No, You Can’t Cram Beethoven: Why Spot-Training the Brain Doesn’t Work

This essay is a follow-up to my earlier article on American Sign Language (ASL), where I emphasized that language acquisition—especially visual languages like ASL—requires consistent, immersive use rather than casual exposure. Dabbling simply isn’t enough. If we want to support real, lasting communication skills, we need to treat ASL (or any skill we want to learn) with the same seriousness and repetition we give to any meaningful learning. The same principle applies here.

I recently saw a flyer from someone named “Michael” begging to learn Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by Saturday. His parents had paid for piano lessons every week for 30 years, but he never showed up. Now, he’s hoping to learn a masterpiece in a matter of days. It would be funny—if it didn’t hit so close to home.

Because this is what we do. We wait. We dabble. We treat learning like a performance, not a process. And then we’re shocked when it doesn’t stick.

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You Can’t Cram the Brain

Learning doesn’t work like that. Especially not when you’re training the brain to do something complex—like mastering language, auditory decoding, or fine motor coordination. You can’t binge auditory training, musical scales, or speech therapy and expect lasting change.

Even habit formation—often cited as taking 21 days—is more complex than people think. A major study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that real habit formation takes an average of 66 days, and for some people, up to 254 days. And that’s just to build one habit.

But when we’re talking about neuroplastic change—about helping the brain communicate across hemispheres, decode sound, or build motor patterns that cross the midline? That takes overlearning.

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We Forgot How to Learn

I remember when I had a math teacher who actually taught us songs to remember various math equations. This was back in seventh grade and we sang them again and again:

“The opposite of B plus or minus the square root of B squared over four AC. It’s all over 2a—you’ll remember the quadratic formula.”

And:

“Look for the common factor when you are factoring your polynomials…”

These songs have never left me. I don’t have much use for them today, but if I ever did—they’re there, lodged in memory. That’s the power of repetition, rhythm, and overlearning.

There was a time—not so long ago—when people memorized phone numbers, speeches, family histories. Children would recite multiplication tables, chant spelling rules, and read aloud until they could hear the rhythm of language in their bones.

We don’t do that anymore.

Modern life has replaced memory with Google, skill with shortcuts, and practice with apps. But human learning isn’t meant to be downloaded. It’s meant to be lived, repeated, performed, engraved.

And somewhere in this age of instant access, we’ve forgotten how to learn.

It’s a cultural shift. Children used to memorize long poems, sing entire songs without looking up lyrics, and repeat math facts daily at school. My children trained at a Taekwondo dojo where they were taught to use abacuses to learn math facts—eventually transitioning to mental math. I watched one boy sit calmly and add numbers mentally for almost five minutes, never writing a thing down, barely changing expression. And he got the answer right.

These students—many of whom score in the top 10% in math statewide—aren’t just memorizing steps. They’re building mental stamina. And after a year in that dojo, my own children’s math skills skyrocketed. They look for chances to use multiplication and division now. They don’t avoid math—they enjoy it. Because they’re fluent.

They didn’t just learn the facts. They drilled them until the facts became part of how they see the world.

Yet this kind of training isn’t common anymore. Many children struggle with multiplication because they’ve never been asked to memorize. Drill-based learning has fallen out of favor—viewed as too tedious, too demanding. We’ve traded mastery for convenience.

Consider handwriting. Once a daily discipline, it’s been replaced by keyboarding. Cursive is disappearing from classrooms. But research shows handwriting activates brain regions involved in memory, fine motor planning, and learning in ways typing does not. When children don’t write, they don’t engage the same neural circuits—or build the same fluency.

We’ve moved away from the hard things that build the brain. But without that structure, the brain becomes weaker, not freer.

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The Power of Overlearning

Overlearning means continuing to practice a skill after you’ve already mastered it. In studies, it’s been shown to strengthen memory, improve performance under stress, and increase long-term retention. This is especially true for cognitive and language-based tasks, where automaticity is key.

To understand the power of overlearning, look at people with aphasia. Aphasia is a communication disorder caused by damage to areas of the brain responsible for language, most commonly due to stroke or traumatic brain injury. It affects a person’s ability to speak, understand, read, or write.

Many individuals with aphasia lose the ability to learn new language—but what’s fascinating is what they don’t lose: overlearned routines. Many can still recite the alphabet, count aloud, sing familiar songs, or speak phrases they’ve said thousands of times. These overlearned skills are so deeply ingrained that they become nearly untouchable, even by brain damage.

This tells us something profound: when the brain is damaged, it clings to what it knows best—what was practiced the most. That’s why overlearning matters. It’s not just for fluency—it’s for durability.

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Auditory Processing and the Corpus Callosum

For individuals with auditory processing disorder (APD), this becomes even more critical. Many of them have documented difficulties with the corpus callosum—the thick band of fibers that connects the brain’s two hemispheres. This affects the brain’s ability to share and integrate auditory information across the left and right sides.

This is why cramming doesn’t work. These brains need habituation—daily, structured, consistent training that builds and strengthens those cross-hemispheric pathways. It’s also why midline-crossing activities (like playing piano, drumming with alternating hands, or movement-based learning) are often recommended. These aren’t just fun extras. They’re neurological therapy.

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Gymnasts Don’t Automatically Make Great Freerunners

Computerized auditory training can give you skills—but it doesn’t necessarily give you timing, adaptation, or safety. It’s a lot like training a child intensively in gymnastics, only to expect them to leap across rooftops and navigate alleyways like a parkour athlete.

Technically, they have the ability to flip, jump, and land. But they haven’t practiced in the wild. They haven’t accounted for shifting ground, noise, visual chaos, or emotional pressure. They might even fall off a building—not because they’re unskilled, but because they never trained in real life.

That’s what happens when we rely solely on programs like Sound Storm or the LiSN-S.

Sound Storm is a treatment program delivered via iPad that trains a child to distinguish a spatialized target sound coming from the front, while noise consistently plays from the sides. The learner is trained to focus on a front-facing speaker and ignore side interference. But that’s not how the real world works. Sound doesn’t only come from one direction. People move. Environments shift. Acoustics change.

The LiSN-S is the diagnostic test used to determine whether a child might benefit from Sound Storm. It uses the exact same setup—target speech directly in front, distractors to the sides—and then re-tests that same task after training to check for benefit.

In essence, it’s test, train, and retest on the same task. And if you improve, you’ve proven you can focus on one direction—the front—and ignore noise from the sides. But what happens when you’re in the car and your kids are playing in the backseat? You hear a police siren coming from behind, it pulls to the side, and suddenly you’re listening to an officer’s voice outside your window.

If all you’ve practiced is listening straight ahead, you may not be able to quickly distinguish speech that approaches from behind or moves around you. You might register it as just more noise—because your brain hasn’t practiced treating dynamic, spatial movement as signal.

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Learning Happens in Context

True change in auditory processing—especially for children with APD, dyslexia, autism, or language delays—requires immersion. Daily practice. Integration into daily life.

If a child drills a listening skill in isolation, their brain tags it as isolated. But if they practice that skill while baking, playing, navigating conversation, or watching a puppet show, it starts to embed across systems: auditory, visual, social, and motor.

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The Real Brain Training Is Life

You can’t build automaticity in a lab. You build it in context, through daily rituals that activate emotion, movement, language, and meaning.

If it’s not part of the child’s world, it won’t shape their world.

And if we’re not practicing fluency, we’re not building it.

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Visual Description of the Poster

The flyer that inspired this essay features a panicked message: “Need to learn Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by Saturday. My parents paid for piano lessons for 30 years but I never showed up. I spent the money on candles. I can offer helicopter facts and wrestling moves.”

Obviously, the flyer was a joke—but it’s no joke how often this scenario plays out in real life. We see it in schools, in therapy, and in parenting: a last-minute scramble to perform what was never practiced. A hope that talent will override the need for training. It’s funny—until it isn’t. Because the cost isn’t just a failed performance. It’s a child who struggles, who falls behind, who thinks they’re not capable—when really, they just weren’t given time to learn.

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References

Driskell, J. E., Willis, R. P., & Copper, C. (1992). Effect of overlearning on retention. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(5), 615–622.

Kraus, N., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2010). Music training for the development of auditory skills. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 599–605.

Kraus, N., & Nicol, T. (2014). The musician’s auditory world: A window into human communication. Hearing Journal, 67(7), 26–31.

Lindsley, O. R. (1991). Precision teaching’s unique legacy from B. F. Skinner. Journal of Behavioral Education, 1(2), 253–266.

Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions: The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes. Oxford University Press.

Whitebread, D., & Bingham, S. (2014). Habit formation and learning in young children. University of Cambridge.

Wood, W., & Runger, D. T. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289–314.