develop their song as juveniles. They practice over and over until, as an adult, the song becomes set. But even a stable adult song has slight variations in pitch or other characteristics.

To see if the birds could make adjustments, the researchers devised an experiment using a computerized system that detects slight variations in pitch in the song. When such a “mistake” is made, the normal feedback the bird hears (its own song) is disrupted by a burst of white noise. As the researchers report in Nature, the birds soon began to shift their pitch — to “correct” their mistakes — to avoid the disruption.

The researchers say the findings show that variations force the bird to learn and adjust — an ability that might be particularly useful in helping the bird maintain the quality of its song as its motor skills decline because of aging or injury.

Such constant learning may help human performers keep up their chops, too.

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