The following is quoted from a December, 2004, Time Magazine article entitled "Why We Sleep:"

Over the past couple of years, Stickgold has teamed up with Matthew Walker at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to investigate sleep's effects on procedural memory for motor skills. They asked right-handed test subjects to type a sequence of numbers (for example, 4-1-3-2-4) with their left hand over and over again as fast as they could. No matter what time of day they learned the task, their accuracy improved 60% to 70% after six minutes of practice. When subjects who learned the sequence in the morning were retested 12 hours later, they hadn't significantly improved. But when those who learned the sequence in the evening were retested following a night's sleep, they were an extra 15% to 20% faster and 30% to 40% more accurate.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... z0cL3YcAP4

This and other research into effects of sleep suggest that during sleep the human mind continues to subconsciously practice motor skills practiced shortly before going to sleep. If true, guitar practice late in the evening may be significantly more beneficial than the same amount of practice early in the morning. (Assuming, of course, that we sleep during the night rather than during the day.)

-Bob

That is very interesting. I always practice in the morning. Maybe that is why I don't make better progress?

Mendoza

Interesting.

I always figured the best time to practice was on days with a "d" in them. Mon[d]ay, Tues[d]ay etc...

I do a lot of my practise in the afternoons, finding that anything I do in the evening is really only playing through what I already play just to keep it ticking over. The best way to make sure I've learned something properly, I find, is to go play something else for a while and come back to what I've just learned to make sure it's still in there.


Alan

I think this is true as far as subconscious retention. Years ago when I did research on hypnosis, this was one of the topics of interest. Because of the more relaxed state of mind before sleep, the subconscious mind starts to take over and information is stored there without the effort required by the conscious mind to retain the same information. Listening to music you want to learn before sleep or falling asleep listening to it, is a great way of memorizing the music without concentration.

I practice in the morning out of necessity due to health and evening being family time. I go to bed early and get up early. Many times in the early morning I listen to flamenco with my headphones and sometimes go to sleep for a half hour or so. It seems the music I was listening to before the AM nap, is what is on my mind that day.