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Gebrain* and the Inner Game

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In my first post about Molly Gebrian’s book on the neuroscience of music practice, I mentioned resonances with the ideas of the Inner Game. Interestingly, the friend who recommended this book to me was keen to keep the two separate – whilst not knocking what Inner Game principles can offer, he saw this book as much more practical and task-focused than the psychological orientation of the Inner Game.

And I agree that is a useful distinction to make. Nonetheless, as someone who enjoys finding connections, I found in a number of places that Gebrian’s suggestions for practice strategies were not only reminiscent of various aspects of the Inner Game, but also helped explain why they work. So I’ve found it helpful to work through some of these connections.

Self 1/Self 2

The primary starting-point for the Inner Game is the recognition that our effectiveness is wildly different depending on what’s going on in our heads. If we find ourselves into a state of Flow, our intuitive musicianship (Inner Game’s Self 2) has free play to run the show. If we let our nasty inner critic (Inner Game’s Self 1) give a running commentary on what we are doing and how we are doing it, everything is a struggle.

This phenomenon is what Gebrian identified as the Constrained Action Hypothesis. And her recommendations for both practice orientation and teaching vocabulary to create an external rather than internal focus are entirely consistent with the kind of Trust exercises in the Inner Game that aim to silence the inner critic by giving the brain something else to do instead.

Awareness

The point about Awareness in the Inner Game is not just about increasing the granularity of detail and insight in your perception of what you’re doing, but also to approach self-observation non-judgementally. It is essentially about honing your skills of discernment, and resonates with Gebrian’s basic point that practising is ideally an exercise in problem-solving.

Will

The Inner Game’s non-judgemental orientation continues into the principle of Will, in which the learner is encouraged to think less about trying to get something ‘right’ but instead to think about being able to do it in any way they choose. If you can develop control over a particular process such that you can do it in extravagantly wrong ways, you will in the process develop the control to do it in ways that, artistically, you would prefer. This idea seems pretty much identical to Gebrian’s practice tactics of Amplification of Error and Old way/New way. (Though the latter has a healthy dose of Awareness built into it too.)

The principle of Variable Practice is a more generalised version of this, less focused on a specific problem that needs solving, and more about developing cognitive strength and resilience of learning by practising music in lots of different ways.

Trust

As noted above, Trust is at the heart of the process of muting your Self 1 inner critic – or as Gebrian would put it, doing your thing without explicit monitoring. The exercises one would use to exercise Trust often involve distraction techniques of various kinds – silly games, using scenarios that engage the imagination – and have a considerable degree of overlap with the more style/expression-focused end of Variable Practice exercises.

These connections seem on the face of it somewhat generalised, but I think the reason I nonetheless found them convincing is, on reflection, experiential and practical. A lot of the things that I already do in my work with choirs that embodies ideas discussed by Gebrian emerged from working with Inner Game principles. I have found it most useful to gain a clearer understanding of why these work, both for their own sake, but also to integrate them with the wider processes of learning of which they form part.


*With continued apologies for the misspelling; I considered making the effort to type it correctly for this post (thinking it was wearing a bit thin), but then my title didn’t rhyme any more.
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