This Is Your Brain... On Music

🎸 Why Musicians' Brains Work Differently: The Science of Habit, Repetition, and Neural Plasticity

There’s a common bit of research that sports coaches, from martial arts instructors to tennis coaches and golf pros, like to quote about how to practice to form muscle memory of particular movements. It comes from a 1991 book called Motor Learning by Dr. Richard Schmidt with Craig A. Wrisberg, followed by Schmidt’s consistently updated editions titled Motor Control and Learning, co-authored with Dr. Timothy D. Lee.

This research suggests that it takes approximately 300–500 repetitions to form a new motor pattern. However, if you have to break the habit and form a new one, correcting a bad habit requires about 3,000–5,000 repetitions to overwrite the incorrect pattern.

Now apply this information to learning chords on a guitar… Let’s say a student learns to move from a G chord to a D chord. After continuous reps, their fingers start to know what to do. But now, the teacher introduces D7 instead of D. Suddenly, the student starts to make the old move first, then has to stop and fix it. They have to unlearn that habit and replace it with a new one.

It's important to practice correctly from the beginning

That’s, the bad news: learning to play guitar, or any musical instrument, often feels like a constant cycle of learning habits, breaking them, and relearning. This pattern repeats constantly as students learn new chords.

But here’s the good news: over time, learning new chords or finger movements, gets easier. It begins to feel like the brain learns how to learn. By repeatedly practicing specific movements, the brain creates neural pathways, making those movements more natural and quicker to perform.

This is what it means to develop muscle memory, your brain forms stronger and faster connections. Eventually, switching chords or learning a new technique doesn't take as many repetitions as it did at the beginning.

As FITTR.com explains in their article Muscle Memory: Understanding the Concept and its Benefits:

“Yes, muscle memory can be transferred between similar movements. For example, if someone learns to play one musical instrument, [or musical concept, like a chord or scale progression] they may find it easier to learn another instrument [or chord or progression] with similar finger movements. This is because the brain has already stored the motor skill information associated with those movements.”

Learning to play a musical instrument engages multiple brain regions at once.

🧠 The Musical Brain: A Symphony of Neural Activity

Playing a musical instrument engages multiple brain regions at once, making it a full-body workout for your brain. This level of complexity enhances areas involved in auditory processing, motor control, memory, and emotion.

Notably, musicians tend to have increased gray matter volume in key areas like the cerebellum, Heschl's gyrus, and the inferior frontal gyrus, which shows clear structural differences compared to non-musicians (PMC6740845).

Music students are also building creativity. During activities like improvisation, brain scans show increased activity in areas linked to spontaneous thinking, and less in areas tied to overthinking or self-criticism (Wired).

The science of repetition, habit formation, and brain plasticity helps explain why musicians' brains operate differently. Every time a student practices chord changes or scale patterns, they aren't just learning music—they're reshaping their brain. Through repetition, challenge, and adaptation, music literally transforms the mind.

✨ Final Thoughts

So if it feels like learning guitar is a constant cycle of "learn it, mess it up, fix it, repeat"—that's not just part of the process, it is the process.

Stick with it. Every chord change, scale run, or fingering pattern is not just building a musical skill—it's reshaping the brain, making it stronger, faster, and more creative with every repetition.