Out of Body Experience

I've finally finished the project I have been working on so much at the office so it's time to get back to a regular schedule.

I celebrated this afternoon by getting on with my piano practice.  I've decided that I need to make sure I master the necessary preliminaries instead of just memorizing finger movements for particular songs so I've been focusing on playing scales.  I started about two weeks ago and I was amazed at how difficult it is when playing with both hands in parallel motion.  You start with the little finger of the left hand on C and the thumb of the right hand on C one octave higher.  Then one progresses up the keyboard with both hands for two octaves.  Now, the difficulty is that one must switch fingers at different times.  The right goes from thumb to index, then the thumb passes under the hand and starts again, passing under again after the ring finger, then again after the index finger and, finally, from thumb through to pinky.  The left is the mirror of this going from pinky through to thumb, then the index finger passes over the thumb and progresses after index, then middle again.  It's rather hard to explain without a diagram.

Anyway, the point of all this is that each hand must do different things at different times.  I managed to play each hand separately after only a couple of days but both at once seemed impossible.  If I focused on one, the other went haywire.  After a couple of days I didn't seem to be getting anywhere so I went back to one hand at once.  I thought I'd try and see if it was possible to train the hand so much that it could do it on its own so I could focus on getting the other hand right.  So, day after day, I'd sit down for five minutes, do a few scales with each hand, go take a break, come back, repeat.

Then, as if by magic, it just worked.  The other day I sat down and went up and down without flubbing the change overs.  Even though I hadn't been able to do it the day before, my subconscious had obviously been hard at work without my noticing.  I still wasn't happy however.  I noticed that I had simply memorized the pattern of left-right switching and there was no way I had any timing-sense left to keep track of the musical timing.  So, back to the drawing board.  I started over again, this time with the metronome going and counting out loud, 1-2-3-4.

After a few days a peculiar thing happened.  I was focusing intently on the metronome so I wasn't watching my fingers.  Then I realized that I didn't know what my fingers were doing.  I had no idea which part of the scale they were currently playing except by listening to the sound.  As soon as I switched my mental focus (while still keeping my eyes on the metronome) I flubbed it up and had to stop.  So I tried again.  Same result.  As soon as I focused my conscious mind on the motion of my fingers the flow was interrupted and I had to stop.  At one point I saw my hands in the bottom of my vision and it freaked me out!  It felt like there were these big, pink spiders moving across the keyboard because I had absolutely no sense of what they were doing.

I found the whole thing quite remarkable.  I thought about it a bit while experimenting, shifting my focus around the room, on the metronome, on my fingers, etc.  As soon as my mind went near my fingers, I had to stop.  I realized that focus is a constricting process.  It is a narrowing of one's thinking.  That's the difference between thinking about something specific versus wandering around in one's mind, drifting from thought to thought.  One's subconscious is not a separate part of one's mind, it is simply the part that is not currently in one's mental focus.  Focus moves through the mind, thoughts are not brought into a mental 'workshop'.  Evidence for this is the fact that I was better at scales after a day's break even though I'd not practiced or thought about practice in the intervening period.  The subconscious is working all the time, and it does so using the same methods as when one is conscious, just without the evaluative function, instead relying on pre-evaluated conclusions.  Which is why it's so important to organize one's thinking.  Doing so means you have more horse-power working all the time, integrating percepts and concepts.  I highly recommend Dr. Binswanger's lectures on the nature of psycho-epistemology for more details on this topic.

I'm looking forward to observing more of this process as I progress with the piano.

Comments

[Dan Edge]

Hello,

I was linked to this post by my good friend Chris McKenzie, who apparently has been a fan of your blog for some time :) He referred me here in response to an essay I wrote about psycho-epistemology and mind-body integration. He asked how I integrate my account with yours, and I wrote a response to that end. You can check it out here:

http://www.solopassion.com/node/904

Your account is interesting, and I would very much appreciate any feedback on my article, which deals with a related subject.

Thanks,

--Dan Edge

[Michael Stone]

The link doesn't work. Do you have another one?