A rich collection of practical lessons in how your brain works, laying a rock-solid foundation for a lifetime of fun and efficient learning…
Please invest an hour of your time and energy to embrace these lessons in educational psychology before you continue your musical journey. Because understanding how your amazing brain works, the very organ you are trying to change when you study and practice, will pay huge dividends in every aspect of your music making, guaranteed!
Table of Contents
- The ABC Model of Intelligence
- The Learning Mystique
- Multiple Intelligences
- Brain Lateralization
- The Power of Studying
- Memory Fundamentals
- The Learning Process
- The Power of Attention
- Soak Time
- “Memorization”
- Why We Forget
- Association & Elaboration
- Chunking, Automatization, & Practice
- Consolidation
- The Power of Patterns
- A Memory Challenge
- Habit Formation
- State-Dependent Learning
- Blossom’s Dance
The ABC Model of Intelligence
The ABC Model of Learning views intelligence in three domains: affective, behavioral, and cognitive…
The Affective Domain is the realm of feeling: emotions, attitudes, values, and motivations.
The Behavioral Domain is the realm doing: bodily actions and skills.
The Cognitive Domain is the realm of thinking: language, definitions, concepts, associations, and calculations.
This “ABC model” validates our intuitive notions of self as consisting of body, mind, and spirit.
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The Learning Mystique
Surprisingly little is known about how your brain learns and remembers a phone number, a friend’s face, a familiar melody, or a complex motor skill…
We are just naturally wired to do so.
In fact, the processes our brains use to seek, interpret, organize, store, retrieve, and relate sensations and information are almost entirely unconscious. And they are so powerful that they need not ask permission from our conscious minds to do work their magic.
But, while we cannot control the unconscious, behind-the-scenes workings of our brains directly, we can control what and how we feed this powerful and mysterious organ. To that end, we introduce the critically important notion of STUDYING… and highlight how it relates to learning:
- LEARNING is an unconscious, passive process beyond our control.
- STUDYING is a conscious, active process within our control.
Learning how to STUDY–by feeding our hungry brains meaningful and useful things in an appropriate way–is essential to the mastery of any complex skill–and has the power to make learning efficient, enjoyable, enduring, and self-sustaining.
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Multiple Intelligences
Your brain is not a single organ. It’s a complex collection of electro-chemical structures that perform an amazing variety of emotional, cognitive, sensory, and motor functions…
- Some parts of your brain perceive the world around you, giving the ability to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.
- Some move your many body parts.
- Some process the language that enters your ears; others process the language that exits your mouth.
- Some count numbers, some remember stories.
- Some perceive shapes, others see colors.
- Some perceive edges, other perceive orientations and movements.
- Some parts are logical; some are intuitive.
- Some rehearse a phone number for just a few seconds; others remember your ABCs for a lifetime.
- Some remember faces; others remember melodies.
- Some help different parts share information with each other.
- Some work together to integrate parts into wholes.
- Some trigger your fight, flight, or freeze responses.
- Some can imagine things… allowing us to “see” with your eyes closed or to “hear” with no sound entering your ears.
- Can you think of some more?
The takeaway: You have an incredibly powerful and versatile tool called a brain at your disposal. And if you learn how it works and how to use it, you will enjoy a lifetime of fun and efficient learning, guaranteed!
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Brain Lateralization
Your brain, anatomically and functionally, consists of two distinct HEMISPHERES: Left & Right…
Left Brain & Right Brain Compared
Each “side” has specical skills, siummarized as follows:
Your Left Brain is logical, detail oriented, interested in facts, verbal, rational, intellectual, systematic, abstract, and controlling.
Your Right Brain is intuitive, big picture oriented, interested in ideas, visual, emotional, inspirational, playful, concrete, and receptive.
Each side possesses unique ways to understand and experience reality, with profound implications for the challenge of studying and performing music…
Your Left Brain likes to name, explain, define, categorize, talk, count, and calculate.
Your Right Brain likes to experience, imagine, feel, relate, listen, and express.
Your Left Brain does one thing at a time.
Your Right Brain does everything at once.
Your Left Brain learns by structured plans.
Your Right Brain learns by exploring.
Your Left Brain likes to analyze wholes into parts.
Your Right Brain likes to synthesize parts into wholes.
Your Left Brain learns and remembers words, numbers, and facts.
Your Right Brain learns and remembers images, body movements, impressions, and relationships.
Your Left Brain is highly selective about what it pays attention to, enabling you to focus on important details.
Your Right Brain can distribute its attention to many things at once, enabling you to grasp the essence of the big picture.
Your Left Brain thinks about the past and future and is the home of plans, regrets, fears, worries, and criticisms.
Your Right Brain senses and experiences everything in the present moment.
Which Side of Your Brain is smarter?
In many ways, your Left Brain is “smarter” than your Right Brain to the degree that your Left Brain can do things that your Right Brain simply cannot do.
Likewise, your Right Brain is “smarter” than your Left Brain to the degree that your Right Brain can do things that your Left Brain cannot do.
Example of Brain Lateralization & Coordination
This is your Left Brain at work…
and this is your Right Brain at work…
and this is both sides working together…
Implications for Studying and Performing Music
One reason why students struggle with music is that they are using the wrong side of their brain for the task at hand. Alas, most students (and teachers) are trapped in an educational system that places way too much emphasis on abstract Left Brain constructs that have little to do with how music actually works.
Unfortunately, music instruction is so poor that it has students trying to learn and play with half of their brain tied behind their backs. At best, the most “successful” students become skilled at playing music they neither hear nor understand.
While your Left Brain is often an essential gateway for understanding and remembering important musical concepts, it is impossible to understand how music works if you study and play using only the left side of your brain.
Ultimately, in order to perform with confidence and conviction, you must play in that magical Right Brain space where logic, names, and abstract constructs cannot go.
Here, for example, is something that your logical Left Brain simply cannot do… or even understand…
… while your artistic Right Brain grasps it immediately and effortlessly.
But don’t conclude that your Left Brain is useless or that your Right Brain is better than your left.
Both sides are necessary and important… and complement each other in significant ways that enable you to construct and internalize an incredible library of musical knowledge and skills.
The Takeaway
When you study or perform music, you want to use the side of your brain that is appropriate for the task at hand–allowing the natural capabilities of each side to do what is does best–while also allowing each side to collaborate with the other side as needed.
This will all become clear in future lessons committed to bridging the gap between “Left Brain” theory and “Right Brain” experience.
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The Power of Studying
If you want to master something, you can’t just passively expose yourself to it and hope that it magically seeps in somehow…
If you really want to get good at something, you have to study it.
The problem is that Studying takes effort. And that’s why studying is so rare. But studying also has enormous benefits, but is not as hard you think if you do it the right way.
Benefits of Studying
Material that is studied, rather than merely “memorized”, is permanently stored in your memory.
Material that is studied, rather than merely “memorized”, is remembered under pressure.
Studying makes you smarter in the sense that learning things today makes it easier to learn other things tomorrow.
Studying leads to mastery and the feelings of competence, self-worth, and confidence that grow with each genuine accomplishment.
How to be an Effective Studier
Effective studiers understand how their brain works and change their study habits accordingly.
Effective studiers are active participants. They don’t just watch. They do.
Effective studiers learn new things by relating and connecting them to things they already know.
Effective studiers use all, not just some, of their many intelligences.
Effective studiers know that one minute of focused attention beats superficial exposure for weeks, months, or even years.
Effective studiers know that studying is tiring, but this feeling of effort means that they are learning at a very deep level.
Effective studiers fuel their work ethic with something that all masters share: love for what they are doing.
Effective studiers know that studying is harder than not studying, but it’s not as hard as you think.
Effective studiers know that studying the wrong way makes learning slow and painful, but studying things the right way makes learning fast and fun.
Effective studiers know that studying is a choice, not a talent.
The Takeaway
If you want to get good, you can’t just play. You have to STUDY!
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Memory Fundamentals
Your brain’s memory system consists of four sub–systems…
- Sensory Register
- Long-Term Memory
- Working Memory
- Central Executive
Before describing how they work together to create long-term memories, let’s discuss each subsystem in turn…
Sensory Register
The Sensory Register contains all the sensations that come from your environment through your five senses: vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch…
The contents of the sensory register are always fleeting, consisting only of what you are experiencing at this very moment.
Long-Term Memory
Long-term Memory (LTM) is where all of your learning, both conscious and unconscious, is stored…
To a great extent, you are your long-term memory patterns: your rules, beliefs, hopes, dreams, fears, regrets, dreams, expectations, preconceptions, misconceptions, prejudices, self-concept, likes, dislikes, knowledge, skills, and habits.
These long-term memory patterns have a profound influence on many things: where you focus your attention, what you think is important, how you interpret new information, how you react to events, how you remember things, what you think about others, what scares you, what you are ready to learn… to name but a few.
Your long-term memory has essentially unlimited capacity, but it can absorb only so much so fast. You need to give it time to learn, as we will see later. And, because long-term memories are very hard to erase, we need to be very careful what we store there.
Working Memory
Working Memory is where thinking occurs. It is used to temporarily store and manipulate information and is filled by simply paying attention to “something” or “somethings”…
- “Something” can be anything: a face, sound, sensation, idea, shape, texture, word, number, color, image, equation, emotion, concept, suggestion, memory… anything.
- “Something” can come from two sources: your sensory register or your own long-term memory.
- It is possible to pay attention to multiple “somethings” if they do not interfere with each other or overwhelm your capacity to pay attention.
- Working memory is the gateway to long-term memory.
The contents of your working memory are what you are paying attention to at the moment. Once you stop paying attention to something, it quickly fades away. This is why working memory is also called Short-Term Memory (STM). Unlike Long-Term Memory, the capacity of your working memory is extremely limited… not much more than the ability to remember a seven digit phone number.
The Phonological Loop & Visuospatial Sketchpad
Two noteworthy components of working memory are the Phonological Loop and Visuospatial Sketchpad…
The Phonological Loop is like a virtual sound recorder with a storage capacity of a few seconds, just long enough to rehearse the seven-digit phone number mentioned above.
Similarly, the Visuospatial Sketchpad is like a virtual image viewer that allows you to manipulate and relate visual information.
Central Executive
The Central Executive tells your working memory what to pay attention to and initiates and terminates all the mental operations performed in your working memory. These operations include manipulating, relating, storing, and retrieving information.
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The Learning Process
What is Learning?
Learning is a change in how you feel, think, or act as a result of some kind of experience.
Piano-ology is designed to routinely tap into all three of these fundamental, complementary aspects of our being as we acquire new attitudes, skills, and knowledge.
Intentional versus Unconscious Learning
Intentional learning is the process by which we deliberately and consciously try to learn something of value…
Unconscious learning, which includes powerful conditioning processes of classical and operant conditioning, is a vast subject on its own, outside the scope of this discussion.
An Example of Expert Intentional Learning
Let’s describe how to use your brain’s memory system to create a stable long-term memory.
Suppose we want to learn how a major triad sounds and feels. This is “Something New”.
Furthermore, suppose that you have already mastered how the music theory for forming a major triad by combining three notes. This is “Something you Already Know”.
Step 1. Pay attention to “Something New”.
Pay attention to the sound of a major triad played on the piano. The sound enters your ears and is perceived by your Sensory Register. When you pay attention to it, the sound is automatically loaded into your Working Memory.
Step 2. Relate this “Something New” to “Something You Already Know”.
Realize that you have pre-existing knowledge of the notes that comprise a major triad. This is a very relevant “Something You Already Know”. Connect the sound you hearing to this “somethingg you already know”.
Step 3. Keep “Something New” and “Something You Already Know” in your field of attention.
Maintain the sound you hear and your knowledge of the notes in a major triad in consciousness at the same time. Do this until you feel something “click”.
When you feel that “click”, it means that you’ve made a meaningful connection–a connection that’s made an impression on your long-term memory. Such learning is likely to be permanent after only a handful of, and maybe after just one, exposure.
An Interesting Paradox
The more you know, the bigger your brain gets!
Because each new long-term memory your create expands the library of things you already know. And the more things you already know, the more ways you have to understand and relate to new information.
In other words, the more you know, the more you can learn… which leads to a very curious paradox: Unlike a computer memory which can get filled to capacity, every useful thing that you master — every fact, concept, attitude, and skill — makes your brain effectively bigger!!!
Implications for Students and Teachers
A full appreciation of how to make the most of your integrated memory system during the learning process can turn poor students and teachers into great students and teachers. But you need to establish short list of productive study-practice habits:
- If you want to learn the right things, you have to pay attention to the right things.
- If you want to remember something, you need to relate to it in a way that is memorable.
- If the information loaded into your short-term memory is perceived as meaningless (not related to any patterns you already know), the potential to be stored in your long-term memory is very low.
- If the information loaded into your short term memory is perceived as meaningful (related to patterns you already know), the potential to be stored in your long-term memory is high.
- Without meaningful associations between something you are trying to learn and something you already know, all you can do is memorize stuff. Such memories are fleeting and unreliable.
- Complex tasks–such as ear-training or learning a precise physical movement–may require multiple exposures (also known as practice) to become permanently stored in long-term memory.
- Be skeptical. Never blindly accept that “Something You Already Know” to be true. If your teacher can’t explain why something is so, it’s time to find another teacher.
- Every lesson needs to be designed with the student’s pre-existing knowledge in mind. Always. No exceptions. I’s crucial to meet the student where they are, not where the teacher is. Such masterful teaching requires an uncommon set of attitudes, experience, and commitment. This is why great teachers are extremely rare.
- If the lesson being taught can be related to patterns the student has already mastered, learning will be fun and efficient. All great teachers use this process of scaffolding to build an ever-expanding repertoire of useful patterns.
- Always strive to make more than one connection to pre-existing knowledge. The more connections, the better. Strive to build rich networks of associations. Mastery is with built upon the rock-solid foundation of such networks.
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The Power of Attention
Attention is perhaps the least appreciated aspect of intentional learning…
In short, we consciously learn what we pay attention to. The corollary is that we do not consciously learn what we don’t pay attention to. When we are not paying attention, we are extremely vulnerable to learning certain things unconsciously. When we are not paying attention, we are at the mercy of another form of learning: conditioning… And we are as vulnerable to being trained as Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s pigeons.
The Challenge of Attention
Directing our attention to the right things is tough in a world were we are conditioned to be passive consumers of information. Paying attention to the right things is one of the most difficult things we can do with our brains… for at least three reasons:
- There are lots of things vying for our attention: external sights and sounds, bodily sensations, and internal thoughts, memories, emotions.
- It takes experience and insight to know what to pay attention to.
- Focused attention requires lots of mental energy and can be absolutely exhausting.
The Limits of Attention
We are only human. And our attention, like all of our other capabilities, has its limitations:
- Our attention is always selective. There is always far more information available to us than we can attend to at one time.
- Our capacity for paying attention has two aspects: 1) the amount of stuff we can attend to and 2) the amount of time we can maintain our concentration.
- Our attention can be viewed as having two dimensions: breadth and depth. Our attention can be wide and shallow or narrow and deep or anything in between. In other words, we can trade breadth for depth and vice versa but we can never maximize both.
- If we pay attention to many things at once, we have less capacity to attend to the details about each individual thing.
- If we pay attention to one thing at a time, we have the capacity to attend to it in more detail, but lose the capacity to notice other things.
- Our attention must be selective and tailored to the task at hand in terms of breadth and depth, enabling us to be receptive at the level of detail we are trying to learn.
- Focusing attention is very hard mental work that will wear you out. When you get tired, be sure to give yourself a break in order to recharge your batteries!
A Fascinating Example of Attention
A must-see, eye-opening demonstration of the power of attention…
An additional point to be made regarding the limits of our attention is that we see with our brain, not just with our eyes…. so much so that our brains can render us blind despite the fact that light is hitting our retinas!
Implications for Students and Teachers
- Always have a clear goal in mind: What am I going to pay attention to today?
- Focus on learning one thing at a time.
- A great teacher will direct your attention to things you might not otherwise notice.
- Studying is pointless if one is not prepared to concentrate. Concentration is hard work that cannot be done properly when you are tired, stressed, or distracted.
- Focused attention is hard mental labor. Take a break when you get tired.
- Years of mindless mechanical practice is worthless compared to one minute of focused, meaningful attention.
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Soak Time
Your brain is like a sponge in at least two important ways…
- It will absorb what you immerse it in.
- It can only absorb so much so fast.
Implications for Students and Teachers
- Immerse your brain only in true and constructive things.
- You must pay attention to something long enough for it to soak in.
- If you want to learn X, you need to slow down and focus your attention on X and maintain your focus on X until you feel something “click” or “seep in”.
- If you’re a teacher, give your students a few extra seconds to think about the answers to your questions. You’ll both be glad you did.
- Once you feel “full” or tired, your brain is saturated. Studying beyond that point will not produce much fruit. In fact, sometimes it can interfere with and displace what you have just learned.
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“Memorization”
“Memorization” is in quotes because the goal of studying is not to memorize a piece of music like you memorize a sequence of random numbers.
The real goal, and only way to “memorize” a piece, is to understand it using all four musical intelligences: ear, intellect, eye, and muscle.
Such is the only enduring solution to all “memory” problems.
The main reason why most of us “forget” something is that we never really learned it in the first place.
The Takeaway
The cure for a “memory problem” is not to practice “memorizing”, but to study-practice more effectively.
Hint: If you want to remember something, you need to find ways to make it memorable!
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Why We Forget
Sometimes we “forget” because we’re trying to learn too much too fast in a single study session…
memory Interference
Such “forgetting” occurs by a process called interference, which can be understood as follows:
- Similar mental activities use similar parts of your brain.
- It is possible to saturate any part of your brain with new information. In this state, your brain is like a fully soaked sponge that can absorb no more.
- Once any part of your brain becomes saturated with new information, any attempt to add more information will be fruitless and possibly destructive by interfering–becoming confused with or by replacing the information that is already there.
It’s important to understand that interference only applies to similar material that is studied in a similar way. Information that is dissimilar (that uses different parts of your brain) does not interfere.
Information that has already been consolidated (already securely stored in long-term memory) is not vulnerable to interference.
Implications for Students and Teachers
Don’t study or practice too much of a single skill (technique or ear training, for example) in a single session. Your brain can absorb only so much so fast and needs time and rest in order to consolidate the new material.
Study and practice a diversity of skills (technique, scales, chords, chord progressions, rhythm, ear training, improvisation) in each session. This works because different parts of your brain do not interfere with each other.
Study and practice any given skill ns small sessions spaced over time. You will learn far more if you study a single topic for five minutes a day every day than if you cram on the same topic for one hour once a week.
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Association & Elaboration
The best way to remember something is to make it memorable!
To that end, it is not enough to merely think of something. You also need to think about it. And two powerful ways to accomplish thinking about something are Association and Elaboration.
Association
Your ability to remember things is greatly enhanced if you can associate them with things you already know. And the more associations, the better. Importantly, these associations should be natural and meaningful, not contrived or based on clever mnemonic tricks.
As you study music, you’ll discover that music is not a disconnected collection of isolated parts, but a richly interwoven tapestry. For example, scales and chords are just different views of the same musical stuff. Also, learning new scales and chords is easy if you relate them to scales and chords you already know.
Takeaway: Always relate new things you are trying to learn to things you already know!
Elaboration
It’s easy for our brains to “forget” things if we only know them in one way. But when we elaborate on something, we explain it in more than one way or add or emphasize important details about that something. Elaboration builds confidence and security because it creates a rich network of connections that employ more than one part of our brain. Of course, the more elaborations, the better!
A common musical application of elaboration is to see a melody as more than just a sequence of letter names. We can also see the melody as Solfege syllables, rhythmic sequence, harmonic cell, visuospatial pattern, fingering pattern, and physical choreography.
Analogies and metaphors are great examples of elaboration is action: How is this thing I am trying to learn like something else I already know?
Takeaway: Always try to learn things in more ways than one. Your confidence will grow immensely with every new pattern and connection you discover!
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Chunking, Automatization, & Practice
One goal of studying music is to turn disconnected pieces of information and behaviors into a single, unified, meaningful idea or behavior…
The integration of many parts into integrated wholes is called chunking.
Chunking is a huge contributor to music mastery because it simplifies the work that our brains have to do. Chunking allows us to transform the impossible task of doing many complicated things at the same time into the easy task of doing just one or two simple things at a time.
By the way, chunking is how you are reading these words. You are chunking individual, meaningless things called letters into unified, meaningful things called words. Musical literacy is the same thing.
Examples of Musical Chunking
- Organizing groups of notes into scales.
- Organizing groups of notes into chords.
- Learning a left hand accompaniment as one unified idea, not separate notes.
- Instead of thinking about two hands, think as if you’re playing with a ten finger hand.
The implications for studying and practicing are profound:
- When you study, look for unifying patterns that allow you to turn many things into one or few.
- Never play one note at a time. Always study and perform in meaningful musical chunks.
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Consolidation
Learn things faster and better by taking advantage of consolidation–the process by which short-term memories are turned into long-term memories!
Physiologically, this process is accomplished by rearranging and modifying the electro-chemical connections in your brain. Feeding this process requires focused attention on what you want to learn, repeated exposure, and time for your brain to change.
Here some very important insights regarding consolidation:
- You have to pay attention to what you want to learn.
- You may have to repeat your exposure to what you are trying to learn, paying attention several to many times.
- Learning may not occur immediately. It may take a few seconds to a few minutes for simple things… to a few days or weeks or even month for very complex things.
- The prime time for your brain to catch up on and permanently store what it learned today is while you are sleeping!
- Each and every day presents a potential consolidation cycle, consisting of the alternating activities of studying using focused attention and brain-restructuring sleep.
- Study and Practice are most effective when distributed over time. Five minutes a day, every day trumps five hours once a week!
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The Power of Patterns
Did you know that your brain is a natural seeker, recognizer, discriminator, interpreter, relater, connector, and creator of patterns?
Your brain loves patterns and hates randomness.
For example…
- “!nkcsrveeeoo htB” is no fun to read because it’s just an apparent jumble of random symbols with no apparent meaning.
- “Beethoven rocks!” is fun to read because it contains recognizable patterns that mean something.
An astonishing example of the power of our pattern-loving brains:
Cna yuo raed tihs? i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg aubot the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae the rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Implications for Students and Teachers
- Learning need not be a brute force memory task.
- “Memorized” information is hard to learn and easy to forget.
- Memorization of unconnected information is mentally exhausting (and usually unnecessary).
- Once you see a pattern, you don’t have to try to remember it. It is impossible to forget.
- Learning new patterns is fun & easy if you connect them to patterns you already know.
- The more useful patterns you have stored in your long-term memory, the easier it is to learn new things. Each pattern already stored gives you a foundation on which to build even more complex patterns.
- If you are a teacher, you need to invest your time & energy teaching useful patterns.
- If you are a student, you need to invest your time & energy discovering, studying, and mastering useful patterns.
- A word of warning: BAD patterns also exist. Once a useless, confusing, or destructive pattern gets stored, useless, confusing, or dangerous things start to happen. And so, you must be careful what knowledge, beliefs, and habits you store in memory.
- Present ease is enabled by past efforts. For example, the effort you invested in learning your ABCs and phonics is makes reading these words easy. Likewise, future ease is enabled by your present efforts!
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A Memory Challenge
In order to illustrate the amazing power of patterns, let’s try a fun memory challenge…
Step 1. Play the following music (30 seconds long) and memorize the following letter/symbol pairs…
When the music stops, scroll down to Part 2…
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Step 2. Count backwards from 42 to 0 by 3s…
42… 39… 36… 33… 30… 27… 24… 21… 18… 15… 12… 9… 6… 3… 0… After you count down to zero, scroll down to Part 3…
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Step 3. Test Your Memory…
What shapes correspond to each of the following letters?
When you are finished or can’t stand it anymore, scroll down to Part 4…
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The Takeaway
No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to forget the effortless connection you just made. In fact, it is highly likely that you will “remember” this connection a week, a year, or twenty years from now! Got it? Good!
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Habit Formation
Every thought, belief, and action that you repeat over and over again turns into a habit–an unconscious, automatic behavior…
Fundamentals of Habit Formation
- Habits are stored in long-term memory.
- Long-term memories can be permanent, so you need to be very careful what you store there.
- Whether your thoughts, beliefs, and actions are useful or not, you deeply and unconsciously remember what you repeat.
- Bad habits are hard to break because long-term memories are extremely hard to erase.
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State-Dependent Learning
Did you know that you remember things better when you study and practice them under the same conditions that you expect to perform them?
This insight is particularly important when preparing to perform under pressure.
Such conditions may include your location, time of day, your state of mind, your health, the clothes you are wearing, your mood, and many other things.
Remember that we have the capacity to learn both consciously and unconsciously. When we are immersed in any environment, there are countless numbers of things that lie beyond our conscious attention. And any number of these things have the potential to become unconsciously associated with the conscious behaviors we are practicing. Therefore, any of these things has the potential to become a memory trigger. So, if one of these memory triggers disappears when we move to another environment, there is a risk that our memories will suffer or fail completely.
Examples of State-Dependent Learning
- Pre-season scrimmages for sports teams.
- Dress rehearsals for theater companies.
- Final hour exam prep by psychology majors. (Visit any upper-level college psychology class an hour before an exam and notice how many psych majors are studying in the very same classroom, with the same lighting, and in the very same seat in which they are about to take their test. No kidding!)
Implications for Students and Teachers
- If you are preparing for a performance, you need to practice under enough different environments and conditions so that your behavior generalizes to all environments and conditions. If you can, play the same piece on different instruments.
- If possible, you should practice in the very same environment you expect to perform in. In the case of a music performance, you should play the very same instrument, on the very same stage, with the very same lighting, while role-playing your entrance, in front of a real or imagined audience.
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Blossom’s Dance
I’d like to close the series on How Your Brain Works on an inspiring and uplifting note by inviting you to enjoy the video below… an illuminating and heartwarming lesson in mind, beauty, and the power of music shared by guitarist Bill Stubblefield and his cockatiel friend Blossom…
learn more… Practice Habits
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