Someone Should Have Told Me This When I Was A Kid! With Dr. Molly Gebrian

If you’ve ever worried that you were a “slow learner” in music, or maybe you’ve heard about our “superlearning” material here at Musical U, then you’re going to love today’s mini-interview.

On our masterclass this weekend we had Dr. Molly Gebrian joining us. She’s our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month, and she’s so fascinating as an individual and the way she talks about her expert area is just really inspiring. So I’m excited to share this mini-interview with her. You’ll hear more about her background in just a moment.

We talk about her views on musicality, how her career as a viola player and her fascination with neuroscience combined to create her incredible expertise in accelerated learning. And she talks about a key insight that let her finally feel really robust in her performances so that they didn’t feel fragile, like things might go wrong at any moment. So if you can relate to that, you’re going to love hearing about how she finally broke through that.

I’ll be back at the end to wrap things up!

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Christopher: Today, I’m joined by Dr. Molly Gebrian, a violist renowned for her expertise and insight in the neuroscience of learning.

Molly is about to join the faculty at the New England Conservatory and is one of the leading lights in helping musicians to understand and actually benefit from all the incredible research that’s being done in academia, unlocking how the brain actually learns and what you can do to make learning music faster and easier.

She’s been published in places like Frontiers in Psychology and the Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain, as well as hosting her own popular YouTube channel.

She also continues to perform professionally as a classical violist, with a new album out named Trailblazers, which shines a spotlight on female composers from around the turn of the 20th century. I’ve been listening to it all morning and love it, highly recommend checking it out!

So you can see why we’re so lucky to have Molly with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month. She’s going to be providing coaching for our Next Level members this coming week.

And today, she’s here to present our monthly masterclass for all members on the topic of “what musicians can learn about practicing from current brain research”. Molly, welcome to the show!

Molly: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited about this.

Christopher: So I’d love to start with my favourite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is: what does musicality mean to you?

Molly: That’s a great question, and I feel like I have so much to say about that, so I’ll try to condense it and not make it too long!

Musicality, to me, means, as an individual musician or as an ensemble, telling your story to the audience, whatever that means. Conveying the composer’s story and what they are trying to say through their music and looking at it through your lens as a performer, as a musician. And we bring so many things to this.

I think very often a lot of musicians think musicality and technique are separate things, right? We work on scales and etudes and things like that. And then in our music, that’s where we work on musicality.

And they absolutely go hand in hand. You can’t do anything musical without the technical means to do it.

And so when I’m working on technique, I’m always thinking about musicality. How is this going to help me tell my story, tell the composer’s story through the music? So, in a nutshell, I would say that’s what musicality is.

Christopher: Fantastic. And the danger with the nutshell is always that I want to go back and pick up on, like, 17 different things that you said. But we’ll leave that as it stands because I think it was lovely, a really good perspective and immediately gives people, I think, a bit of insight into where you’re coming from as a performer, as an educator, as a musician.

I’d love to go back in your story a little bit, because I think there are only a handful of people I’m aware of who are, like, world class as musicians AND on the brain science side. You’re one of them. And I’m always fascinated to know how those two worlds came to be and come together so that you have the unique perspective you now do.

Tell us a bit about your own musical background.

Molly: Absolutely, yeah.

Them coming together was kind of an accident. So I went to Oberlin College and conservatory as an undergraduate, and I had always really liked school, and so I knew I wanted to double major in “viola and something”, but I didn’t know what the something was. And then my freshman year at Oberlin, I was looking through the course catalog, you know, to see what classes I could take, and there was this freshman only seminar on neuroscience, and I was like, well, that looks really interesting, I think I’ll sign up for that. And it was hands down the most interesting class I had ever taken. And I was like, okay, this what I want to double major in. This is what I want to learn about.

But I didn’t have any plans to do anything with it after Oberlin. I really just majored in it because I thought it was absolutely fascinating.

And so then after Oberlin, I went to New England conservatory for my masters. The plan was to be a violist neuroscience. That was nice, but I sort of left it behind. And then my first semester at NEC, I felt very unbalanced in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on. Like, something was very much wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.

And then my roommate at NEC, who had also been at Oberlin with me, she’s a violinist. She participated in a study at Harvard that was looking at something having to do with musicians versus non-musicians brains. And she came home from that and was telling me about it, and I got all excited, and I was like, okay, I really miss the neuroscience. This is why I’ve been feeling so weird.

And I was like, shoot, I’m at NEC. I can’t take neuroscience classes here, right? So I asked one of my professors if I would be allowed to do an independent study on neuroscience-related things, and they were like, I guess so. So I did an independent study looking into aspects of learning that I had started learning about Oberlin in my neuroscience major, that in my own mind, I had started connecting to practicing. Because I had started seeing those connections between what I was learning in my neuroscience classes, about how the brain worked, and how I could maybe apply those in practicing.

So it kind of all started with an independent study at NEC. And then from there, I went to Rice University for my doctorate. And again, it was in viola, but I was back at, like, a “real” school that had classes other than just music.

And so when I got there, I asked, am I allowed to take neuroscience classes here? And they were like, what? Like, why are you even asking? And I was like, it doesn’t matter, is the answer yes or no? And they were like, I guess so.

So I was able to take graduate level neuroscience classes at Rice again, and it was just for my own interest, because I really missed it.

But when I was at Rice. There was a composition professor there, Tony Brandt, who’s very interested in the intersection between music and neuroscience. And so he and I did some projects together, planning some interdisciplinary symposia on music and the brain, and leading up to one of those to get student interest in it, I did this lunchtime presentation series called “Pizza and Brains”, where the school supplied pizza for the students, and I would just do a short presentation on something having to do with neuroscience.

And that’s when I really started combining them and really saw, like, wow, I really love to do this. And it seems like other people are really interested in that as well.

So it’s sort of been a slow evolution over the years. Now, I do lots of stuff. You mentioned my YouTube channel. I write all the time. I have this book coming out this summer on the science of practicing. So none of this was planned, but I’m thrilled with how it turned out because I absolutely love doing this work.

Christopher: Amazing. And a lot of people, a lot of our members and a lot of people in the audience will be familiar with what we do at Musical U, which we call “superlearning”, which is, you know, taking these accelerated learning techniques and ideas and applying them to music.

But for anyone who’s never come across this idea before and is hearing you say, you know “neuroscience is fascinating”, or “I was connecting it to my practice”, can you give some sense of why this is such a fascinating area and what kinds of things can benefit musicians?

Molly: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, when I was an undergrad at Oberlin, I was a really serious musician practicing all the time. Right? And musicians never really have enough time to practice. No matter how many hours you have, you always wish you more time.

And I was learning different techniques for how to practice more efficiently from my viola professor. And I was also learning things in my neuroscience classes that seemed very related. And I saw that when I applied these things from my neuroscience classes that I learned my music faster, that I was able to perform better, that what I learned kind of stuck with me better, and I didn’t, like, lose it later.

And so that’s when I really started connecting these ideas in my mind that, oh, maybe I need to look into this research on learning to really understand how the brain learns so then I can apply it. And what I started to see in myself and in my friends and my classmates was that a lot of us were using practice techniques that were sort of suboptimal because they had been handed down sort of over the generations, just, I don’t know, tradition or something. But they don’t actually match with how the brain learns.

And so it became something that I became really passionate about sharing with other people because I saw how well these ideas worked in my own practicing.

Christopher: Gotcha. And can you give an example or two of what kinds of things would be different from that traditional model?

Molly: Yeah, absolutely.

I would say the biggest two things, which I’ll talk about in my presentation in just a bit, are the idea of taking breaks and something called interleaved practice. So, with taking breaks, especially in classical music culture, we’re taught, like, practice all the time, as many hours as possible. Big blocks of practice, like, stay in the practice room for, like, 3 hours, whatever. Like, do as much as you possibly can. And that’s, like, the total opposite of how the brain learns. The brain needs breaks and it needs downtime in order to learn.

And we actually learn the most during the breaks, which is, like, the most counterintuitive thing you’ve ever encountered. But it just works so much better when you take a lot of breaks and you don’t practice so much. Which is the complete opposite of what we’re told.

Interleaved practice, I’ll also talk about that in the presentation, is essentially practicing many different things sort of at once and going between them frequently rather than, like, focusing on one thing for a big block of time. And then once you’re done with that, moving to something else. I think we’re all taught to practice, like, focus, pick something, you know, work on that, really, really hone in on that, and don’t be, like, bouncing around to all sorts of other things.

But the research on learning shows that the brain learns a lot better and much more durably when you do bounce around between different things.

And it’s especially important for performing well. That was such a game-changer for me, especially in terms of performance, that before I learned about interleaved practice, I always felt very disappointed with how I performed, that I would get on stage and I would make mistakes I never made before, or I would make silly mistakes, and I would just get off stage and be like, man, like, can I please do that again? Like, that was not how I wanted to play that!

And then I learned about interleaved practice. And, yeah, it just, my performing skills just, like, got so much better, and performances felt so much more comfortable, and I was like, wow, okay. Somebody should have told me about this when I was a little kid, so I try to share it with people now.

Christopher: Wonderful, yeah. And, you know, the fascinating thing is how, as you said, counterintuitive a lot of these principles are. And we’ve found that with a lot of them, the devil’s in the details. Right? Like, it’s, it’s a big idea, but then you, you also need to know how to apply it. And that’s why I’m so grateful for yourself and others in the field who are doing the work to translate it into concrete terms for musicians. And I can’t wait for your masterclass coming up shortly.

You mentioned your book there. My copy is pre-ordered, can’t wait to read it! But share a little bit with the audience about what’s in that book and when they can expect it.

Molly: Sure, absolutely.

So the book is called “Learn Faster, Perform Better: A musician’s guide to the neuroscience of practicing”. It’s being published by Oxford University Press, coming out in July this summer, like a couple months from now.

And I’m so excited about this book. I wrote it in summer 2021. It’s been a really long time coming. I can’t believe it will actually exist.

This book is sort of the culmination of all the work I’ve been doing over all these years to apply and explain the science of learning and memory to musicians. It’s very comprehensive. I try to cover all of the topics on learning and performing music that are relevant to musicians for which there is research.

If there’s something where there isn’t research that I’m aware of, then I didn’t include it. But yeah, it has a whole lot of information.

People who have watched my YouTube channel, all of the topics on my YouTube channel are in the book, covered in much more depth in addition to a whole bunch of topics I’ve never talked about in presentations or videos or anything like that.

So I’m super excited about it.

Christopher: Fantastic. And your main website is mollygebrian.com is that right?

Molly: That’s it, yep.

Christopher: Wonderful, we will have a link to that and also to the book on Amazon so people can place their pre-order in the shownotes along with this interview.

Molly, I can see people lining up in the waiting room, so we better get prepped for the masterclass. Can’t wait to dive in with you. Thank you so much for joining me for this mini pre-masterclass interview, and I look forward to having you back on the show again sometime soon!

Molly: Thank you so much!

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Christopher: Wonderful, I hope you enjoyed hearing a little bit about Molly.

She went on to give an amazing masterclass on Saturday. I really thoroughly enjoyed it myself, and she brought a different perspective. Obviously, we talk a lot about superlearning, we’ve got various super learning materials, but her perspective was quite different, and the details and some of the examples she shared really brought some lightbulbs on for people.

She’s going to be in coaching our Next Level gang this week, which I know they’re super excited about.

And we’ll have links to her website and her YouTube channel and her forthcoming book in the shownotes along with this episode.

Shout out to Steve Lee over on Instagram. I’ve been going back and forth a bit during the interview, and it’s great to hear you’re applying some of these ideas already. Steve, I know you’re going to love the full masterclass that’s coming up in the members site this week.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a little clip from that masterclass. I’m going to pull out one of the juiciest sections to share with you here on the show live tomorrow.

Until then, cheers!

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