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If you want to learn about how humans learn things, you’ll want to learn about juggling—better yet, you’ll want to learn to juggle. Unlike, say, walking, juggling is essentially a pure motor skill; there’s little functional reason to keep multiple objects aloft in the air, other than to prove it can be done.
Long used as a convenient way to study human performance, juggling showed up early in the psychology literature. The study that helped popularize the idea of the “learning curve”? Its subjects juggled. The cover of one widely used textbook, Richard A. Magill’s Motor Learning: Concepts and Applications, depicts—you got it—a juggler!
As Peter Beek, a researcher in human movement sciences at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, explained as we sat in his office one afternoon, there are many reasons why juggling is an exceedingly useful way to study learning.
You need a task you can easily do in a lab. You need a task that no one can do right away, that has to be learned.
Yet you want a task that isn’t too difficult, so people don’t immediately give up. Most people can begin to learn three-ball juggling in a few days. (Three balls is generally considered the entry point of actual juggling, which is broadly defined as the ability to manipulate more objects than one has the hands for.) Juggling success is easy to measure: You juggle balls, or you drop balls. Last, learning is aided by motivation, and unlike the typical range of weird, monotonous experimental tasks used in motor-skills research—moving cursors with joysticks, tapping out sequences on buttons—juggling is actually fun.
I wanted to learn to juggle to learn about learning. Still, I couldn’t help thinking it would be a clever party trick. Months later, at gatherings my daughter was invited to, I’d find juggling to be a dad superpower.
For here’s the thing about skills: Once you acquire even the most rudimentary basics of something like juggling, you’ve already set yourself apart from the greater part of humanity. Take an informal poll of your friends or coworkers. Chances are very few of them can capably juggle three balls. Four? Even fewer. Five? Now you’re spending time in juggling chat rooms.
This is one of the secret payoffs of skill learning: It may take you years to become a master, but with just a little time and effort you’ve learned something that others can’t do—that you yourself, a short while ago, couldn’t do. As minor a pursuit as three-ball juggling may seem, for me it once had the air of impossibility, until suddenly, magically, it did not.
The first step was finding a teacher. In New York City, where the local bulletin boards bristle with ads for lessons of all stripes—improv theater, sausage making, tarot card reading—this wasn’t a problem. I quickly found Heather Wolf, who ran something called JuggleFit (“Learn to juggle for a healthy body and brain”). She lived one neighborhood away.
A week later, we were in my living room. She produced three colored scarves. Sensing my vague disappointment—where are the balls?—she said that “juggling in slow motion” would not only help me trace out the pattern in the air but boost my confidence. One way to improve learning, research has suggested, is to make skills seem easier in the beginning.
As I held two scarves in my right hand and one in my (dominant) left, she asked me to simply throw the scarves, one after the other, to the top corners of an imaginary box positioned over my head. I did, and the scarves fluttered to the floor. Easy enough. Next, she wanted me to throw and then catch the scarves, once. Not so bad. Then she wanted me to keep repeating the process. This quickly became overwhelming, and my flurry of scarves looked as if I were frenetically ransacking a bargain bin at Macy’s.
“I can do a bit of mind reading when I teach people to juggle,” Wolf said, “and I can tell you’re thinking of this as a pattern.” Just throw to the corners, she reiterated. Don’t think of the overall pattern you’re throwing; just throw. Wolf didn’t want me to think of the catches, either; if I just kept throwing to the corners, my hands would move to where they needed to be for the catch.
“The key to learning juggling,” she said, “is not thinking.”
The problem with beginners is that they’re always thinking about themselves doing the skill. When we do try to think about an “overlearned” skill like walking, we’re likely to perform worse, under the theory of “reinvestment,” as proposed by the motor-learning expert Rich Masters.
People who have had a stroke, for instance, often suffer from an “asymmetrical gait,” or a limp. They must relearn how to walk, but because they’re self-conscious of how they now walk, they think about the mechanics of walking, which only makes it look more mechanical. To learn to walk well, they’re going to have to learn implicitly. “The trick,” as Masters has described it, “is getting people to learn to move without knowing that they’re learning.”
When we become skilled at something, it becomes automatic. We don’t have to think much about it, because our brain, running on virtual autopilot, is constantly making predictions—and most of its predictions are true.
As Pablo Celnik, the genial Argentine-born director of Johns Hopkins University’s Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Lab, told me, the brain does this for efficiency’s sake, but also because of an inherent time lag. “Your brain receives feedback about what you’re doing, and that takes time—about 80 to 100 milliseconds,” he told me. “We live in the past. Whatever we see now is actually about 100 milliseconds ago for the motor domain.”
These predictions help us get through daily life. When they fail, we look for explanations. We trip on the sidewalk, our brain gets this news 100 milliseconds later, and we accusingly stare at the offending crack. The surprise violated our model. But when we try to tickle ourselves, nothing happens, because we already know what it’s going to feel like. Our cerebellum has “canceled” the sensory input, suppressed neurons. There’s no surprise; the model is intact.
When you first get on an escalator that has stopped working, you gingerly take a few steps. You may even “feel” motion. That’s because your brain has trained itself, through many repetitions. It’s ready for the escalator; it’s predicted it. We know, in our heads, that it’s broken, but we can’t help thinking, in our bodies, that it’s not.
Juggling, I soon learned, wasn’t really the skill I thought it was. Like many beginners, my mind’s eye of juggling was what’s known as a shower pattern—three objects being passed in a clockwise semicircle. But the shower pattern is much harder than the “cascade,” the most common form of multi-object juggling. In the cascade, objects cross each other and land in the opposite hand. Traced out, it looks like a figure eight tipped on its side.
I’d also envisioned that jugglers were tracking each object in flight, which is precisely what beginners try to do. When my daughter gave it a go, her head was wildly snapping as she tried to monitor each scarf.
But, as Heather Wolf had shown me, juggling is less about throwing individual objects than throwing to a pattern, like tossing to a little algorithm in the sky. It’s little wonder so many noteworthy mathematicians, from Claude Shannon* to Ronald Graham, were drawn to juggling.
In juggling, unlike most sports, you don’t actually want to keep your eyes on the balls. Jugglers look to the apex of where things are thrown—that external focus again—and only ever have a peripheral sense of all those objects in flight. This has been confirmed by studies in which most of a juggler’s vision was blocked, except for a thin slice up near the parabola of the throwing arc, and they juggled just fine. Good jugglers can do it blindfolded.
Back in my living room, I was having better luck with the scarves. I could now keep the three scarves aloft for a number of repetitions, or what jugglers call runs. We moved on to balls. First, Wolf asked me to just throw a ball, with a relatively high arc, from one hand to the other. Easy enough. Then she wanted me to reel off three of those throws, but let the balls simply fall.
This would help me diagnose my throws. In juggling, the throw is everything. With a good throw comes a nearly automatic catch (prediction, again). I was struck by how fast it all seemed. I got the first three balls in flight relatively well, but then I experienced a common beginner’s malady: I rushed the fourth throw, which messed up the timing of the pattern. “You have more time than you think,” Wolf said.
Over time, she said, juggling would come to seem slower. And it did. As you sometimes hear a professional athlete describe it, I felt as though I had more time with the balls. The pattern was as clear as skywriting; the balls seemed to hang in the air.
The neuroscientist David Eagleman, who has researched people’s perception of time, offered me a compelling explanation of this slowing. When we start out with a skill like juggling, he suggested, novices pay attention to everything.
My early juggling went something like this: OK, I’m throwing one ball. And then another! Wait, I still have to throw another? What happened to that first one? Here it comes! I can’t believe I’m throwing again—oops, here’s that second ball! Did I just mess up my third throw? Should this throw be with my left or right? Wait, how did I get two balls in one hand? Why am I doing this again?
The more things you have to pay attention to, the faster time seems to move. But as you get better, you learn what to pay attention to. You have a better sense of what to expect. Suddenly you’re not thinking about the balls at all. You’re just tracing a pattern in the air. You have all sorts of spare attention. You can carry on a conversation while you juggle. Time seems more unoccupied, and thus slower.
Then you start to learn a new trick, and everything speeds up again.
Another classic novice problem I faced was that my throws, apart from being mistimed, were going everywhere. In juggling, little errors had big consequences: A throw that was just a few degrees off could end up being way off target by the time it came down.
“Be the robot!” Wolf would say. She wanted me to imagine I’d been programmed so my feet would stay still, my arms would be close to my sides when I threw, and I would move slowly and deliberately. My only job was to make clean throws, robot-like.She recommended juggling while facing a wall; with a natural barrier, I’d have little choice but to rein in my throws. One key problem in skill learning is that our bodies have so many “degrees of freedom,” as the renowned movement scientist Nikolai Bernstein put it. The human arm alone has, from the shoulder joint to the wrist joint, some 26 different degrees of freedom, or directions it can be moved. To do this, we need to effectively coordinate any number of the body’s thousand-odd muscles and hundred billion neurons. The simplest act of throwing a ball starts to look like a busy airport control tower working in sync with an army of crack puppeteers.
Imagine trying to teach your child how to swing a baseball bat. There are all sorts of ways to swing it, but when it comes to baseball, only a small number of these will be useful. Novices, overwhelmed by the idea of orchestrating all these movements, tend to “freeze” their muscles, as Bernstein put it. They fight against their own bodies.
Eventually, we learn to “unfreeze” the body and take advantage of muscles working in concert. We call it coordination. “One of the things that people learn as they get more skillful,” as Richard Magill, a motor-skills expert, told me, “is to take advantage of what nature provides for free.”
Learning a skill means doing the most with the least. Expert performers, we often say, “make it look easy.” This is for good reason. When I visited New York University’s Sports Performance Center, ahead of running the New York City Marathon, I was surprised to discover how riddled with inefficiency my running form was; for example, I unnecessarily clenched my shoulders. It seems a small thing, but over 26.1 miles it adds up, costing extra energy and interfering with breathing.
Pick any skill—from cello playing to cycling—and the findings are the same: As we get better, our movements become more efficient. This means “inhibiting” muscles that aren’t needed and “exciting” the ones that are. If I ask you to clench your fist and raise only your pinkie, as you lift that one digit, you will be simultaneously instructing your other fingers not to move.
When Wolf advised me to “be the robot,” she didn’t mean to literally move like a robot, all herky-jerky. (I was already doing that on my own.). What she really intended was for me to get out of the way of my juggling.
Sometimes, she said, people will suddenly cry out, “I can’t do this!” And she will have to point out, “You are doing it.” The robot is doing it. The physical part of juggling is not really that demanding—simply throwing a ball from one place to another. What’s hard is executing the “mental model” for each pattern. Poorly aimed throws are often just timing errors that disrupt the pattern.
When talking about skills, people often use the phrase “muscle memory.” It’s tempting to think that we’re literally encoding some motion onto our muscles, that they harbor the memory of some act. But it’s not really true.
When you sign your name, your muscles seem to reflexively “know” how to apply pen to paper. But you could also draw a huge version of your signature on a chalkboard. You could spray-paint it on a wall. You could trace it out in the sand using your toe. You could pee it into a bank of snow (I did this as a kid, in the name of science). You could pull off a fairly decent version of your John Hancock with a pencil clenched in your mouth.
None of those things involve moving the same muscles in the same way. Rather, you’re executing a “motor pattern” that resides in your brain. The muscles are simply doing what the brain tells them (even as they tell the brain what it should be doing).
Muscle memory also implies that when you perform a skill, you perform it the same way every time, the way you “remember” it. But even the most repetitive motor skills are always subtly changing. We need to constantly adapt and optimize. For this reason, Bernstein argued that when we practice some skill, we shouldn’t simply repeat “the means of solution of a motor problem time after time.”
In other words, we shouldn’t try to endlessly perfect that one technique that seems to work, under the same set of conditions. That’s too rigid; if one little variable changes, the technique might not work so well.
Instead, we should try to solve the problem every time, which means we might even use a different technique. He called it “repetition without repetition.” And so good juggling practice is not simply about trying to do longer and longer runs of the same old three-ball cascade. I knew the solution to that problem; I just had to get there faster and more consistently.
What would help make me better was to give myself new problems to solve: starting a pattern with my weaker hand (which has already “learned” some of the skill from the dominant hand), or changing the height at which I was juggling. I would switch rooms, switch objects. I would try to walk and juggle. I tried to juggle while sitting. I listened to music; I had conversations.
With every subtle change, I had to subtly change. I would act like learning-to-walk infants, for whom what looks like willy-nilly randomness is actually the powerful learning strategy of variable practice.
It’s not that good jugglers never make mistakes. But their constant problem solving has given them many more solutions. Expertise, the chess grandmaster Jonathan Rowson notes, means running out of unfamiliar mistakes.
Expert jugglers not only know the moment a ball leaves their hand that they have made a mistake; they know how to correct for it, mid-flight.
“Once you have a bad throw,” Wolf told me, “rein it in. Be the robot.” The key, she said, is “that you control the balls; they don’t control you.”
Excerpted from Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt. Copyright © 2021 by Tom Vanderbilt. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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