From Scientific American:
Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. They say that practice makes perfect.
But sometimes the best practice is not on a keyboard.
It’s all in your head. Because a new study shows that the brain takes advantage of the rest periods during practice to review new skills, a mechanism that facilitates learning. The work appears in the journal Cell Reports. [Ethan R. Buch et al., Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay]
Leonardo Cohen: A lot of the skills we learn in life are sequences of individual actions.
Hopkin: Leonardo Cohen of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, or NINDS.
Cohen: For example, playing a piece of piano music requires pressing individual keys in the correct sequence with very precise timing.
More here.