How will humans and machines work together in the future?

We spend so much time discussing how the world's changing.

It would be absolutely absurd to believe the role of the CEO is not.

This is Imagine This, a podcast from BCG that helps CEOs consider possible futures for our world and their businesses.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily.

Today's lesson is something I really needed, since focus has been a real problem lately.

The talk is about practice and how to practice most effectively to make us better at studying or hobbies or new skills.

It's from our education arm, TED ed, and created by educators Annie Bosler and Don Green.

Mastering any physical skill, be it performing a pirouet, playing an instrument, or throwing a

baseball, takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement,

and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence.

So what does practice do in our brains to make us better at things?

Our brains have two kinds of neural tissue, gray matter and white matter.

The gray matter processes information in the brain,

directing signals and sensory stimuli to nerve cells,

while white matter is mostly made up of fatty tissue and nerve fibers.

In order for our bodies to move, information needs to travel from the brain's gray matter down the spinal cord

through a chain of nerve fibers called axons to our muscles.

So how does practice or repetition affect the inner workings of our brains?

The axons that exist in the white matter are wrapped with a fatty substance called myelin,

and it's this myelin covering or or sheaf, that seems to change

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