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I recently enjoyed a virtual presentation about what musicians can learn from the latest in brain science.

The speaker, a musician and cognitive neuroscientist, was enlisted by the Adult Music Students’ Forum, a local organization I belong to that gives (mostly) older adult musicians the opportunity to perform in front of their peers and, occasionally, the public.

The goal of Dr. Molly Gebrian’s presentation was to help us learn how to practice more effectively and become better, and less nervous, performers. It was fascinating and potentially very helpful to me as a musician.

But she drew on studies of athletes as well as musicians, and I believe her message should be taken to heart by just about everybody. Here, in my own words, is a truncated layman’s summary of some of the points she made.

Gebrian began by describing how our brains take information in, embed it in memory, and enable us to retrieve it or take action on it. The billions of spindly nerve cells that make up most of our brains communicate with each other by transmitting electrical signals to other cells in their vicinity.

Complex actions involve many nerves that, when frequently engaged in this manner, create a neuronal “pathway” that produces a specific action. Like finding your way through a forest, once you’ve laid down a path and walked it many times, it becomes more and more clear and easily traversed.

This is how we learn to perform any action, and how our brains turn the most repeated ones into automatic, habitual behaviors.

The problem is, nerve cells don’t evaluate the end result to which those paths lead. They simply follow “the road more traveled.” It’s the behaviors we do the most that become “myelinated,” meaning more or less automatic for us, even if they are things we don’t intend to do.

A study of college basketball players doing free throws determined that what makes top performers so much better than the others is how they practice.

First, they set very specific goals for themselves in each practice session. Second, when they miss a basket, they identify a specific intention to improve and methods for doing so. And finally, they analyze exactly what went wrong whenever they miss until they can make the basket repeatedly.

Of course, every basketball player tries to make the basket during a free throw. They all claim to focus on what they’re doing. But the intense specificity of the best performers — their forethought, self-monitoring and self-reflection — is worlds away from the general intention of the others.

The same principles apply to musicians. If, during a practice session, I frequently or even occasionally hit the wrong notes in a particular passage (as I commonly do), my brain’s nerve cells only know that I am creating a frequently used path.

The fact that I say (ahem) “Darn!” each time I make a mistake doesn’t tell my nerves this is a bad pathway I want to avoid. And when I find myself making different mistakes at different practice sessions, I’m just muddying the path further, not correcting it.

To improve, what’s called for is making a serious, conscious effort to identify each error, analyze how it happens, and determine what I need to do to avoid it next time.

Finally, I need to pay careful attention to repeatedly playing it correctly — according to Gebrian, five to seven times in a row — until the right notes become habitual.

There are a number of other lessons from studies of musicians that reveal additional, and often counterintuitive, steps to what might be called best practices.

One is that taking breaks every 5 to 10 minutes is a necessary step to making progress. Another is that practicing a little each day is far better than trying to squeeze one long practice in each week.

And randomizing what you work on — jumping around to different pieces or different sections during a practice session — is better than focusing all your attention on one thing.

Let’s face it, our brains are complicated. But fortunately, researchers have been able to tease out some of the best ways to maximize learning.

Even if these methods don’t exactly make sense from a logical perspective, it’s what works that counts. I know I’m going to try putting these ideas into practice.

At the same time, I don’t need to tell myself that I really need to achieve perfection. That’s not why I play the piano or compose music. I do those things because I love doing them.

I’m fond of a saying I heard from a close friend about what we should strive for in making music: “Don’t make it perfect; make it beautiful.”

Those are two different things, and a lot of beauty can coexist with imperfection. That’s what it means to be human.

For more information about music and the brain, see mollygebrian.com. For more about the Adult Music Student Forum, see AMSFperform.org.