You might need to concentrate a little harder for the first two paragraphs, but bear with me, it’ll become clear in the third. This applies to adults, too, not just children.

Jj is for Jottings: 3. Learning, Part 1.

To understand about learning, we need to know a little bit about how the nervous system works. I’ll keep it as simple as possible:
Neurons are nerve cells which are specifically adapted to transmit electrical messages throughout the body. There are 3 main types of neuron: sensory, intermediate and motor. The sensory neurons bring sensory information to the brain and spinal cord from all over the body. Intermediate neurons are the networkers and bring all the information together, process it, and then tell the body how to respond by way of the motor neurons. Bundles of neurons form nerves.
A neuron is made up of a cell body; dendrites – highly branched, thick extensions of the cell body which gather information and conduct impulses towards the cell body; and an axon, which is a long thin fibre that conducts nerve impulses away from the cell body to another neuron, a muscle or a gland. Axons may have many branches. As neurons are used over and over, they lay down a sheath of myelin. Myelin increases the speed of nerve impulse transmission and insulates, protects and assists the axon to regenerate if the nerve is damaged.
When we first learn something, it is slow going, like chopping a path through the jungle with a machete. But as the neurons are activated repeatedly, more myelin is laid down. The more myelin, the faster the transmission. So, more practice=more myelin=the faster the processing, until it becomes easy and familiar, like driving quickly on a super-freeway. Now do you see why I have been banging on about repetition?
More on learning next time.
References: “Smart Moves”. Carla Hannaford, PhD.
“Functional Human Anatomy”. James E. Crouch.