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Practising and the Gebrain

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GebrainWith apologies to Molly Gebrian, the author of the book I’m about to recommend, but what with the cover image and the subtitle about neuroscience my own brain seems irrevocably committed to making her name into a subject-relevant anagram.

TL;DR: Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing is an excellent book, and you should read it.

Molly Gebrian is a viola player who also spent a lot of her student years studying neuroscience, and has since spent her professional life finding useful practical applications for that extra study to help herself, her students, and now the rest of us too. She presents clear explanations of what’s going on in our brains during various aspects of the learning process, and works through the implications for how we can use our practice time most effectively.

For those who have come with me on my journey here over the last 15 years, there will be some familiar topics: myelination, the importance of sleep, and mirror neurons all play important parts in the narrative. But she also brings a lot of specific studies to bear on the nitty-gritty of learning and executing music, and I have come away with a goodly list of distinctive concepts that shed focused light on things I understood only in a generalised, intuitive way before.

The reading experience was thus an interesting mix of, ‘Oh so that’s why that works,’ ‘I always thought that was a waste of time, glad to know why,’ and, ‘OMG that makes so much sense, I had no idea!!’ So, both affirming and illuminating, which is a very pleasurable state to find oneself in. And even with things she recommends that are already well embedded in my praxis, I now feel I can wield them in a more strategic and purposeful way.

As you can tell, there’s more in there to digest than I’m going to cover in one blog post, so I’ll leave my list of specific points that got me excited to another day (or two). But I’ll headline today with her opening key point about the nature of practice: that it is essentially a process of problem-solving.

I had already been thinking quite a lot recently about a cliché that had popped up in a conversation a few weeks back, that ‘the amateur practises until they get it right, the professional practises until they can’t get it wrong’. I have always found this somewhat unsatisfactory as a truism, not least because so many professional musicians (in the UK at least) have to live their performing lives in a state of high-level damage control, relying on crack sight-reading and intelligent recovery skills, because the industry as a whole rarely has (or is prepared to dedicate) enough budget for adequate rehearsal time.

But the other reason I find it unsatisfactory is that I have mostly heard it said by amateurs as a way to beat each other up over how much work they’re putting in (or not). There’s a kind of protestant work ethic of joyless grind lurking in the background: you’re not allowed to have your pudding of musical fluency until you’ve eaten your overcooked greens of drill.

Now, I like greens, but not overcooked ones. And of course advanced skills only develop if you put in the time to develop them, and have the discipline to do so regularly on an ongoing basis. But how you use that time is key, and if you use it purposefully and interrogatively, with plenty of breaks, then actually you’ll need less of it than you might think, and it will also be more rewarding as well as more effective.

Gebrian (or, as I just typed her name, Gebra-delete-ian) encourages us to approach our practice in a state of inquisitiveness: ‘What’s going on here?’ ‘What happens if I do it this way?’ ‘Why does this sometimes work and sometimes not?’ ‘Hang on, whose body parts are these and how do I operate them?’ ‘What exactly am I trying to achieve here anyway?’

There are two things I like about this. The first is her primary reason for recommending it: it interrupts the process of counter-productively reinforcing undesirable habits and gets us on the track of finding more useful thoughts and actions to embed. The second is that it interrupts the process of beating ourselves up about still getting something wrong even after loads of practice. If you are using your conversant awareness to ask interesting questions, you’re not using it to feel bad about yourself.

There are some interesting resonances here with another old friend, the Inner Game, but we’ll leave those for another day too. But for now the first big take-away is that if you find yourself getting stuck, don’t get frustrated, get forensic.

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