Practising and the Gebrain: Specific take-aways

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In my last post I gave an overview of Molly Gebrian’s excellent book on the neuroscience of practising music. Today I turn my attention to a number of specific concepts she shares that help us understand why we experience particular types of learning experience as effective or ineffective.

Contextual Interference

This is the term used to describe the extra cognitive load that comes with switching between tasks. This is why it feels comfortable to get stuck in and stay with one piece of music for extended periods during our practice. However, as we know, what is comfortable isn’t always the optimal learning experience, and Gebrian recommends using contextual interference strategically in order to make our brains work harder in practice. Finding ways to randomise what’s coming up, and using a timer to schedule regular changes of task make us dig deeper at each change-over. It will probably feel like we’re not doing so well than we feel after a long stint on one piece, but it results in better performances.

Constrained Action Hypothesis

When we exert conscious control over our bodily movements, we often get in the way of our automatic processes, and thus constrain ourselves: we react to late, and when we do react, we overreact. A related concept is explicit monitoring which refers to the process of micromanaging ourselves.

Of course, when we are making fundamental changes to technique, we sometimes do need to think about precisely how we are operating specific body parts. But as soon as we move beyond this initial, deep diagnostic phase, we will embed the change better by changing that focus.

It turns out that it is more effective to have an external focus (what am I doing with this violin bow?) than an internal focus (what am I doing with my hand holding the bow?). I am reminded of Cy Wood giving people paper plates to move around when teaching choreography, observing that people feel able to move an object around with much greater freedom and fluency than they move their own body parts. It also turns out that the use of imagery and/or a focus on expressive purpose circumvents this tendency to inhibition.

Proactive Interference

This is where old knowledge gets in the way of the acquisition of new. I am reminded of my old friend The Blue Paint Problem. I mention it here mostly because it’s a nice introduction to the next one.

Retroactive Interference

This is about where the acquisition of new knowledge disrupts the security of something previously learned when there is a strong similarity between the two. The first thing this brought into focus for me is why it is so important for composers and arrangers to be mindful about how they handle repetition. We already know that version control takes up a disproportionate amount of rehearsal time, untangling passages that are similar but not identical. So it is an important discipline for creators of music to be very clear about either making repeated passages repeat exactly, or making changes to parallel passages expressively salient.

But there is also some stunningly useful information for the learners here too. This effect disappears if you leave more than six hours between working on the similar sections (you can shorten this interval by taking a nap). So, whilst my instinct might previously have been to highlight the similar/different passages and work on them together, actually it will be more cognitively efficient, once they’re identified, to deliberately separate the work on each.

Ultradian Rhythm

Maybe everyone knew about this one already, but I found it a bit of a revelation to know that just as we have inbuilt daily cycles (the circadian rhythm), our waking lives also have a rhythm of around 90 minutes of alertness, followed by about 20 mins of downtime. I had already discovered from experience that 90 mins is a good length of practice time for me, and that, even if I feel like continuing beyond that, the extra time is never as productive as what went before and it is more healthful to take a break. Turns out that this is because I am a human being.

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