Practice Makes Perfect 💪
The neuroscience of working really, really hard on a skill (and what it means for writers) 🧠
It’s my first day of swimming lessons.
I’m 33, standing in the shallow end, and wondering if it’s too late to pretend I got sick.
As I’m contemplating my escape plan, an 8-year-old casually glides past me doing a perfect backstroke as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The next few minutes of that day are too painful to relive. Let’s just say there was a lot of panic, splashing, and immediate retreats towards the pool wall.
Fast forward three weeks.
I’m still not winning any swimming competitions, but I can now coordinate my hands and legs to move (very awkwardly) from point A to point B without drowning.
It’s not pretty, but it’s progress.
Does Our Brain Change When We Learn Something New?
The short answer is yes.
As we practice a new skill, our brains rewire to form new neural connections.
In the case of swimming, new neural pathways are formed to coordinate breathing, balance, and movement in ways that didn't exist before.
We know this thanks to some fascinating research by neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire on London’s taxi drivers.
To get licensed, these drivers spend years memorizing thousands of streets and landmarks in what's called "The Knowledge"—navigating London's famously chaotic and winding layout.
When Maguire compared brain scans of experienced taxi drivers to regular people of similar age and education, she found something striking: the drivers had notably larger hippocampi (the brain's memory center). In fact, the longer they'd been on the job, the larger this brain region had become.
However, she wondered if taxi driving simply attracted people who were already born with larger hippocampi. So she, along with other researchers, designed a brilliant follow-up study.
They recruited people before they started taxi training, alongside a matched control group who weren't becoming drivers. They scanned everyone's brains at the beginning, then waited four years.
The results were remarkable: the trainees' hippocampi actually grew during the learning process. Their brains physically changed as they mastered London's maze-like streets.
Similar brain changes appear across different skills.
Musicians who practice for years develop enlarged Broca's areas (linked to language processing).
Ballet dancers exhibit neural adaptations that improve their balance and reduce dizziness.
What Does This Mean for Writers?
Creative writing is also an incredibly complex skill that demands multiple brain networks working together.
When we write, our brain co-ordinates language processing, memory retrieval, creative thinking, and decision-making all at the same time.
The more time we spend writing, the more our brains learn to manage language, creativity, and expression simultaneously.
Jerry Seinfeld once told a comedy class something that applies perfectly to writing: “You know who's great? The people who just put a tremendous amount of hours into it. It's a game of tonnage—how many hours are you going to work?”
He was right. Those London taxi drivers didn't develop larger hippocampi by reading about navigation, they spent years driving the streets.
Musicians don't rewire their brains by studying theory, they practice for hours every day.
There's no shortcut to rewiring your brain.
No tricks. No hacks. Just write. Every single day. For hours.
This is a useful reminder that skill development is a biological process, not just a motivational one. The taxi driver example makes it hard to argue with the idea that repetition literally changes capacity over time. Applying that lens to writing reframes practice as infrastructure building rather than self-expression. The emphasis on hours and coordination explains why consistency matters more than insight or theory alone.
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