The quest for consistent high level performance goes through the territory of practice. Whether it's athletic, musical, artistic or whatever, we've been told that practice makes perfect. That is, if you want a consistent golf swing or piano sonata, you gotta practice, practice, practice.
Well, maybe ... but only up to a point. At least, that's what a recent study at Stanford seems to say about practicing a simple movement of reaching. Up to a point, the reaching movement became somewhat consistent, but beyond that point results were spotty at best. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that study was done with macaque monkeys who were induced to repeat the reaching with food. I guess it would be hard to get monkeys to practice the golf swing or play a sonata repeatedly.
Like so many such studies, the movement areas of the monkeys' brains were monitored during their practice sessions. The researchers say over half of the movement variations came not from little monkey muscle, but from little monkey brains.
So much for the idea of muscle memory you golf pro tries to drill into you as you hit hundreds of 5-iron shots at the driving range. Grooving your swing might involve a lot more than simply practicing long hours.
Of course, to me at least, the blinding flash of the obvious here is the idea of what you're paying attention to during the practice. If you can become aware of the variability of the movement as you make them, there may be an opportunity to at least influence those movements, if not control them. On the other hand, if you're a monkey in a research cage, you're probably only interested in reaching so that you can get a banana at the end. So mindful practice is probably better than mindless practice.
One of the other interesting things here is the goal of the practice. Minimizing or eliminating variation narrows the widow of influence you can have over the movement, at least to my way of thinking. But awareness of variation might let you do something about it.
Another thing that caught my eye in the article was the notion of understanding movement and how that might lead to treatments for movement-related disorders. I'm not sure what to make of that, because the article stops there and doesn't elaborate on it. I can guess what they might be referring to is that accurate understanding of neural patterns might lead to ways to interrupt or influence them.
I do know that practicing the Feldenkrais Method uses mindful movement variations to influence the quality of movement. It's not that far a stretch, following the study, to conclude that things in the brain change as you do this.
There's lots of anecdotal evidence that mindful movement or awareness can have a mighty influence over quality and variation of movement. But I guess if your hungry enough, a banana's a pretty good reason to practice. Just don't expect perfection.