How interestingly the brain works. Take some musical notes, practice for about half an hour. Some things work right away, but of course, at first, it’s far from smooth, and after a while, you feel — that’s it, no progress. Then you take a break, switch to work, after a while — say an hour or two — you return to the piano, and it goes significantly better than before the break. You make progress again, hit a dead end again, go to sleep, for example, come back — and it’s a completely different story. The delta between the first time after rest and the last time before rest feels very significant. It’s as if the brain was training instead of resting. Or not eating. Or not coding.
Apparently, during the learning process, the brain gets loaded with all sorts of junk in a form that’s inconvenient for it, which then requires time to sort things out neatly when it’s not busy consuming information. Then it takes the necessary things directly from the right shelves, not from the heap hastily thrown together.
For some reason, this doesn’t work with drawing.
Another interesting thing is how muscle memory and consciousness work. You play something, and you are aware of playing — exactly at what moment which chords and which keys to press and which not to. At some point, after about the tenth time, you catch yourself thinking that you no longer understand what you are playing, but it plays smoothly. And that’s the moment when you need to significantly reduce the tempo (or even break it), to create a balance between muscle memory and conscious playing. Muscle memory is fine, but only until the first mistake. It is quite difficult to recover from it, as the conscious part of the brain has relaxed and handed over control to the mechanical part, and then bam, a mistake, and the conscious part is like oh where am I what are we even playing here and all that.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 