The boiling frog learning method

The technique has a similarity to a phenomena mentioned in the movie Dante’s Peak in which the character describes how if you put a frog into cold water and heat it up slowly, it’ll stay in it until it dies, but if you drop the frog into the boiling water directly, it’ll immediately jump out. Human motor skills are the same. I will go on to explain how to learn by gradually adapting. If you just want to know the answer to this myth, then the answer is: Frogs will try and escape, no matter how slowly you raise the water’s temperature according to this article.
During my years as a competitive ballroom dancer, I found a very interesting phenomena while trying to learn different ways to move previously unknown parts of my body. My teacher would show me something and go through the motion with me and I’d completely fail the attempt that day. Later, after a day or two, I’d attempt the movement with great success. Same thing goes for dance routines. Often, the movements are so fast and involve so many parts of your body that if my conscious tries to manage it, I’d completely fail. If I’d just let go and trust something, I’d succeed without thinking about it. My teacher often tell my dance partner: “Don’t think”. But what is this? I can only arrive at one conclusion and it’s “muscle memory”.

I’ve experimented a lot with muscle memory and understood a few limiting factors of it. First, it doesn’t learn very fast and second, it can learn a lot of different things a day. Which makes sense, because the muscle memory probably need time to build the muscle tissues needed for the movement you require and the brain muscle connection also need to be reinforced and those take biological time. You can’t force it to go from knowing nothing to an expert at certain movements, but you can train a lot of different movements a day and not worry about it at all.

The muscle memory growth seems like a subconscious process which grows by itself as long as you initiated an effort and wish it to learn something. Which brings me to the boiling frog learning method. Which is to say, map out the small steps that you need to do to reach mastery of certain craft and add one to your routine everyday. Say you want to become vegetarian, start by stating a time frame and slowly reduce the amount of meat you take while increasing the amount of vegetables. You don’t even have to do this every day, just make a conscious effort to do so the next time you shop for groceries.

Start by analyzing the changes you’ll need to make to your current lifestyle and apply the changes that are most insignificant first and slowly move to the harder stuff. The emphasis is to prevent the body from rejecting a drastic change, like the frog and the boiling water. A famous quote by someone somewhere I once heard: “Given time, human will get used to anything.”