Think Ahead. . . But Be Present

Music is like an unreasonable boss. It expects you to be everywhere at once, executing uncountable mental and physical tasks at the highest level without ever missing a beat—literally. In the early years of our studies, we admire the musical masters of the world and treat them as proof that our bodies and brains should be able to multitask their way to the perfect performance. This is— irrefutably—a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad lie.

In our current construction, humans are biologically incapable of “multitasking.” Our attention is like a very narrow spotlight in a pitch black theater. We can focus our spotlight on a single actor on stage, but the second we swing that spotlight away to a different place on the stage, we lose that first actor to the darkness. What we’ve learned to do, in the absence of multiple spotlights, is to swing our light rapidly back and forth between things we want to focus on. This is called rapid task-switching, and it’s one of the ways that musicians seem to be able to do a million things at once. Musicians are not, and have never been, masterful multitaskers—but they are among the best task-switchers in the world.

But surely a pianist can’t be task-switching between every single finger as all ten of them move in rapid succession, right? To an extent, this is true. While musicians have been shown to be significantly better at task-switching than non-musicians, task-switching is not the only cognitive ability that enables them to execute their craft. In addition to the spotlight operator illuminating specific aspects of their musical task, musicians have a stage crew working in the background helping things run smoothly. This stage crew is a musician’s memory; studies show that musicians have notably better short-term and working memory than do non-musicians. From this, we can understand that musicians are not only better task-switchers than most, but their memory is also better suited to help them execute. Where a musician’s spotlight doesn’t shine on one finger or another, enhanced memory-processing enables them to keep moving through their work.

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Don’t get frustrated if more experienced musicians make tasks look easier or if things are challenging right now. Not only have those musicians had exponentially more time to master their instrument than you have; their cognitive processes have also been sharpened over their years of practice to allow them to execute at such a high level. And with plenty of practice, your brain will become chiseled too!

Yes, music asks too much of us. But day by day, week by week, you’ll find that it demands less and less from you. Be kind to the spotlight operator in your brain, begin building up your stage crew, and great success will follow.

Happy contemplation!

Luke

Songhorse Founder

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