The Musician’s Mind

The Musician’s Mind

Teaching, Learning, and Performance

in the Age of Brain Science

Lynn Helding

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Title: The musician’s mind : teaching, learning, and performance in the age of brain science
/ Lynn Helding.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The Musician’s Mind translates the latest
cognitive and neuroscience research into clear, compelling concepts that enlighten the
central pursuits of musicians’ lives: teaching, learning, and performance. No matter your
instrument or level of musical ability, this book will show you new ways to optimize your
mind’s creative power and wellbeing”—Provided by publisher.
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 Preface

Of Systems Breakdowns and Musicians’ Brains

Systems breakdowns—whether of marriages, hip joints, or

laptops—are little disasters that interrupt normal function. In scientific
brain research, however, systems breakdowns are seen as priceless
opportunities for studying intact systems. According to this
reductionist viewpoint, not only does devastation in one part of the
brain reveal how it must have operated when it was healthy, but
insights are also gleaned by observing how the healthy components
compensate for the diseased ones.
Both the birth of brain science and the creation of this book owe
some of their origin story to breakdowns. In the case of brain
science, it was the gruesome accident of railroad worker Phineas
Gage, who blasted out his left frontal brain lobe when gunpowder
and a tamping iron collided on the job. In the case of this book, the
breakdown occurred within my instrument.
As a music student pursuing an operatic career the early 1980s,
I had acquired a healthy and solid classical vocal technique through
work with my first voice teacher. With the certainty provided by some
performance kudos and a few major singing competition wins under
my belt, I left home to pursue further music studies at a renowned
school of music. But after only six seeks in my new teacher’s studio,
I began to lose my voice, most often immediately following my voice
lessons. Logic directed me to tell my teacher, but that only generated
a scolding that I wasn’t practicing hard enough, that I must actually
practice more. Dutifully following this directive, I rapidly spiraled into
vocal distress.
So began my long education into voice physiology and the
scientific principles of vocal production, begun by voice teachers
Ralph Appleman and William Vennard in the 1960s and masterfully
propelled forward by voice pedagogue Richard Miller in the 1980s.
With the help of an excellent voice technician who espoused Miller’s
systematic vocal technique, I quickly regained my instrument,
convinced that voice science could bridge the gap between what
Miller had dubbed “the historic Italian school of singing” and the
current century and, more importantly, that voice science could
answer age-old questions and settle tiresome debates. (What is
breath support, anyway?)
In my burgeoning teaching career, I eagerly heeded Miller’s
exhortation that, as teachers, “we owe it to our students to be able to
take advantage not only of everything that was known 200 years
ago, but also of everything that is known today” and ramped up my
efforts in what I came to call “the Doctrine of Accumulation.”[1] That
doctrine was simple: the more you know about the physiology of the
voice and the way that vocal acoustics work, the better you can sing
and teach singing. It seemed to me, then, that what one knows
matters most.
A similar mode of thinking can be found within the pedagogies
of almost every musical instrument (at least for the classical
instrument families that comprise the traditional American music
conservatory), even though the standard teaching method in those
schools is based on the European master-to-apprentice model,
wherein technical knowledge is bequeathed to students in highly
personal, subjective, and idiosyncratic ways. Yet for every ten music
teachers like this who do not teach the physiology of the body parts
that it takes to drive their instruments, there is at least one who is
sold on the idea that knowledge of the biomechanics of the wrist, the
delicate facial muscles that construct an embouchure, or the
components of respiration are critical to advancement, self-care,
protection from harm, and recovery in the event of a systems
breakdown. This type of knowledge is, in my view, vital for effective
and humane music teaching. Indeed, many in our profession would
do well to heed the ancient Hippocratic oath of physicians: Primum
non nocere, “First, do no harm.”
Yet regardless of which method music teachers choose—an
empirical one, based on their own artistic experience, or a scientific
one, built on a base of knowledge accumulated by many people over
time—the transference of that knowledge from teacher to student
ultimately hinges on the ability of the student to absorb it. Indeed,
such a knowledge base is virtually worthless to the student if they
cannot understand it. Unfortunately, this truth provides the perfect
rationale for science-averse teachers to eschew science or
“evidence-based” pedagogies altogether.
Nevertheless, there are a number of musicians within every
instrument family who earnestly pursue the science behind their
instruments, propelled by a combination of fascination with facts and
concern for their students and bewitched by the Doctrine of
Accumulation. Eventually, though, many who reach the far shore of
knowledge with their priceless cargo intact will discover that they
cannot get their goods to market—they cannot install their treasures
with equal measures of speed and success into their students’ minds
—and are stymied by the realization that what one knows as a
musician is no guarantee whatsoever of teaching success.
This revelation occurred to me in stages. The first stage was
acceptance of its truth, which allowed a different question to reveal
itself, the urgent question of “How?” Assuming one possesses the
knowledge in the first place, how might we first plant and cultivate
that knowledge within our individual students and then propagate it
within the studio and even beyond to others who might benefit by it?
The second stage of revelation occurred to me at the National
Center for Voice and Speech, where I had gone to study at the
Summer Vocology Institute. Dr. Katherine Verdolini Abbott, in the
midst of her course on motor learning theory, made an offhand
comment that what teachers and clinicians know about the voice
does not necessarily transfer to how to train it. This insight hit me like
a thunderbolt. With the power of a spiritual conversion, I realized
that, while scientists pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge
(and, admittedly, artists pursue art for art’s sake), teachers—and
especially artist teachers—are lodged in an entirely unique domain.
We simply do not have the luxury to merely accumulate knowledge
or artistic experience; we must figure out how to transfer both into
our students. In the pursuit of the question “How?” I came to realize
that the “what” of voice science was missing both the delivery
system and the receptacle for that knowledge: the human mind.
These realizations fortuitously coincided with the 1990s’
presidentially decreed Decade of the Brain, which was intended to
“enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain
research” and to “encourage public dialogue on the ethical,
philosophical, and humanistic implications of these emerging
discoveries.”[2] This initiative spurred explosive growth in that decade
in both the cognitive and neurosciences, which was first ignited in
the 1950s by the aptly named cognitive revolution. As I dove
headlong into this research, I proposed cognitive science as a logical
place of rapprochement for voice science and vocal art because they
had been at odds for over a century.[3] I later came to propose that a
paradigm shift in all music pedagogy must occur in response to the
cognitive revolution, a shift in emphasis from how well teachers
teach to how well students learn; a shift from what musicians know
to how to train them.[4]
This book is a result of more than nine years of research that
follows these lines of thinking. It is my hope that readers will find this
research as illuminating, stimulating, and useful as I have in my life
as an artist, a musician, and a teacher. Toward that end, I offer the
following navigational thoughts.
Intended Readership: This book is intended for all musicians,
at all stages of their learning-teaching-performance journey, as well
as for those who teach, love, and nurture them.
Musical Genres and Styles: Similarly, this book is intended for
musicians of all musical genres and styles. In cognitive terms, the
biggest division is between written and oral practices. The ability to
read musical notation is a hallmark of Western classical music, yet
the ability to improvise based on memorized musical components is
fundamental to many other musical styles. These diverse practices
seem to demand different mental gymnastics, depending on whether
the musician is accessing memorized material as a canvas for
creation or cognitively processing musical notation in the act of
recreating the written work of a composer. In both cases, the brain is
evincing its network connectivity, currently thought to underpin all
complex cognitive tasks. Once again, cognitive science offers a
fruitful arena for rapprochement between many diverse musical
genres and styles.
Cognitive Science: Many disciplines are now housed under the
heading cognitive science, specifically neuroscience, cognitive
psychology, neurobiology, neurophysiology, neurolinguistics, and
evolutionary psychology. Thus, a founder of the field has suggested
the field would be more appropriately named the cognitive sciences,
opining that the plural form would signify its interdisciplinary nature.
Nevertheless, the blanket term cognitive science is the primary term
used throughout this book.[5] This choice intentionally reflects the
focus of this book, which is cognitive science (how the brain
processes information) and not neuroscience (a branch of biology
focused on the anatomy and physiology of brain structure). Thus, the
reader will rarely encounter the names of brain structures in this
book, and graphics featuring the brain sliced up like a side of beef
are nonexistent.
Experts and Expertise Studies: Much of the information in this
book about fruitful practice methods comes from the fields of motor
learning and the relatively new field of expertise studies. Why should
we study experts? Mostly because of the clear-eyed observation that
experts seek continually to improve. That is why they are experts.
And improvement demands practically all of the attributes that are
eschewed by a “don’t-think-just-do-it” mentality: that is, self-reflective
thinking, planning ahead, predicting and weighing results, and
monitoring physical actions. So this book is not intended for the
casual musician but rather for both experts and students of expertise
—let us call them “expertise-seekers.” How far the learner chooses
to travel on the continuum from beginner to mastery is ultimately a
personal choice, yet it is my opinion that very committed amateur
musicians can gain much from this book to aid their pleasure in
music-making.
Terminology: I am a singer trained in the Western classical
tradition and have sung and performed in several different vocal
styles: opera, choral, early music, musical theater, and jazz. As a
child, I also received training in piano, percussion, viola, and guitar.
Throughout this book, I have used the generic term musician to
stand for both singers and instrumentalists and also have delineated
them when necessary. Likewise, use of the word athlete in the
chapters on motor learning refers to all motor performers, not just
those in the world of sports. Therefore athlete refers to musicians
and dancers, as well as to runners, skiers, basketball players, and so
forth.
Pronouns: Cognitive and motor learning principles as they
apply to music teaching, learning, and performance are best
illustrated through imagined scenes and stories; therefore, the use of
pronouns is unavoidable. I have attempted an even distribution of
him/his, her/hers, and they throughout the book.

NOTES
1. Richard Miller, “The Singing Teacher in the Age of Voice Science,”
in Vocal Health and Pedagogy, 3rd ed., ed. Robert Sataloff (San
Diego, CA: Plural, 1991), 7–10.
2. U.S. Library of Congress, “Project on the Decade of the Brain,”
January 3, 2000, www.loc.gov/loc/brain/.
3. Lynn Helding, “Voice Science and Vocal Art: In Search of
Common Ground,” Journal of Singing 64, no. 2
(November/December 2007): 141–50; Lynn Helding, “Connecting
Voice Science to Vocal Art: Motor Learning Theory,” Journal of
Singing 64, no. 4 (March/April 2008): 417–28.
4. Lynn Helding, “The Missing Brain,” Journal of Singing 66, no. 1
(September/October 2009): 79–83.
5. George A. Miller, “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical
Perspective,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (March 2003).
 Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the following institutions,

organizations, and people who have supported my research:

Dickinson College
The University of Southern California Thornton School of
Music
Westminster Choir College of Rider University
The National Association of Teachers of Singing
The Voice Foundation
The Van Lawrence Fellowship
The National Center for Voice and Speech and its Summer
Vocology Institute
The Pan American Vocology Association
At Rowman & Littlefield—Natalie Mandziuk, acquisitions
editor; Michael Tan, assistant editor; Kellie Hagan, senior
production editor; and John Shanabrook, copyeditor

I wish I could say thank you to every single person in my life

who ignited my synapses. But I cannot, so my profoundest thanks
are given to those whose influence carved a deep neural pathway.
For that, I say thank you to

My parents, Robert and Joanne, for providing what is now

known as free-range parenting but which they just understood
as a normal childhood. This was fundamental to everything that
came after. How can one issue a sufficient enough thank-you for
that? Instead, I regularly weep with gratitude because normal is
sadly neither average nor common.
My brother, for teaching me how to fight like a boy. That
knowledge has come in real handy.
My piano teacher, Mrs. Braxton, for insisting on three piano
lessons a week.
My middle school English teacher, Mrs. Bradshaw, who
taught me how to write.
 The late Esther England, for teaching me how to sing in the
way that I wanted to be heard.
Don Carey, for “emotion and meaning in music” long before
I discovered Leonard Meyer.
Ingo Titze, for opening a door to walk on the wild side with
science.
Kittie Verdolini Abbott, for exposing me to my Holy Grail,
motor learning theory, and sharing your draft motor learning
chapters with our vocology class.
The late Paul Kiesgen, for enthusiastically supporting my
belief in cognitive science as the third pillar of voice science.
Don Miller, for challenging me on the worth of cognitive
science in the field of voice science. Here is your answer.
Meredith Mills, for making me laugh myself silly.
Chris Arneson, for honoring my ideas yet urging me to
always keep it practical. Let me know how that worked out,
won’t you?
Scott McCoy, for encouraging me to publish my writing and
then doing so himself.
Dick Sjoerdsma, for sharing my enthusiasm about the
human mind, handing me a column to write, then being the best
eagle eyes a gal ever had. I am a better writer because of your
stringency and interest in my work. You made Mindful Voice
truly a “desirable difficulty.”
Lynn Maxfield, for taking over that column and for his
clarifying graphic, a revised version of which is reprinted in this
book by permission.
Eric Hunter and Manuj Yadav, for generous e-mail
discussions on the nature of sound.
All my students, past and present, who continually motivate
me to answer the question “How?”
Melissa Treinkman, for reading the chapters on learning
and for being an insatiable learner yourself. You are exactly the
kind of graduate student I hoped to find when I finally earned the
honor of teaching them.
Kristin Rothfuss Erbst, for enlightening me as to the
difference between the master’s-degree mind and the doctoral-
degree mind (and the vast territory in between).
My USC Thornton School of Music teaching and learning
colleague Beatriz Ilari, for reading the chapter “How Learning
Works,” reminding me of the centrality of emotion, and then
giving it her seal of approval.
My USC Thornton colleagues Peter Erskine, Rod
Gilfry, William Kanengiser, Stephen Pierce, and Antoinette
Perry, for their good work on the Thornton Musicians’ Wellness
Committee and for sharing their wisdom about music
performance anxiety.
Cindy Dewey, because she thinks that anybody who
researches the brain must be really smart. You are my sister
from another life.
My children, Claire and Keanan, for keeping it real. As the
Skin Horse said, “Real is a thing that happens to you, after a
child has loved you for a long, long time. And it doesn’t happen
all at once, either. You become. It takes a long time, and doesn’t
happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges,
or who have to be carefully kept.” Thanks, kids, for filing down
the sharp edges and keeping it really real.
Ah, Blake Wilson. As Salman Rushdie wrote, “Our lives are
not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful
ways, deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song
shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our
selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.” And so,
meine Seele, mein Herz, you truly are mein guter Geist, mein
bess’res Ich.
 Introduction

A New Enchantment

The human brain is the superstar of the new millennium. How

this homely, wrinkled lump of cranial tissue was sprung from its
hidden attic room within the human skull and emerged a pop-culture
phenom reads like a Cinderella fable.
The story begins in the waning decades of the nineteenth
century, when physiological explanations for human behavior began
to surpass philosophical accounts. Leaders of the then-nascent field
of experimental psychology felt called to rescue psychology from
philosophy, marry it to the emerging field of biology, and legitimize its
progeny (psychological phenomena) through scrutiny in a proper
scientific laboratory, not a psychoanalyst’s risqué chaise longue.
These experimental psychologists, particularly in the American
school, soon cleaved brain from mind and banished the latter and its
by-products, emotion and introspection, from serious scientific
inquiry. Thus the ephemeral mind was shunted to the outer rings of
mainstream psychology, while the material brain, in thrall to the
authority of science, served out its serf-like drudgery throughout the
cold-war era of behaviorism.
But at the dawn of the 1960s, the brain was emancipated by the
new cognitive science. And so began its Pygmalionesque transition.
By the 1990s, the brain was reunited with the missing mind and,
gussied up in the day-glo colors of neuroimaging, debuted as the
belle of the ball at the start of its namesake era, the presidentially
decreed Decade of the Brain.
Imaging technologies such as fMRI, PET, and MEG can now
illuminate the brain in real time as it negotiates the attributes of
human behavior (like language processing), the sublime creations of
human culture (like music), and the scourges that exploit our neural
hardware (like gambling and pornography addictions). The
transubstantiation of the brain’s heretofore hidden activities into fixed
images, at once thrilling and disturbing, makes manifest the mantra
of the new science of mind: The mind is what the brain does.[1]
Practically from the moment of their inception, the gaudy fMRI
“brainbow” images proved too promiscuous for confinement to
academe. The persuasive power of what two psychologists have
dubbed “neurobabble” and its “cousin, brain porn,” have sparked the
new field of neuromarketing, which seeks to exploit these images’
dual powers of fascination and authority to sell everything from Coke
to cars to political candidates.[2] And just as a cunning young starlet
might morph from a hottie hawking merchandise to a high-class
artiste, the shrewdly managed brain has even become the subject of
a book-length portrait collection.[3]
Yet the brain’s popularity is not confined to its photo ops. A quick
Internet perusal of worldwide headlines on any given day reads like
the peregrinations of a media darling: “Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’
in the Human Brain” or “Breast-Feeding Feeds Babies’ Big Brains.”
Yes, even “Attack of the Teenage Brain!!”[4]
The megastar brain flits among research topics as lithely as a
popstar changes escorts, but like a true diva, it outshines every
associate within its orbit, even one as attractive as music. The
brain’s partnership with music generated the field called the cognitive
neuroscience of music, which, as its name suggests, is compounded
of cognitive psychology and neuroscience and devoted to the
scientific study of the neurobiology of music. Within this
constellation, music is valued primarily for its ability to offer “a unique
opportunity to better understand the organization of the human
brain.”[5] True to form, the brain steals the spotlight.

THE BRAIN ON MUSIC

Two pillars of investigation within the cognitive neuroscience of
music are (1) music and emotion, and (2) the perception and
cognition of musical structures. The current state of this research is
reflected in the title of a popular book on the topic (This Is Your Brain
on Music), and its narcotic overtones bespeak the way in which the
elements of musical experiments are delivered to their subjects: from
the outside in. This research is largely conducted along a one-way
path, funneling a channel of recorded musical sound (itself
previously produced by unseen music-makers) and injected through
the conduit of the human ear to its final destination, the human brain.
[6] With a few notable exceptions, researchers use the information
gleaned in order to infer how listening to music affects the brain, not
how the brain might influence the way we make music—let alone
how we might improve our music-making.
Throughout this book, I flip these priorities by first stepping back
from the sensational brain hype to a more reasoned consideration of
what is known about the brain so far. I focus on cognition,
specifically, how humans learn, and so the guiding question is be
“How?” How might the current state of brain science make us better
musicians? As you shall see, this question is largely absent from the
cognitive neuroscience of music, perhaps because neuroscientists
consider the evolutionary question “Why?” in regard to music making
much more compelling:

More fascinating than how people make music (and greater

mysteries, perhaps) are why people make it, why others listen
and how a beat of any sort can have such a profound impact on
the body and the brain.[7]

Undoubtedly, some musicians will agree with science journalist

Elizabeth Quill, who wrote that statement, and find such questions
fascinating. For those people, there are several excellent books that
consider these questions. It is equally certain that many more
musicians have already answered the question “Why?” for
themselves, and that answer probably has something to do with
emotion and meaning.
Quill herself acknowledges “music’s tendency to get charged
with cultural, religious and emotional meaning” and notes that these
very attributes “may complicate things for scientists seeking its roots
and benefits,” while at the same time allowing that these
complications are what make pursuing the questions “worthwhile.”[8]
Yet not all cognitive scientists find the question “Why?”—in
regard to music at least—a worthy one. A total eclipse of music as
“useless” was proffered by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in
his now-infamous comments on the status of music within the human
condition. For Pinker, the pure pleasure gleaned from music can only
be explained by its dismissal as so much “auditory cheesecake”:
sweet but empty.[9] Those were fighting words for evolutionary
psychologists, who took on the challenge of revealing the
evolutionary roots of music, as if proving music’s function might
prove its worth.[10]
But musicians need no such evidence. We already know
music’s inherent worth. Yet in much current research on music and
the brain, the endgame is not to explain music’s power “to soothe a
savage breast” but to defend music’s usefulness—to prove the
power of music to, in Quill’s words, “provide a mental boost” for such
implicitly higher-order computations as “improved understanding of
grammatical rules and sharper auditory perception.”[11]

THE “MOZART EFFECT”

The lines of inquiry described by Quill labor in the shadow of the so-
called Mozart effect, a now thoroughly discredited scientific legend
that listening to classical music makes you smarter.[12] And while
serious scientific researchers were suspicious from the start that
merely listening to classical music could boost cognitive performance
(it doesn’t), some were then, and yet remain, enthusiastic about the
cognitive benefits of active engagement with music through music
lessons and performance. A leader in this corner of research is
Canadian composer and cognitive psychologist Glenn Schellenberg.
In 2004, Schellenberg conducted an important experiment to
test the hypothesis that music lessons promote intellectual
development.[13] The children in Schellenberg’s study who received
music lessons showed, on average, a 2.7-point boost in IQ over the
kids in control groups. If that seems statistically insignificant,
researcher Schellenberg himself notes that this was only a “small
increase” in IQ.[14] Despite the unequivocal and provocative title of
the article (“Music Lessons Enhance IQ”), Schellenberg’s written
conclusion at the end of the paper is more somber: in the process of
formal education, he writes that “extracurricular experiences such as
music lessons appear to play a role.”[15]
In fact, there are many well-known factors besides music
lessons that can cause a boost in test scores, starting with the
phenomenon that instruction of any kind can boost IQ.[16] A second
known factor in positive academic achievement is a low student-to-
teacher ratio.[17] Indeed, a distinguishing characteristic of music
instruction is the one-on-one paradigm: children who take lessons
once weekly receive a weekly dose of undivided adult attention. This
factor has been suggested as one correlational link between music
lessons and the higher IQ scores and improved school performance
noted in musical kids.
A third and significant correlation is a ubiquitous factor in the
lives of scheduled children: parents. It is well known that “children
with high IQs are more likely than other children to take music
lessons because better educated and more affluent parents tend to
provide music lessons for their children.”[18] These special adults
who will drive kids to lessons, oversee instrument upkeep, and foot
the bill for musical activity are also apt to help their children with
homework, require healthy physical activity, and ensure adequate
rest, all factors that boost academic success.
Parents’ reason for providing music training for their offspring
may be for the sheer love of music or for cognitive enhancement, but
chances are it is for the latter. In two recent Gallup polls, 88 percent
of adults surveyed said they believe that music-making boosts a
child’s overall intellectual development (along with other benefits,
such as self-discipline, enhanced creativity, and the ability to work
well with others).[19]
Yet a recent study that made headlines found that “there is very
little evidence supporting the idea that music classes enhance
children’s cognitive development.”[20] Despite the habitual caution of
researchers to the lay public that “correlation does not equal
causation” (or, just because certain events line up does not mean
that they cause or even influence each other), this study, in the
words of one of its authors, ignited a “media firestorm.”[21]
 And so it goes in the Mozart effect wars. Given that music-
making demands many cognitive skills and at high intensity, it would
be fairly amazing if at least some permanent cognitive benefits were
not realized with practice, over time. Indeed, there is very promising
research that shows a direct connection to music training and brain
plasticity—in effect, “softening up” the brain to make it more pliable
(or “plastic”) for receiving information.[22] Still it remains difficult to
determine the causal effects of music training on cognition. Even
Schellenberg has allowed that the many underlying factors that
influence children’s intellectual achievements are so complex and
interconnected that future experiments on the music-to-cognition
connection “could find that there is no clear winner or loser.”[23]
Nevertheless, research by Schellenberg and others is regularly
seized upon as definitive by arts-industry trade groups and other arts
supporters because the vast majority of the general public believes
that art makes you smarter. This belief has become, in the words of
arts education researchers Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, “almost a
mantra” among parents, teachers, and politicians, while the ability for
arts classes to improve kids’ scores on standardized test is
“practically gospel among arts-advocacy groups.”[24]
Despite the understandable desire to wield scientific research in
defense of the arts, the impulse to do so is wrong-headed. Hitching
arts training to gains in unrelated fields obfuscates what the arts can
actually provide. The arts, indeed the broad scope of the humanities,
teach creative thinking, a commodity all the more prized as it
becomes more rare due to the heavy influence of standardized
testing within our current educational systems in the United States
and the emphasis on STEM topics (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics). It makes no sense to measure the
value of something precious simply by how it may boost parameters
within entirely different domains. I do not value my second-born child
because he provided ballast to my first (even though it is true that he
did); I cherish him simply in and of himself.
The measure of the value of music has less to do with cognitive
enhancement—even if music does prove to provide it—and more to
do with a broader enhancement of human experience. As literary
scholar Joseph Carroll describes it,
 art, music, and literature are not merely the products of cognitive
fluidity. They are important means by which we cultivate and
regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more
highly developed functions depend.[25]

We should promote music’s intrinsic worth and value not

because music makes us smarter but because music makes us
better. And in order to make better music, as teachers, learners, and
performers, musicians can reap the benefits of the most recent
discoveries in cognitive neuroscience.

MUSIC AND THE MIND

Chapter 1, “Science, Art, and the Missing Mind,” begins by surveying
modern psychology, whose outsize influence on everyday life was
advanced under the banner of behaviorism during much of the
twentieth century until behaviorism was challenged and largely
overthrown in the 1960s by the so-called cognitive revolution.
According to some educational reformers, behaviorist principles still
underlie many teaching environments today to the particular
detriment of such attributes as creative thinking, perseverance, and
internal motivation. An in-depth look at this is in order, for musicians’
lives depend upon these very attributes.
And while the cognitive revolution provided the impetus for what
New York Times opinion writer David Brooks calls our “new
enchantment” with brain science, such upheavals should generate
caution as we navigate this enchantment; it is wise to heed the
ancient warning caveat emptor.[26] Even though creativity is
generally culturally valued and individually sought, human creativity
per se is not always directed toward positive ends. Studies of the
dark side of human personality have shown that the very divergent
thinking that marks creativity may also engender behavior that is
“morally flexible,” which in turn opens the door to antisocial or even
harmful acts.[27]
When human ingenuity teams up with psychological acuity, the
human qualities we hold most dear can bear bitter fruit, and so it is
with music. The very thing that musicians love can be weaponized
by means of psychology’s dark arts. As disturbing as it is to see our
muse commandeered for harm, musicians should not spare
themselves the knowledge that the U.S. military has alchemized the
elements of music in order to inflict damage on its enemy
combatants. Largely due to the investigative work of musicologist
Suzanne Cusick, as you shall see, the pain potential in music goes
well beyond amped-up volume or pitch levels. The insidious value of
music as an instrument of torture lies in its ability to penetrate the
mind and infect the prisoner with “earworms,” yet leave no visible
trace.
I will move from that dark corner to consider the historic
milestones in education and philosophy most significant for
musicians, namely C. P. Snow’s 1950s two cultures controversy (on
the nexus of art and science) and Howard Gardner’s multiple
intelligence theory (MI theory), which in the early 1980s took the first
crack at previously unquestioned notions of intelligence. MI theory
paved the way for the more expanded view of human competencies
that we currently enjoy, creating a space for emotion after its long
exile by rationality and producing calls for a culture in which science
and art are revered as equals.
Thus girded by cautious enchantment and inspired by the dawn
of a new age of understanding more amenable to the artistic
temperament, in chapter 2, “Groundwork: At the Foothills,” I debunk
popular conceptions about the brain and move on to consider the
real brain gains from current research that are most applicable to
musicians.
Chapter 3, “How Learning Works,” amalgamates current
cognitive research with the overabundance of learning theories to
provide a clear and concise basic primer on how human cognition
works by focusing on cognition’s three main building blocks:
attention, learning, and memory. These are the necessary
components common to two of the basic types of learning from
standard psychology, declarative and procedural. Declarative
learning (colloquially known as book learning) is required for
mastering Western classical music yet is arguably less important for
other musical genres, particularly those that do not require the ability
to read musical notation. However, procedural learning (also known
as muscle or motor learning) is essential to all genres of music
performance, for it forms the core of any musician’s life: technique.
Regardless, no learning is possible without the critical prerequisite of
attention; thus, attentional aides are considered in light of recent
research on what boosts attention and what is harmful to it. The
chapter ends with the paradigm shift in our understanding of human
change via neurogenesis (brain-cell growth) and neural plasticity, the
brain’s amazing ability to transform itself.
Chapter 4, “Learned Movement: Motor Learning,” goes more
deeply into procedural learning, or motor learning (ML). ML research
advanced rapidly through support by the U.S. military during World
War II; indeed, psychological experts’ rise to prominence during the
twentieth century was largely abetted by the war effort. But by the
mid-1960s, progress in ML theory had slowed as the cognitive
revolution drew researchers away from previous fields of inquiry and
toward newer and more tantalizing areas of research, such as verbal
learning, information processing, and memory studies.
After a brief hiatus, ML research was reborn in the 1970s, when
the field of sports psychology took off. Today, thanks to advances in
neuroscience (and funding from the multi-billion-dollar-per-annum
sports industry), ML research is thriving. New research on the
organization of practice schedules, the timing of feedback, and the
quality of practice have revolutionized sport and led to optimized
performance in the physical realm. This research is directly
applicable to music learning and performance.
In this chapter I also consider two sides of the popular maxim
“Go with the flow,” known in ML research as the theory of attentional
focus. New insights indicate that the key difference between the
brain of a beginner and the brain of an expert is the depth of the
motor plan in their respective brains. Experts may be able to “relax
and go with the flow,” but how can beginners do so when they have,
in the early stages of motor learning, no flow with which to go?
Of particular note throughout this book is the vital difference
between learning and performance. While one leads to the other,
they inhabit distinctly different domains, yet their conflation is
common, to the detriment of both. Their vital link is practice. In
chapter 5, “Performance Studies,” I consider practice as a valuable
deposit into a future account of automatic recall. Musicians will want
to know how much practice time is required (Is it really 10,000
hours?) and whether those hours carry a quality rating (they do)—
which is why an artless tally of the hours one spends at a keyboard
is far less important than the quality of intention within those practice
hours. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, an expert on expertise, has
dubbed this deliberate practice. I consider how the concepts of
deliberate practice can revolutionize music practice, even if
becoming a bona fide expert is not necessarily one’s goal. I also
consider some of the hottest topics in both popular science and
popular parenting media, including that troublesome notion called
talent. I consider psychologist Robert Bjork’s concept of desirable
difficulties, which takes its name from a necessary component of
learning: struggle. Yet this necessity has been withheld from many,
particularly among those to whom the talent label was most strongly
affixed. The aversion to struggle, combined with the cultural
phenomenon of self-esteem theory, created a potent combination
that is blatantly toxic to learning. This toxicity is especially evident in
sports and music, two arenas that share motor learning as a
fundamental component and in which American kids spend the
majority of their extracurricular energy. Children who are yoked to
the talent myth and fed big dollops of praise soon develop what
social psychologist Carole Dweck has termed a fixed mindset that,
unless exchanged for a growth mindset, stunts progress throughout
the life of the learner.
Whether historic and modern musical luminaries were guided by
a talent account or a growth mindset, one thing is certain: all had to
log a minimum of 10,000 practice hours—even the child prodigy
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That his success in achieving this magic
number had something to do with his papa Leopold has inexplicably
remained buried in the so-called expertise literature, which has long
shown that a primary component to success in many endeavors
(particularly sports and music) is parental involvement.
Übermom Amy Chua dealt perhaps the first nationwide blow
against self-esteem theory in her now-infamous parenting memoir,
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, whose debut was preceded by an
excerpt released in the Wall Street Journal under the provocative
headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”[28] Yet her book is as
much about raising musicians as it is about raising kids. Much of
Chua’s small volume is devoted to reprints of detailed notes she took
while sitting in on her daughters’ music lessons and the daily
practice directives she devised for them by the dozens. Now that the
Tiger Mom firestorm is history, the musical education and
accomplishments of Chua’s daughters merit a rational look by
musicians through the composite perspective of what we currently
know about attention, deliberate practice, neural plasticity, synaptic
strengthening, and self-esteem theory.
Chapter 6, “Mind Games,” begins with an overview of the
autonomic nervous system and our current understanding of the
human stress response, based largely on the work of
neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky. This chapter includes new
information from the nascent field of music-performance-anxiety
research as well as two particularly weird phenomena that especially
bedevil experienced performers: (1) the so-called ironic effect,
described as that inexorable pull “in a direction precisely opposite”
the intended one, which results in (2) “choking,” the inexplicable
mistakes made in public performances by seasoned professionals.
[29] Research on the latter has largely been funded by the sports-

entertainment industry, which has a lot riding on cures for choking.

The research is both fascinating and hopeful for musicians,
particularly for those chokers who seek alternatives to
pharmacological treatments. On the upside of games the mind can
play, the marvel of mirror neurons holds promise as an effective “no-
practice” practice routine for injured musicians.
Evolutionary psychologists note that attention is an adaptive
behavior; without it, the human race would not have survived. Yet
attention as a human resource is under an attack so severe that
journalist Maggie Jackson has tied its demise to a “coming dark
age.”[30] Chapter 7, “The Digital Brain,” first considers the bad news:
digital media has the power to effect devastation upon attention,
memory, and social interaction. Given that the centerpiece of a
musician’s life is public performance, which in turn is undergirded by
thousands of hours of deliberate practice—and that both these
activities demand loads of attention from both the doer and the
receiver—a sobering look at the fragmentation of attention is in
order, including the cultural harm of mass inattention as revealed in
the section titled “Who Cares If You Listen? The Problem of
Audience Attention.” Yet while musicians are just as vulnerable as
anyone else to the addictive qualities of technology, we are also
uniquely positioned to combat its pernicious side effects and
champion Jackson’s optimistic “renaissance of attention.”
I end this exploration of the new brain science in chapter 8,
“Emotion, Empathy, and the Unification of Art and Science,” with a
final look at the importance to art and artists of emotion’s rescue
because emotion links to empathy, which is a cornerstone of civilized
culture. I circle back to Snow and consider whether calls for a fourth
culture might herald a new age in which art and science are, at long
last, equal partners. Author and inspirational speaker Daniel Pink
has dubbed this possibility “The Conceptual Age,” and he envisions
a new world order guided by “nonlinear, intuitive and holistic”
thinkers. If Pink is correct that “the wealth of nations and the well-
being of individuals now depend on having artists in the room,” then
musicians should plan to take their rightful place there.[31] This book
can help prepare the way.

NOTES
1. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton,
1997), 24.
2. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla
(New York: Crown, 2010), 142.
3. Carl Schoonover, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from
Antiquity to the 21st Century (New York: Abrams, 2010).
4. Fox News, “Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in the Human Brain,”
March 10, 2009, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,507605,00.html;
MSNBC, “Breast-Feeding Feeds Babies’ Big Brains,” March 29,
2011, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42330417/ns/health-
kids_and_parenting/; and Dennis Palumbo, “Attack of the Teenage
Brain!!” Huffpost, May 25, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-
palumbo/attack-of-the-teenage-bra_b_173646.html.
5. Isabelle Peretz and Robert Zatorre, eds., The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003),
preface.
6. Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a
Human Obsession (New York: Penguin, 2006).
7. Elizabeth Quill, “A Mind for Music,” Science News 178, no. 4
(August 14, 2010): 17.
8. Ibid.
9. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 528–34.
10. See David Ball, The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why
We Can’t Do without It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010);
and Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music,
Language, Mind and Body (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).
11. Quill, “Mind for Music.”
12. See Adrian Bangerter and Chip Heath, “The Mozart Effect:
Tracking the Evolution of a Scientific Legend,” British Journal of
Social Psychology 43, no. 4 (December 2004): 613; and Christopher
Chabris, “Prelude or Requiem for the ‘Mozart Effect’?” Nature 400
(August 1999): 826–27.
13. E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Music Lessons Enhance IQ,”
Psychological Science 15, no. 8 (August 2004): 511–14. His
research team announced free lessons to children in exchange for
being part of a study on the cognitive benefits of music training. A
total of 144 six-year-olds were selected and then randomly divided
into four subject groups of 6 kids each: two groups received music
instruction (keyboard or voice), and two control groups received
either drama lessons or nothing. Lessons were given over a thirty-
six-week period, and at the conclusion of instruction, each child was
administered an intelligence test before entering the first grade and
then again the following summer. As might be expected, all of the
children evinced a significant increase in full-scale IQ simply due to
the fact that they had been in school. However, the kids who got
music lessons showed, on average, a 2.7-point boost in IQ over the
kids in the control groups.
14. Ibid., 513.
15. Ibid., 514.
16. Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, “Schooling, Intelligence and
Income,” American Psychologist 52 (1997): 1051–58.
17. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Dominic J. Brewer, Adam Gamoran, and
J. Douglas Willms, “Class Size and Student Achievement,”
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 2, no. 1 (May 2001).
18. See Gael I. Orsmond and Leon K. Miller, “Cognitive, Musical and
Environmental Correlates of Early Music Instruction,” Psychology of
Music 27, no. 1 (April 1999): 18–37; and Schellenberg, “Music
Lessons Enhance IQ,” 511.
19. Samuel A. Mehr, “Music in the Home: New Evidence for an
Intergenerational Link,” Journal of Research in Music Education 62,
no. 1 (2014): 79. See also NAMM, “NAMM Global Report,” 2011,
175, www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/namm/2011globalreport/UPI; UPI,
“Poll: Music Education Is Important,” April 21, 2003,
www.upi.com/Top_News/2003/04/21/Poll-Music-education-is-
important/UPI-99891050959298/#ixzz35CK0oZUx; and NAMM,
“New Gallup Survey by NAMM Reflects Majority of Americans Agree
with Many Benefits of Playing Musical Instruments,” April 29, 2009,
www.namm.org/news/press-releases/new-gallup-survey-namm-
reflects-majority-americans.
20. Samuel A. Mehr, Adena Schachner, Rachel C. Katz, and
Elizabeth S. Spelke, “Two Randomized Trials Provide No Consistent
Evidence for Nonmusical Cognitive Benefits of Brief Preschool Music
Enrichment,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 12 (December 11, 2013): e82007.
21. Samuel A. Mehr, “Miscommunication of Science: Music
Cognition Research in the Popular Press,” Frontiers in Psychology,
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00988.
22. Krista L. Hyde, Jason Lerch, Andrea Norton, Marie Forgeard,
Ellen Winner, Alan C. Evans, and Gottfried Schlaug, “The Effects of
Musical Training on Structural Brain Development: A Longitudinal
Study,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1169 (2009):
182–86.
23. E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Long-Term Positive Associations
between Music Lessons and IQ,” Journal of Educational Psychology
98, no. 2 (2006): 466.
24. Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, “Art for Our Sake,” Boston Globe,
September 2, 2007,
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/art_for_our_s
ake . See also Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, and
Kimberly M. Sheridan, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual
Arts Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007).
25. Joseph Carroll, “Steven Pinker’s Cheesecake for the Mind,”
Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 2 (October 1998): 481.
26. David Brooks, “The Social Animal,” TED Talk, March 2011,
http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/14/the-social-animal-david-brooks-on-
ted-com/.
27. Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely, “The Dark Side of Creativity:
Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 102, no. 3 (2012): 445–59.
28. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin
Press, 2011); and Amy Chua, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,”
Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2011,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704
111504576059713528698754.html.
29. Daniel M. Wegner, “Ironic Processes of Mental
Control,” Psychological Review 101, no. 1 (1994): 34.
30. See Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and
the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).
31. See Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will
Rule the Future (New York: Penguin, 2005).
 Chapter 1
Science, Art, and the Missing
Mind
WHAT REVOLUTION?
If you were neither alive nor sentient in the last half of the previous
century, you no doubt missed the revolution. If you were alive, adult,
and aware, you can still be pardoned for not noticing, for even the
revolution’s footsoldiers and architects have claimed they were
oblivious to the so-called cognitive revolution as it rolled out and are
only aware of its significance in hindsight. Nevertheless, given the
brain’s current star power, key players have jostled for the bragging
rights to have known the brain back in the dowdy, black-box days of
behaviorism and to lay claim to having engendered its starring role in
the cognitive revolution.
According to renowned developmental psychologist Howard
Gardner, the scholars who attended a symposium titled “Cerebral
Mechanisms of Behavior” at the California Institute of Technology in
1948 stood “at a critical juncture of scientific history.”[1] While
Gardner acknowledges that cross-fertilization among American and
British scholars of the mind was occurring with increasing frequency
throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he singles out this symposium as a
major harbinger of the revolution because it featured two of its most
radical and vital components: new theories of human information
processing and a robust challenge to behaviorism, the ruling
orthodoxy in psychology at that time. But harbingers seldom receive
the accolades that the main event enjoys.
According to psychologist Steven Pinker, the official birthday of
the revolution occurred over a decade later, on the opposite coast of
the United States. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
was the setting, and 1956 was the “annus mirabilis” for a symposium
on information theory that would come to be acknowledged as “the
start of the modern scientific study of the mind”—and the beginning
of the cognitive revolution.[2] On the occasion of the MIT
symposium’s fiftieth anniversary, science writer Jonah Lehrer
invoked the swashbuckling image of “a group of brash young
scholars” who “introduced a series of ideas that would forever alter
the way we think about how we think.”[3]
The late psychologist George Mandler preferred the term
evolution, and he observed (as a player in the [r]evolution himself)
that there was little “radical rooting out of previous dogmas.” Rather,
behaviorism, according to Mandler, “faded because of its failure to
solve basic questions about human thought and action, and memory
in particular.” Mandler and others believed that talk of revolution
overly romanticizes what was simply the natural progression of
psychology. “Much was said in colloquia and in congress corridors,”
wrote Mandler, “but the written record does not record a violent
revolution.”[4]
Indeed, George Miller, himself one of those brash young
scholars, asserted a sentiment common to revolutionaries when, in
hindsight, they consider their historic moment: “At the time, of
course, no one realized that something special had happened, so no
one thought that it needed a name,” he reminisced. “That came
much later.”[5]
Some psychologists have argued that, besides the notable
exception of the founding of modern psychology itself, revolution in
psychology is a myth, and furthering the cognitive revolution storyline
is actually harmful to the field.[6] Some have defensively sniffed that
the other -isms that cognitivism supposedly overthrew (notably
behaviorism) are still alive and kicking, even as cognitivism currently
dominates the field.[7] Yet others have summarily dismissed the
entire revolution narrative as simply “banal.”[8] Despite these
seemingly arcane debates among experts, understanding the
evolution of psychology does matter to the layperson, if for no other
reason than the privileged position of power and influence in
American life that this field exerts. Like the saga of America itself, the
rise of modern American psychology begins with its divorce from
Europe.
By the mid-twentieth century, experimental psychology, having
ditched the pesky mind, was finally solidly situated as a natural
science. Thus it was positioned to harness, as did science en
masse, its suddenly elevated social status, borne of the realization
that, if science could make a nuclear bomb and unleash its terrible
power, science was equally capable of offering defense and
protection. So began what historian Ellen Herman has termed “the
romance of American psychology,” the field’s meteoric rise to power
during the years of World War II and its cold-war aftermath through
organized consortiums of academic, political, civilian, military, and
governmental persons and entities.[9]
The influence of the psychological establishment on American
public policy, begun under duress during the war years, is now so
ubiquitous in twenty-first-century life as to be virtually unremarkable.
Its reach into our private lives is evidenced by the sustained, robust
consumption of self-help and how-to books, with diet and parenting
guides topping the list. Psychology in the present era is not just an
academic discipline or a professional association but, as Herman
argues, nothing less than “the creed of our time.”[10]
And what about that revolution? While scholars within the
psychological establishment debate the details of location and
birthdate, should the rest of us care whether a bona fide revolution
birthed our current worldview or not?
We should care for at least two reasons. First, if a revolution
occurred, we might well wonder, the way civilians in wartime do, if
we are securely located in its aftermath. Even more significant is the
very reason for any revolution’s existence in the first place, namely,
the entity against which it reacts. In the case of the cognitive
revolution, that antagonist was behaviorism. And understanding the
effects of behaviorist psychology is key to understanding our
motivations and weaknesses as they currently play out in all our
arenas of musical endeavor and accomplishment, whether as
students, teachers, parents, or practicing musicians.

MINDLESS BEHAVIORISM
At the dawn of the twentieth century, American experimental
psychology was on a quest to join the natural sciences by
systematizing observation through “experimental introspection” as a
method to crack the code of consciousness, itself guilelessly
described by psychology historian Daniel Robinson as the thing that
“every man, woman and child know to be true during every waking
hour of daily life.”[11] (Spoiler alert! In spite of this grand effort,
consciousness per se yet remains the Holy Grail of brain science.)
As the century progressed, instead of a focus inward on this quest,
many forces from both within psychology and outside the discipline
combined to abandon philosophy, inexorably supplanting
introspectionism and mentalism with behaviorism as the dominant
school of psychological thought. While, as Robinson notes, it is
“difficult to isolate the factors responsible for the early success of
behaviorism,” it is germane to this chapter to identify a few of them.
[12]

The great waves of immigration into the United States at the

turn of and into the early decades of the twentieth century
corresponded with massive, indigenous population shifts away from
rural agrarian life to urban life. The resultant population growth in
many American cities was explosive—and unnerving to their longer-
term occupants. At the same time, novel theories of education and
child development combined with the influence of Darwinism and laid
fertile ground for a new psychology that shifted focus away from the
individual to consideration of the citizenry as a whole. And with that,
the enticing promise (and, some argued, the necessity) of controlling
group behavior came into view.
The observations of the German psychologist Kurt Koffka,
arriving at Cornell University in 1924 as a visiting professor, offer a
keen outsider’s perspective on the American intellectual climate at
the time, which he found

chiefly practical; the here and now, the immediate present with
its needs, holds the centre of the stage. . . . In science this
attitude makes for positivism, an overvaluation of mere facts and
an undervaluation of very abstract speculations, a high regard
for science, accurate and earthbound, and an aversion,
sometimes bordering on contempt, for metaphysics that tries to
escape from the welter of mere facts into a loftier realm of ideas
and ideals.[13]
 Early behaviorists, sparked by John B. Watson’s 1913 dictum
Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, eschewed the products of
the mind (Koffka’s “ideas and ideals”) as too ephemeral for serious
scientific study and thus dismissed the mind altogether as
unknowable. They endeavored to join psychology to the ranks of the
sciences by transforming the field from its preoccupation with
interior, hidden mental states into a discipline strictly confined to
directly observable behavior. And once a thing is observable, it is but
a short path to measurability, the sine qua non of scientific credibility.
American behaviorism fed upon each of the cultural
predilections that Koffka had enumerated; the exaltation of “mere
facts” was exactly behaviorism’s allure. In the chapter “The Danger
of Science” in his 1935 book, Principles of Gestalt Psychology Koffka
cautions that erecting a rational system of psychological knowledge
would necessarily require cherry-picking only those facts that “would
most readily submit to such systematization.” His prediction that we
might all “pay for science by a disintegration of our life” was a
warning both plaintive and prescient: a catastrophic second world
war soon followed, marked most terribly by an enemy that wielded
eugenics as one of its motivating ideologies.[14]
Consequently, during the years that followed World War II,
psychological theories that hinged on genetics or heritable traits
were quietly shelved, while environmentalism (the “nurture” half of
the ancient nature-versus-nurture debate) ascended. Onto this
primed platform stepped behaviorism’s most famous and ardent
purveyor, the late Harvard psychology professor B. F. Skinner
(1904–1990). Skinner picked up where Watson and followers had
left off, advancing a more rigorous and spartan school of behaviorist
thought, one that did not “regard itself as under any obligation to
speak of brains or minds.”[15]
By behaviorist principles, future behaviors of an organism are
necessarily shaped by the positive and negative consequences that
the organism experiences the first time around, whether pigeon, rat,
or child. The practice of manipulating those consequences, operant
conditioning, came to be one of Skinner’s most famous (and
infamous) contributions to science—not to mention to the training of
the family dog. And since behaviorists saw virtually no behavioral
distinction between animal or human, the basic tenets of operant
conditioning were soon enthusiastically applied to controlling
behavior in group settings like prisons and classrooms.
Behavioral control systems are based upon a set of
assumptions, the most critical being that organisms choose their
behavior voluntarily. Since positive behavior is rewarded and
negative behavior brings unpleasant consequences, behaviorists
believe that positive behavior tends to be repeated while negative
actions will be avoided. This all made rational sense until
psychologist Martin Seligman discovered in the mid-1960s that some
of his animals that were repeatedly subjected to the “unpleasant”
consequence of pain in the laboratory chose a third and unexpected
path: they simply crumpled and gave up. Even when offered an
opportunity to escape, these animals chose the path of no
resistance. Seligman dubbed this response learned helplessness, a
principle that opened the door to research on depression, which in
turn spawned cognitive behavior therapy and the positive psychology
movement.[16]
Still, behaviorism could not explain why people do not always
choose the sensible path of reward; it could not explain why some
folks will irrationally subject themselves to repeated
“unpleasantness.” It turns out that people cannot be judged and
predicted by outward behavior alone; people do not always choose
their pain.
Yet behaviorism reigned as the dominant school of psychology
in America for so much of the past century that anyone who received
a standard-issue education during that time is likely the product of an
educational system based largely on behaviorist psychology. And
despite the currently held view (which incidentally hews to the
revolution storyline) that “the cognitive movement dethroned
behaviorism and brought the mind back to psychology,”[17] critics like
progressive-education scholar Alfie Kohn maintain that our culture
remains completely “marinated in behaviorism.”[18] Kohn has made a
singular career of blasting behaviorism, particularly the ubiquitous
use of what he calls “goodies” (candy, praise, financial rewards) to
“incentivize” behavior. Kohn has long argued that these behaviorist
principles, still common practice among parents and teachers, have
spawned multiple generations of schoolchildren who have grown up
so addicted to incentives, praise, and prizes that they find little joy in
discovery, little intrinsic worth in learning for its own sake, and
therefore little reason to pursue a goal without the promise of
immediate reward.
Yet research by psychologist Carole Dweck and others has
shown that such incentives are actually not the primary forces that
stimulate human endeavor and creativity. Furthermore, these
“goodies” are not only ineffective motivators, but in children they can
actually cause regression of the very motivations they are intended
to ignite, devolving into a negative cascade that has been cleverly
dubbed “the inverse power of praise” (a subject I will return to in
chapter 5).[19]
If these incentives are so ineffective, why do they persist?
Indeed, as early as the 1950s, behaviorism had already “come to be
labeled by its opponents as a narrow, rigid, dogmatic and
authoritarian system,” yet these opponents operated primarily within
the rarefied world of academe.[20] Even after the knowledge brokers
declare an entire theoretical system passé and move on, the rest of
society remains stuck, often for decades, in the wake of their
abandoned -isms. Kohn asserts that this is so for behaviorism
because B. F. Skinner lives on through his “surviving minions,” who
ply operant conditioning techniques on so many levels of modern life
that behaviorism is now deeply embedded in the American psyche.
“Behaviorism,” Kohn insists, “is as American as rewarding children
with apple pie.”[21] If Kohn is right, then all of us ought to take more
than just a passing interest in behaviorism’s overthrow. And more
critically, we ought to be alert to what new theories of learning are
erected in behaviorism’s place.

THE NEW SCIENCE OF MIND

Whether the cognitive revolution started intentionally or inadvertently,
at a west- or an east-coast conference, a new intellectual
environment was spawned at the mid-twentieth-century mark, after
which similar interdisciplinary symposia flourished. By 1960, the
Center for Cognitive Studies had been founded at Harvard, and
similar centers quickly followed at universities across the United
States. As a field, cognitive studies was conceived as cross-
disciplinary from its inception and included researchers and scholars
from the fields of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, biology,
mathematics, anthropology, pediatrics, history, psychiatry, and
psychoanalysis. This amalgamation, cognitive science, now includes
neuroscience, sociology, education, and artificial intelligence as well
and has recently come to be more broadly defined as “the New
Science of Mind.”[22] In turn, calls to fund a Decade of the Mind
coalesced into an international initiative to build upon the progress
made during the 1990s’ Decade of the Brain.[23]
Like the many fields it encompasses, this new science of mind
can be seen from multiple perspectives as a foil to behaviorism, as a
new horizon in psychology, or as what New York Times opinion
writer David Brooks has grandly anointed “the new humanism” and
“a new enchantment”:

It’s in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of

research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists,
behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology; we’re
developing a revolution in consciousness. And when you
synthesize it all, it’s giving us a new view of human nature. And
far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it’s a new
humanism, it’s a new enchantment.[24]

Brooks, like many nonscientists, often uses the word revolution

when referring to this new science of mind, but at least one expert,
psychologist Justin Barrett, has scolded that “we should get our
‘revolutions’ straight. What Brooks refers to as a ‘cognitive revolution’
is predominantly non-cognitive.”[25]
Barrett’s comment is technically correct. As he explains it, “the
Cognitive Revolution was, first and foremost, about cognition and not
about brain activity”—in other words, it was about brain function
(cognition), not brain cells (neuroscience). Cognitive science owes
its birth to the insight that computer processing can be harnessed as
a metaphor for understanding human problem-solving, though the
field is still mainly concerned with studying human information
processing rather than consciousness per se, both the Holy Grail
and the stickiest wicket in the new science of mind. However, the
trope of revolution is simply too attractive for those outside scientific
disciplines who, like Brooks, have understood the magnitude of this
sea change in psychology and have begun to imagine what it
portends for all of us, both individually and as a society.
Critics from within the academic psychological establishment
argue that the cognitive revolution was no revolution at all because it
failed to adhere to certain hallmarks of revolution.[26] But by the
dynamics that signify a paradigm shift, as defined by the late science
philosopher Thomas Kuhn, the cognitive revolution not only
occurred, but by Kuhnian measures, it effectively cleared the playing
field. Topics previously considered unworthy of study, owing to their
interiority and therefore (most egregiously for rigorous behaviorists)
their inability to be directly observed and measured, were suddenly
allowed entrée. Critically, those subjects comprise the very attributes
that make us most human: emotion, empathy, memory, desire,
imagination, reflection, projection, creativity—and music. A
comprehensive study of the myriad causes that preceded and
sustained these enormous omissions from modern psychology is
outside the scope of this book, but the negative consequences of
their exile are staggering when considered en masse, which is,
admittedly, much easier to do now that they are in our collective
rearview mirror.
Steven Pinker ascribes the omission of emotion at the start of
the cognitive revolution to nothing more than plain geekiness. “These
were nerdy guys interested in the nerdy aspects of cognition,” he
explains. “It’s not that our emotions aren’t interesting topics of study,
but these weren’t the topics that they were interested in.”[27] This glib
dismissal (Oh, those unemotional, rational scientists!) would be easy
to buy but for our current cultural predicament, marooned in the
quagmire of behaviorism, simultaneously dogged by the exaltation of
rational thought as the pinnacle of human wisdom, yet haunted by
the phantoms of banished emotion. And one can only stand
astounded at the utter soullessness of this statement by B. F.
Skinner: “My answer to Montaigne’s question [“How to live?”] has
shocked many people: I would bury my children rather than my
books.”[28] The true shock of this comment is its permanence, for it
was not impulsively uttered in a live interview but penned by Skinner
himself in his autobiography.
Pinker has complained that “much science journalism today is
hostile to scientists,” opining that “there is a presumption of guilt
about scientists, that they are . . . experimenting on innocent victims,
or tricked by drug companies into making drugs we don’t need.”[29]
But we have reason to be wary of a science that disavowed emotion
and to wonder at not only what was lost by its banishment but, more
distressingly, at what damage was wrought by emotion’s exile from
mainstream psychology during most of the past century. It is a bitter
irony that, along with Harvard’s starring role at the start of the
cognitive revolution, another of Harvard’s most notable products
during that same era was one Theodore John Kaczynski.
Between 1959 and 1962, Kaczynski, along with twenty-one
other young undergraduates, volunteered for psychological
experiments conducted at Harvard, whose ultimate purpose was far
from clear. But the method was to create extreme conditions of
intense psychological stress. Kaczynski’s biographer, Alston Chase,
contends that the ferocity of these experiments fractured Kaczynski’s
mind and engendered in him the seething hatred of science that
erupted so terribly decades later within Kaczynski’s alter ego, the
“Unabomber.”[30] Kaczynski’s mail bombs, three of which were fatal,
terrorized the United States over a period of seventeen long years
before his brother David tipped off authorities, leading to Kaczynski’s
1996 arrest in a Montana cabin.
Pinker grumbles that “the old notion of the scientist as hero has
been replaced by the idea of scientists as amoral nerds at best,” yet
this characterization is not completely unfounded.[31] Psychologist
Dr. Henry Murray (1893–1988) led the three-year-long study in which
Kaczynski participated, which featured techniques described by
Murray himself as “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.”[32]
Murray’s motivation stemmed from his wartime experience as a
lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to
the Central Intelligence Agency). Murray was sobered by the
effectiveness of the Nazi propaganda machine (methods he
nevertheless studied) and aroused by irrefutable evidence that entire
nations could be “brainwashed” to enact horrific acts of brutality.
Thus Murray, like many psychologists of his era, was an enthusiastic
participant in a concerted effort to bend biological, chemical,
sociological, and psychological science to nothing less than the
creation of a new “World Man.”[33] So much of this effort was funded
by the U.S. Department of Defense that, according to Ellen Herman,
“between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the U.S. military was, by far, the
country’s major institutional sponsor of psychological research.”[34]
As the new science of mind burgeons and beckons, we must
view the shadier chapters in the history of psychology from the
objective perspective of historical time and take care not to become
(to borrow Brooks’s word) “enchanted.” That is, musicians can
profitably experiment with the application of recent brain research to
the business of music-making without chasing the chimera of
absolute scientific truth. Besides, as Chase observes, “once you
start quoting scientific data to support your position, you’re
immediately really only talking about half the truth.”[35]
To allow oneself to be charmed by scientific half-truths is, at
best, imprudent due to the simple fact that the new science of mind
is still in its infancy. This new science, like any true science, is raising
many more questions than can be answered. Ironically, some of
these questions (How does emotion effect choice? What motivates
desire?) are the same ones that behaviorism sought to address over
one hundred years ago, though, regrettably, by exalting directly
observable phenomena at the expense of the mind’s mysteries.
At worst, fully embracing this “new enchantment” while
discounting the playbook of psychology’s dark arts does not allow us
to defend the thing we love against its theft and debasement as a
weapon for human torture.

MUSIC AS A WEAPON
“It is an important, irrefutable fact that Americans have theorized
and deployed music and sound as weapons of interrogation for
at least fifty years. It is not a phenomenon of the current
administration or the current wars; it is not news. The only news
 is that in the last few years we have become increasingly aware
of it; that, and perhaps the unnerving fact that our awareness of
this practice has provoked no public outcry.”—Suzanne
Cusick[36]

The harsh interrogation techniques (like hypothermia and

waterboarding) used by the CIA and approved by the Bush
administration in the “global war on terror” included carefully crafted
psychological methods. Investigative journalist Jane Mayer
documented how techniques featured in the U.S. Department of
Defense’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program—
techniques originally designed by trained psychologists to teach U.S.
military personnel how to withstand torture—were actually reverse-
engineered to torture suspected terrorists.[37] These techniques
included the use of music as a weapon.
Suzanne Cusick, professor of music at New York University, was
one of the first to investigate the “acoustic bombardment” protocols
that were part of the torture playbook used by the U.S. military’s
Psychological Operations division. Chillingly nicknamed “The Music
Program,” it went well beyond simply hurling annoyingly loud rock
music at prisoners.[38] Specific psychological methods were crafted
to exploit what the late neurologist Oliver Sacks noted as music’s
peculiar ability to “cross a line and become, so to speak,
pathological,” referring to what are colloquially called “earworms.”
Sacks called them “brainworms,” noting that one insidious symptom
of what he called “sticky music” is that such music is almost always
not to one’s liking and is even odious, suggesting a “coercive
process, that the music has entered and subverted a part of the
brain, forcing it to fire repetitively and autonomously (as may happen
with a tic or seizure).”[39]
Use of heavy metal, rap, and sexually suggestive music and,
most grotesquely, songs such as “I Love You” from the children’s
television show Barney, the Purple Dinosaur were routinely
employed to block a prisoner’s ability to maintain his own thoughts (a
necessity to keep from going mad), thus “softening him up” for
interrogation.[40]
 But music can be weaponized in a more brutally tactile way.
After all, sound, at its most basic level, is the movement of air
molecules within a medium. That medium can be air, wood, string,
reed—or the human body. The acoustical properties of music can be
inflicted upon detainees’ bodies without leaving physical evidence,
thus sparing the inflictors from criminal prosecution under the
Geneva Convention. The high value of these and other
psychological techniques is exposed by their rubric in CIA training
manuals, filed under “No-Touch Torture.” But one thing that the new
science of mind has shown is that, while physical wounds heal,
psychological ones can last a lifetime.[41]
What a macabre twist it is that empathy, imagination, creativity,
music—the very attributes that were exiled from scientific
consideration for much of the past century—have been hijacked and
alchemized into weapons of psychological torture. The rendering of
the very thing to which musicians’ lives are devoted until it is, as
Cusick says, “damaged beyond recognition as the thing it was”
sparked outrage among many, especially those whose music was
commandeered for harm. In 2009, a coalition of musicians (including
members of R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against
the Machine) filed a freedom of information petition requesting the
declassification of secret U.S. documents on “The Music Program”
and its use as an interrogation device at Guantánamo Bay Prison.[42]
In a statement, guitarist Tom Morello said,

Guantánamo is known around the world as one of the places

where human beings have been tortured—from waterboarding
to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating
sexual acts—playing music for 72 hours in a row at volumes just
below that to shatter the eardrums. Guantánamo may be Dick
Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine. The fact that music I
helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me.
[43]

It is possible to cautiously embrace the new science of mind

while at the same time stand firmly opposed to such debasement of
our humanity. To do so necessitates grasping the vital role of the
artist in relation to science’s “half-truth.” When science tackles a
question, the tools are direct observation, and the result is empirical
evidence. But elucidation is required in order to understand the
meaning of such evidence, and at that juncture, even words may fail.
The other half of science’s “half-truth” lies with art.

SCIENCE AND ART

The fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s famous and controversial
1959 Cambridge lecture and subsequent book The Two Cultures
and the Scientific Revolution set off a wave of retrospective
conferences, public symposia, and op-ed pieces on both sides of the
Atlantic, all to reflect on what science historian D. Graham Burnett
calls “the most frequently cited articulation of the relationship
between science and society.”[44]
In his book, Snow opines that, while among educated people
ignorance of great literature was considered an abomination,
ignorance of science was considered acceptable, even defensible. In
turn, according to Snow, ignorance of science bred outright disdain
for science, which halted its progress and its benefits for the greater
good. Almost immediately, this schism was abbreviated in the media
to simply “the two cultures controversy,” and by the mid-1980s, both
the thesis and Lord Snow had achieved the ultimate
acknowledgment of cultural significance: the adjectival
transformation of Snow’s name—a “Snowvian disjuncture”—to
describe the split.[45]
Despite the symmetry implied by the derivative version of
Snow’s two cultures, it was clear from Snow’s original opening volley
that, in his view, the fault for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension”
was anything but mutual:[46]

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people

who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought
highly educated and who have, with considerable gusto, been
expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or
twice I have been provoked and have asked the company, how
many of them could describe the Second Law of
 Thermodynamics? The response was cold: it was also negative.
Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of:
Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such
as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the
scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than
one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was
speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern
physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the
Western world have about as much insight into it as their
neolithic ancestors would have had.[47]

Both the affinity with which other Western cultures received

Snow’s Two Cultures and its extraordinary staying power are
remarkable given that the original work was steeped in the British
postwar culture in which it was born. Snow’s “literary intellectuals”
were largely men (notably not women) of high socioeconomic status
who had received a classical education at either Oxford or
Cambridge during an era in which literature was extolled but science
was considered, at best, an expensive hobby for gentlemen
scientists. But Snow’s facile progression from identifying this social
caste as a “traditional culture” to elevating them to “the dominant
class” that, he pretentiously claimed, “manages the Western world,”
engendered harsh criticism yet may reveal more about Snow himself
than any rift between science and art.[48] Snow had been born into
humble circumstances and, through a science scholarship to
Cambridge, had ascended to the upper classes through education
alone. After a middling career in research science, he turned to
writing novels. From this dual vantage point, he qualified himself to
speak so knowingly of science and art.
Snow’s Two Cultures included kudos to the Soviet Union for its
science education and dark warnings about the risks of failing to
include the world’s poor in the riches of industrial progress. Thus in
its original form, it surpassed its current reputation as simply a public
outing of the dichotomy between science and art; as Burnett quips,
there was much more to Snow’s original lecture than “just an
observation about how scientists and artists had difficulty
chatting.”[49] Yet it was precisely this disjunction that most resonated,
literally around the world, and makes it still, as Burnett notes, a
“touchstone for several generations of commentary.”[50]
In 1964, Snow produced a second edition of Two Cultures in
response to criticism that he had excluded the social sciences.[51] He
optimistically prophesied that a third culture would rise in which
humanists and scientists would communicate so effectively as to
bridge the gap between them for the betterment of society.
Throughout the ensuing decades, Snow’s two- and three-cultures
metaphors have been regularly trotted out to legitimize the perceived
dichotomy between science and the humanities or, when it suits a
particular agenda, science and “the arts.”
But it was self-appointed intellectual impresario John Brockman
who actually took up Snow’s call and in the 1980s staked his claim to
the third culture, writing a book of the same name. Brockman
became the literary agent for a new tribe of science writers who
sprang up in the last two decades of the twentieth century and who
communicated their work in refreshingly comprehensible language.
Many of his clients’ books became surprising bestsellers, proof, he
said, that there exists an educated readership who are willing to
devote the time and brainpower to reading about scientific and
technological ideas that “will affect the lives of everybody on the
planet.”[52]
When Brockman set out to consciously create this third culture,
he, like Snow, felt that humanists not only displayed scientific
ignorance but, perversely, seemed to revel in it. So Brockman
decidedly ditched what he labeled the “quarrelsome mandarin class”
of literary intellectuals in favor of people who belong to “the empirical
world,” defined as those science and technology intellectuals
(nicknamed the “Digerati”) whom Brockman deemed were “at the
center of today’s intellectual, technological, and scientific
landscape.”[53] Situated at the center of that landscape is his
website, Edge.org, an online salon launched in 1996 and built on
invitation-only submissions monitored by Brockman himself. Despite
the claim that artists are included in the roster of invited Edge.org
salon opinionaters, the scientists and the Digerati far outweigh
Edge.org musings by artists. This may have less to do with any overt
snubbing of artists and writers and more to do with the dearth of
artists who have crossed the Snowvian juncture to join the Digerarti
in Brockman’s scientific landscape.
In this respect, Brockman’s cultural creation resembles E. O.
Wilson’s “Consilience,” the only other serious contender in the
attempt to establish a third culture. Even though Wilson’s 1998 book
of the same name began with the need for the sciences and the
humanities to “jump together,” Wilson was criticized for suggesting
not a mutual joining at all but a wholesale takeover of art by science.
[54] So it is that only a handful of artists, thus far, have found their

spiritual home in the third culture, and for those who have, it is digital
technology that has provided the conduit for most of them, not the
traditional sciences. Why is this so?
Perhaps artists are simply too consumed with the work of
creation, too busy “out there doing it, rather than talking about and
analyzing the people who are doing it” (this is somewhat ironic,
considering that this quote comes from Brockman himself, describing
his third-culture community).[55] Perhaps many artists lack enough
scientific education to render science inspirational to their art—or
maybe they simply do not find science artistically inspiring at all.
Among the many plausible reasons that artists spurn science,
the most fundamental one may be the suspicion that scientific
knowledge is more highly valued than artistic knowledge. The
Western cultural milieu in which we live and work has, for much of
the past century, supported a culture that values certain types of
intelligence more highly than others. This premise formed the
foundation of Howard Gardner’s revolutionary theory of multiple
intelligences and partially explains its enormous appeal to artists and
creative thinkers as well as to their teachers and parents.

THE THEORY OF MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple
intelligences, put forth in his 1983 book Frames of Mind, was greeted
simultaneously with accolades from the public and hostility from the
psychological establishment. The legacy of behaviorism, specifically
its exaltation of measurable phenomena, partially explains both
receptions. Multiple intelligences (MI) theory, in Gardner’s words,

can be summed up in a brisk sentence or two: Most people think

that there is but a single intelligence; MI Theory holds that we
each have eight or more intelligences, and we can use them to
carry out all kinds of tasks.[56]

Despite—or perhaps precisely because of—MI theory’s massive

popular appeal, it was attacked in academic psychology circles.[57]
The critics rounded on three cornerstones of Gardner’s theory: his
insistence on the word intelligence (as opposed to ability or talent)
and his twin challenges to the notion of intelligence itself: that only
math and language are reliable parameters of it and that intelligence
testing can yield the single g, or intellectual quotient number of
tested individuals.
As to the choice of the term intelligence, Gardner’s initial
defense was one of misapprehension: he hadn’t fully appreciated the
firestorm that this “seemingly minor lexical substitution” would ignite.
He later admitted that, if he had used the term talent instead, his
book would probably have received far less attention than it did.[58]
Whether the choice was deliberate or random, Gardner’s continuing
steadfast defense of the term intelligence and his insistence that its
conflation with the related terms talent and ability be free of rank
have endeared him to legions of educators and parents:

I am often asked whether an intelligence is the same thing as a

talent or an ability. . . . I have no objection if one speaks about
eight or nine talents or abilities, but I do object when an analyst
calls some abilities (like language) “intelligences,” and others
(like music) “mere” talents. All should be called intelligences or
talents; an unwarranted hierarchy among capacities must be
avoided.[59]

Gardner often singles out music as an example of an

intelligence that is all too often dismissed as “mere talent.” This
choice highlights the seminal bond between music and MI theory
that is grounded in Gardner’s own personal musical history; he was
a serious enough pianist that he briefly considered pursuing it
professionally. Instead, he landed at Harvard as a freshman in the
fall of 1961 and was quickly drawn to the cognitive revolution, which
was in full swing:

I am often asked how I first got the idea of the theory of multiple
intelligences. . . . As a young person, I was a serious pianist and
enthusiastically involved with other arts as well. When I began to
study developmental and cognitive psychology, I was struck by
the virtual absence of any mention of the arts. An early
professional goal, then, was to find a place for the arts within
academic psychology. I am still trying![60]

Gardner’s rise to cultural prominence through MI theory was

abetted by massive public support from individuals who displayed
the very attributes that the psychological establishment of the time
deemed outside the confines of g. Musicians, writers, performing and
visual artists, inventors, and other creative thinkers found not a little
of their own histories in statements such as this:

In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was

generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was
inherited; and that human beings—initially a blank slate—could
be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an
appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of
researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a
multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that
each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the
mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is
unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early
“naïve” theories or that challenge the natural lines of force within
an intelligence and its matching domains.[61]

Even though MI theory corroborated what most educators had

already observed through experience (i.e., that children learn
differently from one another and that some children who do poorly in
math or language may demonstrate brilliant abilities in other
domains), the fact that a Harvard psychologist gave credence to
these observations engendered a grassroots movement among
teachers, parents, and learners that continues to this day despite the
sheer difficulty of implementing MI principles in the classroom. The
feasibility of teaching seven different intelligences in one classroom
ranges from daunting to impossible for a public school classroom
teacher in America, where the average class size is twenty-five
students.[62]
But in a different setting, well known to musicians,
implementation of MI principles can be regularly achieved. The
standard music studio setup is based on one-on-one interaction so
that music studio teachers provide pro forma what school districts
call “individualized education plans,” though it is hardly being labeled
as such.
Nevertheless, at this moment in our national history, American
music teachers inherit the products of the current standardized
testing culture in their student clientele. Indeed, as children, they
themselves were most likely tested by similar measures. Music
teachers may find MI theory efficacious in predicting the training
needs of those students who, for myriad reasons, score low on
standardized tests, as well as those for whom such tests are easy. In
both cases, because standard IQ tests measure knowledge gained
at a particular moment in time, they can only provide a freeze-frame
view of crystallized knowledge. They cannot assess or predict a
person’s ability to learn, to assimilate new information, or to solve
new problems. Real learning takes place when students confront
what cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork calls “desirable
difficulties.”[63] Conquering desirable difficulties demands a fluid
response to instruction, not simply retrieval of prelearned
information. On this basis alone, standardized and IQ tests are
particularly useless when it comes to motor learning, the foundation
upon which the acquisition of motor (or muscle) skill is built. Known
by musicians as technique, this is the essential tool for singing or
playing a musical instrument with expertise.
Although the cognitive revolution and the ensuing rejection of
behaviorism was already two decades on by the time Gardner
produced Frames of Mind, that schism had been cleaved within
academe, so it was largely unfelt by average citizens. Conversely,
Gardner’s theory awoke potent qualms, particularly among members
of the baby-boom generation, about how their own intelligences had
been dichotomized, nurtured, or starved. Nagging doubts fed these
parents’ unease at watching their own children march through the
seemingly unchanged behaviorist systems and psychometric testing
procedures that had characterized their own schooling.
In the decades since the first publication of Frames of Mind,
while the effects of the cognitive revolution continue to be felt,
Gardner himself has since moved on to a number of other initiatives.
He notes, with the calm distance of an elder statesman, that MI
theory has so completely entered the culture that it has taken on a
life of its own, perhaps outstripping its creator in name recognition.
Even though Frames of Mind opened with this somewhat humble
apologia,

the idea of multiple intelligences is an old one, and I can

scarcely claim any great originality for attempting to revive it
once more. Even so, by featuring the word idea I want to
underscore that the notion of multiple intelligences is hardly a
proven scientific fact; it is, at most, an idea that has recently
regained the right to be discussed seriously,[64]

the importance of Gardner’s MI theory as a paradigm shift in the

history of education in general, and in arts education in particular,
cannot be overemphasized.
At about the same time that multiple intelligences were
recognized as an idea whose time had come, another human trait,
long shunned for most of the past century, was likewise restored to
the panoply of human attributes worthy of scientific consideration.
Brought in from the cold was banished emotion.

THE RESCUE OF EMOTION

“People did not think that after a century of rationalism, we
needed to go from reason to emotion. And, of course, we do.”—
 Antonio Damasio[65]

For much of the previous century, orthodox science had held

that emotion was not only useless as a subject of research but
downright seditious: emotion bewitched and muddled rational
thought. Acclaimed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio led the charge
to rescue emotion from exile and breached the wall of rationality with
his landmark Somatic Marker Hypothesis, which proposed emotion
as a central component in human decision-making. Far from a hero’s
welcome, however, Damasio recalled the mixture of consternation
and utter disdain that greeted his theory in 1995: “I remember
actually presenting my first paper on somatic marker hypothesis at
the Society of Neuroscience. . . . There was one person in the first
row that just shook his head and said, ‘How can this poor guy be so
wrong? You know, Why is he doing this?’”[66] and Damasio’s
colleagues worried that he had “gone off the deep end.”[67] But the
naysayers are now the poor guys who are so wrong, for emotion is
now, as Damasio notes, “a huge field in neuroscience and everybody
talks about it.”[68]
Gardener’s MI theory, most especially his personal intelligences
component, was one harbinger of this change. Gardner made the
case for the critical importance of intra- and interpersonal
intelligences, not only toward the pursuit of life, liberty, and
happiness, but because poor self-knowledge and lack of empathy
can have such devastating consequences for the self and others.
And while it may seem a kind of vindication for banished emotion
that it has finally been deemed worthy of scientific scrutiny, we must
acknowledge that science cannot wholly address our most
meaningful questions. Science raises questions but cannot
completely answer them—this is the “half-truth” of science. Where
science falters, art begins.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE TRUTH

“The most exquisite stuff is what we can’t explain. That’s why we
call it art.”—Jonah Lehrer[69]
 The third culture, as masterminded by Brockman, is not really
the bridge of mutual comprehension between science and the
humanities as envisioned by C. P. Snow but a one-way conduit of
scientific information delivered by scientists themselves straight to an
educated public. Wunderkind science writer Jonah Lehrer launched
his meteoric career from this third culture platform, but noting the
dearth of art, he posited the need for yet a fourth culture where
science would concede that not everything can be known and would
welcome a place at the table for the arts.[70] In his first book, Lehrer
the provocateur even posited that certain artists (Proust, Cézanne,
and others) actually “anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience”
and, in doing so, “discovered truths about the human mind—real,
tangible truths—that science is only now re-discovering. Their
imaginations foretold the facts of the future.”[71]
Before Lehrer was deposed for plagiarizing, he shared his third-
culture perch with author Malcolm Gladwell.[72] Gladwell has made a
lucrative career accessing science research and alchemizing it into
such readable bestsellers as The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005),
and Outliers (2008).[73] Similarly, author and inspirational speaker
Daniel Pink enthusiastically declared “a seismic, though as yet
undetected shift” away from “the age of left-brain dominance” and
toward “creative and empathetic ‘right-brain’ thinkers,” as explored in
his bestselling book A Whole New Mind (originally subtitled Moving
from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age and subsequently
changed in paperback to Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future). If
Pink is correct that we are poised at the dawn of a new “conceptual
age,” then people who can commandeer such distinctly human
attributes as empathy and cooperation in service of problem-solving
will soon eclipse those who are wedded to the kind of rational
thinking that blocks creativity.[74] This optimistic viewpoint makes A
Whole New Mind, in the words of one reviewer, “an encouraging
graduation gift for liberal-arts graduates”—and, presumably, others
who face similarly gloomy economic prospects, like musicians and
visual artists.[75]
As optimistic as the projection for a rising creative age may be,
as long as cultural and civic leaders remain (in Kohn’s words)
“marinated in behaviorism,” it will take more time before we are no
longer in thrall to science’s “half truth,” no longer chase rational
thought as more highly evolved (and therefore more worthy) than
emotion, and no longer spurn human capacities that are not
expressed in mathematical equations or encapsulated in language.
Performing artists who labor under these lagging cultural norms face
double jeopardy, for they must also bear the legacy of dualistic
thinking: the mind-body split.

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

If consciousness beckons researchers as the Holy Grail of brain
science, the mind-body problem is its Rosetta stone. The ancient
mind-body problem, the belief that the mind (or soul, depending
upon one’s perspective) is a entity separate from the body, was
codified in modern Western thought most famously via seventeenth-
century philosopher René Descartes’s dictum “Ego cogito, ergo
sum.” This mind-body dualism was a bedrock of Western culture for
centuries until it began to dissolve with the advent of neuroscience.
Each new revelation about the biological bases for mental
phenomena has added to the inexorable transformation of
Descartes’s dualistic “I think, therefore I am” paradigm to the new
mantra of brain science: “The mind is what the brain does.”[76]
As apparent as this new paradigm is to those on the forefront of
brain science, performing artists and athletes who inhabit the realm
of the body still await the full flowering of Pink’s conceptual age,
heirs as they are to the mind-body problem and its related
prejudices, as Gardner notes:

This divorce between the “mental” and the “physical” has not
infrequently been coupled with a notion that what we do with our
bodies is somehow less privileged, less special, than those
problem-solving routines carried out chiefly through the use of
language, logic, or some relatively abstract symbolic system.[77]

This “divorce” is a hallmark of Western culture, its corollary, the

notion that the mind is a wise overlord, steeled by eternal principles
to overrule the transitory passions to which the body is enslaved.
Likewise, the devaluation of the body’s output as “mere skill” versus
the “noble” work of the mind has ancient roots in Western culture.
The sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius, in his treatise on
music, likened the work of the performing musician to that of a mere
artisan and thus a slave of the body. By contrast, the theoretician
who considered music solely with his mind, without the taint of
actually touching an instrument, was the true musician:

Every art and discipline ought naturally to be considered of a

more honorable character than a skill which is exercised with
the hand and labor of a craftsman. For it is much better and
nobler to know about what someone else is doing than to be
doing that for which someone else is the authority. For the mere
physical skill serves as a slave, while the reason governs all as
sovereign. And unless the hand acts according to the will of
reason, the thing is done in vain. Thus how much nobler is the
study of music as a rational science than as a laborious skill of
manufacturing sounds! It is nobler to the degree that the mind is
nobler than the body.[78]

This attitude has seeped by cultural osmosis into the modern

Western world. It explains, for example, the initial reluctance of some
American Ivy-League colleges to introduce applied arts into their
curricula, a move fought by some in academia long before the
advent of such educational schemes as experiential learning and still
periodically renewed to prevent encroachment on STEM and other
supposedly practical subjects.[79] A defense of art for art’s sake is
perceived as weak when set against the potent argument of
practicality, making art perennially vulnerable to the strange
bedfellow of science as its paramour.

NEUROAESTHETICS
Perhaps we are no longer on the verge of a fourth culture, a unifying
of science and art, but squarely in it, as evidenced by the rapidly
rising new field of neuroaesthetics, defined as “the scientific study of
the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of
art.”[80]
The emergence of this field is no surprise, for, as Brooks notes,
“there’s ‘neural’ this and that, basically ‘neural’ everything.”[81] As a
more concrete and scientific rejoinder to Lehrer’s assertion that “art
got there first,” this new discipline seeks to uncover why we create
and enjoy art.[82] The field’s inception in the visual realm has a
simple explanation: much of our brain real estate is devoted to sight.
But the emergence of a neuroaesthetic lens applied to all the arts,
from poetry to dance to music, is underway. For example, the
Society for Music Perception and Cognition, as its name suggests, is
chiefly concerned with music perception (how we experience music)
and what we do with those impressions—that is, how we cognitively
process them.[83]
For those who view attempts to peer into the mind as it
experiences our most sublime creations as either a heinous violation
of the soul or an obtuse attempt to quantify the ineffable, Semir Zeki,
a founder of neuroaesthetics, has this cautionary piece of advice:
“It’s a bit like the guys who said to Galileo, ‘We’d rather not look
through your telescope.’”[84]
If this admonition sounds familiar, it is simply a recapitulation of
C. P. Snow’s rebuke, Brockman’s third culture initiative, and Wilson’s
one-sided consilience. And while all these initiatives were presented
as invitations to a marriage between equals, in the final analysis,
they were not propositions for fruitful cohabitation but rationales for
the legitimization of art by science. In the witty words of D. Graham
Burnett, artists should beware scientists who come a-courtin’ and
bearing bridges “for the message comes through clearly: Let us build
a bridge . . . and take over your island.”[85]
And lest we artists believe that, in such a scenario, all potential
humanist conquests would fend off such advances virtuously, literary
scholar Curtis D. Carbonell astutely observes (channeling Freud),
“There are those in the humanities who suffer from science envy.”[86]
It should be acknowledged that Carbonell, like Zeki and Burnett,
belongs to Brockman’s “mandarin class,” engaging in what
academics do best: sparring with each other. Still the main
achievement of the third culture has been to hurdle over the
traditional gatekeepers of knowledge, an accomplishment almost
unimaginable before the advent of the Internet. Third culture delivers
knowledge straight to the people—albeit a public that, Zeki warns, “is
getting more and more savvy about the brain.”[87] Read: If artists
want to remain relevant, just embrace science, already!
To be sure, there are scientists who are looking to art for the
same reason. In a highly publicized experiment on jazz musicians,
researchers at Johns Hopkins University sought to “investigate the
neural substrates that underlie spontaneous musical performance”
(although no one impugned their curiosity as music envy, except for
a passing confession by the head researcher to the idolization of
jazz saxophonist John Coltrane).[88] The researchers used fMRI
imaging to discover that, during improvisation, brain regions typically
associated with self-monitoring and self-evaluation calmed down,
while brain areas associated with self-expression lit up. One
wonders, Is this news? The researchers reported—apparently
straight-faced—that

in short, musical creativity vis-à-vis improvisation may be a

result of the combination of intentional, internally generated self-
expression . . . with the suspension of self-monitoring and
related processes . . . that typically regulate conscious control of
goal-directed, predictable, or planned actions.[89]

The researchers concluded that “creative intuition” springs forth

when brain regions typically associated with self-monitoring quiet
down, “allowing unfiltered, unconscious, or random thoughts and
sensations to emerge.”[90] This conclusion will surprise no one who
regularly practices creativity, for such people understand that
creativity is accessed through a fund of emotion and experience,
unsifted by worries and what-ifs. As critic Russell Blackford
summarily avers,

cognitive neuroscience [is] not about to put the humanities, in

particular, out of business. At this stage, there is a banality in
 attempts to produce illuminating comment about the arts based
on evolutionary considerations.[91]

Indeed, to many practicing musicians, scientific discoveries that

periodically issue forth from cognitive neuroscience may be nothing
more than mildly amusing, while to others, it may be thrilling to view
the technicolor fMRI images that seem to verify phenomena already
experienced. Either way, such discoveries should give artists pause
because art does not need science to validate or substantiate it. It
would behoove us all to restate this essential stance at the gathering
edges of a fourth culture, a culture in which, take note, the new
science of mind has already staked out a sizeable claim.

CAUTIOUS ENCHANTMENT
Science itself occupies a privileged position within our society as a
venerated fount of knowledge, and American psychology—whose
modern form owes its entire existence to “science envy”—is nothing
less than Herman’s “veritable worldview.”[92] If the recent past offers
any admonition, it is that art must take its place as a stakeholder in
the fourth culture for while science pursues knowledge for its own
sake, it is the humanities that illuminate that knowledge with
meaning. That the new science of mind might provide an arena for
an outright unification of the arts and sciences is debatable. As
Blackford notes,

there are good reasons why the natural sciences cannot provide
a substitute for humanistic explanation, even if we obtain a far
deeper understanding of our own genetic and
neurophysiological make-up. This is partly because reductive
science is ill-equipped to deal with the particularity of complex
events, partly because causal explanation may not be all that
we want, anyway, when we try to interpret and clarify human
experience.[93]

Scientists, as Gardner notes, are guided by “beliefs about how

the universe must work, and basic convictions about how these
principles are best revealed.”[94] By contrast, artists thrive in the gray
area that envelopes the black-and-white answers that scientists
pursue. Artists, like scientists, are stimulated by mystery; both artists
and scientists question and seek passionately to know. Yet, unlike
scientists, the artist’s role in society is to broach and explore
profound questions, not to definitively answer them. As the great
choreographer Agnes de Mille once said,

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next, or

how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The
artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but
we take leap after leap in the dark.[95]

To inhabit the realm of inquiry, whether scientist or artist, is to

situate oneself in the midst of de Mille’s dark yet dynamic place.
Certainly this is the embarkation point for both scientist and artist.
But the scientist’s journey is dictated by the exacting choreography
of the scientific five-step method, from initial impulse (hypothesis) to
the finale (conclusion).
The artist’s role by contrast is one of neither repose nor
conclusion; the artist’s role is fulfilled, at least in part, by simply
operating within the realm of inquiry. In the words of esteemed
neuroscientist Eric Kandel,

It is important to be bold. One should tackle difficult problems,

especially those that initially appear messy and unstructured.
One should not fear trying new things, such as moving from one
field to another or working at the boundaries of disciplines—
where the most interesting problems often emerge.[96]

One need not be an expert to experiment between the

boundaries of art and science. From any angle, it will take creative
minds to engage the discoveries made there.

NOTES
1. Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the
Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 14.
2. Steven Pinker, “The Cognitive Revolution,” Harvard Gazette,
October 12, 2011,
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/multimedia/the-cognitive-
revolution/. “The Cognitive Revolution, which took place at Harvard,
was the start of the modern scientific study of the mind. . . . [T]he
school of behaviorism came to take over American psychology until
the early 1950s when a number of scholars with ties to Harvard
started to rethink that whole idea.”
3. Jonah Lehrer, “Hearts & Minds,” Boston Globe, April 29, 2007,
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/04/29/hearts__min
ds.
4. George Mandler, “Origins of the Cognitive (R)Evolution,” Journal
of History of the Behavioral Sciences 38, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 339–53;
see also Robert Proctor and Kim-Phuong L. Vu, “The Cognitive
Revolution at Age 50: Has the Promise of the Human Information-
Processing Approach Been Fulfilled?” International Journal of
Human Computer Interaction 21, no. 3 (2006): 253–84.
5. George Miller, “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical
Perspective,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (March 2003):
142.
6. Thomas H. Leahey, “The Mythical Revolutions of American
Psychology,” American Psychologist 47, no. 2 (February 1992): 316.
7. Roddy Roediger, “What Happened to Behaviorism?” Observer,
March 2004, www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?
id=1540.
8. Michel Legrand, “Du behaviorisme au cognitivisme,” L’annee
psychologique 90, no. 2 (1990): 248.
9. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 9.
10. Ibid., 1.
11. Daniel Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 3rd ed.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 338.
12. Ibid., 342.
13. Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1935), 18.
14. Ibid., 8.
15. Robinson, Intellectual History of Psychology, 37.
16. See Penn Arts & Sciences, “Learned Helplessness Research,”
Positive Psychology Center,
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/research/learned-helplessness.
17. Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who
We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), 23.
18. Alfie Kohn, “Newt Gingrich’s Reading Plan,” Education Week,
April 19, 1995, www.alfiekohn.org/article/newt-gingrichs-reading-
plan/.
19. Po Bronson, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of
Praise,” New York Magazine, February 11, 2007,
http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/.
20. Jamie Cohen-Cole, “Instituting the Science of Mind: Intellectual
Economies and Disciplinary Exchange at Harvard’s Center for
Cognitive Studies,” British Journal for the History of Science 40, no.
4 (December 2007): 586.
21. Alfie Kohn, “Supernanny State,” The Nation, May 23, 2005,
www.thenation.com/article/supernanny-state.
22. See Gardner, Mind’s New Science; and LeDoux, Synaptic Self,
23.
23. James S. Albus et al., “A Proposal for a Decade of the Mind
Initiative,” Science 317, no. 7 (September 2007): 1321.
24. David Brooks, “The Social Animal,” TED Talk, March 2011,
http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/14/the-social-animal-david-brooks-on-
ted-com/.
25. Justin Barrett, “A Cognitive Revolution? Which Cognitive
Revolution?” The Immanent Frame, July 18, 2008,
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/07/18/which-cognitive-revolution/.
26. Leahey, “Mythical Revolutions.”
27. Quoted in Lehrer, “Hearts & Minds.”
28. B. F. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences: Part Three of an
Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1983), 411.
29. Quoted in Robin Dougherty, “Between the Lines with Steven
Pinker: Part of a Golden Age of Science Writing,” Boston Globe,
December 26, 2004.
30. Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an
American Terrorist, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
31. Quoted in Dougherty, “Between the Lines.”
32. Quoted in Alston Chase, “Harvard and the Making of the
Unabomber,” Atlantic Monthly, June 2000.
33. Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber, 257.
34. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 126.
35. Sage Stossel, “The Disease of the Modern Era,” interview with
Alston Chase, Atlantic Unbound, May 20, 2003.
36. Suzanne Cusick, “‘You Are in a Place That Is Out of the World . .
.’ Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror,’”
Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 1 (2008): 3–4.
37. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on
Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday,
2008).
38. See Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon,”
TRANS-Transcultural Music Review 10, article 11 (2006),
www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/ cusick_eng.htm.
39. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 41.
40. BBC, “Sesame Street Breaks Iraqi POWs,” May 20, 2003,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3042907.stm.
41. Grant Hilary Brenner, MD, “The Expected Psychiatric Impact of
Detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Related Considerations,”
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 11, no. 4 (2010): 469–87; see also
Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Demakis, “Neglect of Medical
Evidence of Torture in Guantánamo Bay: A Case Series,” PLoS
Medicine 8, no. 4 (2011),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001027.
42. “U.S. Bands Blast Use of Music in Guantánamo Interrogations,”
https://web.archive.org/web/20091025152431/http://news.yahoo.com
/s/afp/usattacksguantanamomusicprisoners.
43. See National Security Archive, “Musicians Seek Secret U.S.
Documents on Music-Related Human Rights Abuses at
Guantánamo,” October 22, 2009,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//news/20091022/index.htm; Sam Stein,
“Music Stars Demand Records on Bush Administration’s Use of
Music for Torture,” Huffington Post, October 21, 2009,
www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/music-stars-demand-
record_n_329476.html; and Joe Heim, “Torture Songs Spur a Protest
Most Vocal: Musicians Call for Records on Guantánamo Detainee
Treatment,” Washington Post, October 22, 2009,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/10/21/AR2009102103743.html.
44. D. Graham Burnett, “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures
Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science,” Daedalus 128, no. 2
(Spring 1999):196.
45. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times
Book Review, October 28, 1984,
www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html.
46. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 4.
47. Ibid., 15–16.
48. Ibid., 12.
49. Burnett, “View from the Bridge,” 199.
50. Ibid., 196.
51. Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look, An Expanded
Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
52. John Brockman, “The Third Culture,” Edge.org, September 9,
1991, www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-the-third-culture.
53. John Brockman, “About Edge.org,” Edge.org,
http://edge.org/about-us.
54. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
55. Brockman, “About Edge.org.”
56. Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory
and Practice (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 26.
57. Jeffrey A. Schaler, ed., Howard Gardner under Fire: The Rebel
Psychologist Faces His Critics (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2006).
58. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences, 20th-anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2004),
xiv–xv.
59. Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed (New York: Basic Books,
1999), 83.
60. Gardner, Frames of Mind, xiii.
61. Ibid., xxxiii.
62. Sarah D. Sparks, “Class-Size Limits Targeted for Cuts,”
Education Week 30, no. 13 (December 2010): 1–16.
63. Robert A. Bjork, “Memory and Metamemory Considerations in
the Training of Human Beings,” in Metacognition: Knowing about
Knowing, ed. Janet Metcalfe and Arthur Shimamura, 185–205
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
64. Gardner, Frames of Mind, 11.
65. Antonio Damasio, “This Time with Feeling,” YouTube, July 4,
2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IifXMd26gWE.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Jonah Lehrer, “Our Inner Artist,” Washington Post Book World,
January 11, 2009, T8.
70. Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2008), 196–97.
71. Ibid., vii.
72. Josh Levin, “Why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself?” Slate,
June 19, 2012,
www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/06/jonah_lehrer_self_
plagiarism_the_new_yorker_staffer_stopped_being_a_writer_and_b
ecame_an
_idea_man_.html. Note that Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, publisher of all three of Lehrer’s books, pulled the third
(Imagine) from publication and offered refunds on the second (How
We Decide) yet conducted a postpublication review of Lehrer’s first
book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and, not uncovering any
problems, decided to keep it in print. See Michael Moynihan,
“Publisher Pulls Jonah Lehrer’s ‘How We Decide’ from Stores,” Daily
Beast, updated July 12, 2017, www.thedailybeast.com/publisher-
pulls-jonah-lehrers-how-we-decide-from-stores.
73. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can
Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, 2000); Malcolm
Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (New York:
Little, Brown, 2005); and Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of
Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
74. Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information
Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Penguin, 2005).
75. Daniel McGinn and Jennifer Barrett Ozols, “Quick Read,”
Newsweek, April 17, 2005,
www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2005/04/17/quick-read.html.
76. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999), 24.
77. Gardner, Frames of Mind, 208.
78. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, “What a Musician Is,” De
institutione musica, in Music Theory Translation Series:
Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V.
Palisca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 50–51.
79. Jacques Barzun, professor emeritus and former dean of the
faculties and provost of Columbia University, in “Trim the College?—
A Utopia!” (Chronicle Review, June 22, 2001), wrote,

But what of the student whose interest lies in an area like film
and theater, art and music, photography and television, and who
wants to “qualify” for a job the day after graduation? Let there be
a School of Applied Arts on campus or at the nearest university,
similar to business and journalism schools. The applied arts are
not college work; the very scheduling of long hours of practice
makes for conflicts with other studies.

80. Suzanne Nalbantian, “Neuroaesthetics: Neuroscientific Theory

and Illustration from the Arts,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33,
no. 4 (December 2008): 357–68.
81. David Brooks, “The Best Books on Neuroscience:
Recommended by David Brooks,” Five Books, October 8, 2009,
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/david-brooks-neuroscience/.
82. Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, press release,
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/lehrer/.
83. Society for Music Perception and Cognition, 2019,
www.musicperception.org/.
84. Quoted in Alexander C. Kafka, “Eric Kandel’s Visions,” Chronicle
Review, March 11, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/Eric-Kandels-
Visions/131095/.
85. Burnett, “View from the Bridge,” 214.
86. Curtis D. Carbonell, “The Third Culture,” Institute for Ethics and
Emerging Technologies, November 22, 2010,
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4334.
87. Quoted in Kafka, “Eric Kandel’s Visions.”
88. Charles Limb and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of
Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz
Improvisation,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 2 (February 2008): 1–9,
www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00016
79.
89. Ibid., 5.
90. Ibid., 4.
91. Russell Blackford, “Will Science Put the Humanities Out of
Business?” Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies,
November 12, 2010, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4315.
92. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 4.
93. Blackford, “Will Science?”
94. Gardner, Frames of Mind, 150.
95. Jane Howard, “A Book and Show for Agnes de Mille, the Grande
Dame of Dance,” Life, November 15, 1963, 89–94.
96. Eric R. Kandel, “The New Science of Mind,” New York Times,
September 6, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/opinion/sunday/the-new-science-of-
mind.html.
 Chapter 2
Groundwork
At the Foothills

NEUROMYTHS AND BRAINSCAMS

Experts on the brain and cognition generally agree on the
characterization of the brain as the most complex object in the
known universe.[1] Neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Eric
Kandel summarizes the journey ahead: “As we enter the 21st
century, the new science of mind faces remarkable challenges.
Researchers . . . are only standing at the foothills of a great
mountain range.”[2]
Yet these cautions have done little to quell the hyped-up
neuromyths fueling so-called brainscams that boost the sale of
questionable products, feeding outsize expectations about
neuroscience while simultaneously obfuscating its marvelous
revelations.[3] It just so happens that one of the most infamous
neuromyths of all time involved one of the most famous musicians of
all time: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The Mozart effect—the myth that merely listening to classical
music makes you smarter—took off during the brain-obsessed
1990s, when poor Mozart was virtually exhumed, remixed, and
exploited by savvy marketers peddling brainy-baby products (images
of headphones strapped to pregnant bellies may come to mind).
Even though the Mozart effect was eventually revealed to be a
sham, this myth has exhibited remarkable staying power. As noted in
the introduction to this book, 88 percent of American adults surveyed
agreed with this statement: “Participating in school music
corresponds with better grades/test scores.”[4] Critically, the action
here is participating in, not listening to, and indeed, some modest
gains in cognitive development have been demonstrated in children
who take music lessons and actually make music.
In this chapter, I explore some of the most exciting findings in
recent research on music and cognitive development that promise
benefits far more sustainable and profound than boosted test scores.
But before I do, I must first consider how the myth of the Mozart
effect yet haunts our culture and the effects of this haunting, which
are not benign. It has corrupted how we value music, blinding us to
its true worth while simultaneously tainting our understanding of how
learning really works. Musicians should understand these
ramifications and be properly prepared to champion our art both
onstage and throughout our communities.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOZART EFFECT

The story of the Mozart effect begins in 1993, when researchers
Francis Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky published a one-
page paper in the journal Nature. They describe their experiment in
which a small cohort of thirty-six college students showed a modest
improvement in a spatial task after they listened to a Mozart piano
sonata (as compared to silence or a “relaxation tape”).[5] This
modest improvement was not permanent or even long-lasting: it
disappeared after fifteen minutes. Nevertheless, Rauscher and her
colleagues submitted the paper for peer review. They were not
prepared for what happened next:

The first call came from the Associated Press before I even
knew the paper was coming out. And then, all of a sudden, once
it broke in the Associated Press, it was everywhere. I mean, we
had people coming to our house and interviewing us for live
television. I had to hire somebody to handle all the calls that
were coming in.[6]

In the rush of media attention, Rauscher’s findings were

christened with the catchy headline “The Mozart Effect,” a name
neither Rauscher nor her team invented. Like the children’s gossip
game of telephone, key elements of the Rauscher team’s study were
transformed with each successive report. Their original results
rapidly ballooned from a modest gain in one small parameter of brain
function (the ability to mentally rotate images) to nothing less than
overall intelligence, or g. The target group that supposedly benefitted
from exposure to classical music morphed from a tiny collection of
American college students to children, then infants, then even to the
unborn. By 1998, even government officials had bought into the
hype: Governor Zell Miller of Georgia successfully lobbied his state
legislature to fund a giveaway program of classical music CDs to
every newborn in the state of Georgia.[7] The state legislature of
Florida mandated classical music be played daily in all childcare and
early educational programs that received state funding.[8]
Entrepreneurs soon seized upon these ideas. Self-styled
“author, lecturer, and musician” Don Campbell snatched the term
The Mozart Effect and rushed to claim copyright. He published a
book under the copyrighted name and developed CDs and other
products that he claimed held music’s “transformational power” to
“heal the body” and “strengthen the mind,” all “at the speed of
sound.”[9] (Note that Campbell’s fortunes were largely made possible
by snaffling copyright-free music from the public domain.)
The same year that Campbell’s book appeared, the husband-
and-wife team of William Clark and Julie Aigner-Clark shot a home
video in their basement and from that humble beginning launched a
line of CDs and videos with names like “Baby Mozart,” furthering the
notion that babies listening to this music—even in utero—could
increase their g quotient. By the time the Clarks sold off “Baby
Einstein” to the Walt Disney Company in 2001, sales had reached
over $17 million.[10]
Despite the whiff of snake oil surrounding these ventures, we
might wonder, what is the real harm here? Even if there is no
scientifically proven cognitive benefit to hearing classical music, you
may agree with Ms. Aigner-Clark’s “lesser of two evils” reasoning
when confronted with the evidence. “A child is better off listening to
Beethoven while watching images of a puppet than seeing any
reality show that I can think of,” she bristled.[11] In other words, even
if the kids are plugged into an electronic babysitter, at least that
babysitter is regurgitating classical music and not Nine Inch Nails!
But apparently even this kind of reasoning can get you into hot
water, as Frances Rauscher discovered when she implied that rock
music is toxic to cognitive development: “I started getting phone
calls, literally death threats, from people that were so offended that I
would say that rock music was bad for the brain. So I had to get an
unlisted number. It was crazy.”[12]
It is no wonder that researchers who study the cognitive effects
of listening to music are wary of how reporters may misinterpret their
findings and twist results into catchy headlines that bear little relation
to the original studies: not only can such results be skewed for profit,
they can also elicit death threats and even get you sued. In the case
of the Clarks, two cognitive studies conducted at the University of
Washington take direct aim at Baby Einstein:

Despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants

a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of
time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as
“Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby.” Rather than helping babies,
the over-use of such productions actually may slow down infants
eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring
vocabulary.[13]

For good measure, the lead author on the study adds, “There is
no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos
and there is some suggestion of harm.”[14]
Incensed, the Clarks sued the University of Washington to
release details from the studies, claiming that the study denigrated
their life’s work (not to mention deflating “Baby Einstein” sales
figures). Not only did the couple win, but the university had to cough
up a portion of the Clarks’ legal fees.[15] The Disney company, under
threat of a class-action lawsuit charging that Baby Einstein products
had been fraudulently marketed as educational, offered full refunds
to customers.[16]
Meanwhile, back in the scientific community, the Mozart effect,
which had met with immediate skepticism originally, was forthwith
subject to intense scrutiny. A meta-analysis of many duplicate trials
of the Mozart effect concluded that “any cognitive enhancement is
small and does not reflect any change in IQ or reasoning ability in
general.”[17] The several studies that did manage to connect music to
verifiably enhanced cognitive abilities concluded that any observable
increase in spatial task performance was due to “arousal.”[18] In
other words, music made the test-takers feel good, so they
performed better. This result has been replicated with many different
genres of music so that Rauscher, when queried about the arousal
effect, was able to throw a bone to the diehard rock fans who had
earlier wanted her head on a platter: “I think the key to it is, you have
to enjoy the music. If you love Pearl Jam, you’re going to find a Pearl
Jam effect.”[19]
So what if the Mozart effect was a sham? Is there harm, or even
crime, in manipulating scientific research that later turns out to be
untrue? Were Mr. Campbell, the Clarks, and others who profited
from Rauscher’s research just savvy entrepreneurs who
nevertheless may have actually believed the hype? And regardless
of whether pseudoscience is merely annoying or truly harmful, did
we really need a psychology test to tell us that the music we like can
move our emotions and put a spring in our step? Of course not. But
all the hype, the marketing, and the flurry of counterresearch that
surrounded the Mozart effect produced such a din that it effectively
drowned out the most valuable finding revealed in the years shortly
following Rauscher’s original publication: there probably is some
cognitive benefit to be gained from music instruction—from actually
making music—as researchers like Schellenberg, Kraus, and others
have endeavored to show.[20]
And here is where we must consider this myth’s deepest harm:
it falsely legitimized the notion of exposure. As demonstrated
throughout this book, a fundamental tenet of all learning is that the
learned thing must be actually experienced. Exposure is not
learning. Given the reach and staying power of the Mozart effect
myth, it is a very good bet that some portion of that 88 percent of
parents referenced in the survey confused and conflated exposure
with experience. You will revisit the damage to learning that this
conflation causes and also consider its damage to policy-makers’
decisions later in this chapter. But first, let us track this scientific
legend so that we might understand its tenacity.

TRACKING A SCIENTIFIC LEGEND

Social science researchers Adrian Bangerter and Chip Heath define
a “scientific legend” as “a widespread belief . . . that propagates in
society, originally arising from scientific study, but that has been
transformed to deviate in essential ways from the understanding of
scientists.”[21]
They tracked the evolution of the Mozart effect legend in three
ways: first, they charted how the Mozart effect’s fortunes rose and
fell in the news media in close relation to similar topics like education
and early childhood development. Second, they demonstrated that
the Mozart effect was more widely propagated in states where
primary education and childhood development were of grave
concern. Finally, they demonstrated that the Mozart effect “mutated
over time” and that the media “overextended the scientific findings to
new, untested populations.”[22] In other words, Bangerter and Heath
showed how the original test subjects (college students) magically
morphed in the press into babies and how spatial task performance
was grossly inflated to include all intelligence.
Scientific legends are propagated by societal vectors and
amplified by valid science. In the 1990s, the societal vectors that fed
the Mozart effect included concern over the state of education in
public schools and parental anxiety about raising children in an
increasingly complex (and seemingly dangerous) world.
The science that fed the Mozart effect was the entwined
discovery of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, which overturned a
century’s worth of fixed-brain theory, the notion that the brain cells
(neurons) with which we are born cannot regenerate. Unrelated
scientific teams working around the globe almost simultaneously
discovered that, not only is the human brain malleable (plastic), but it
is capable of producing new brain cells right up to the moment of
death.[23] Fixed-brain theory was laid to rest as we rolled into the
new millennium, although that knowledge had not yet reached the
general public in the 1990s. But the discovery of synaptic pruning
had.
Groundbreaking neuroscience from the 1980s and 1990s had
revealed that an infant’s brain comes preinstalled with a bushy
overgrowth of neuronal connections (synapses) and therefore
develops by actually reducing, not growing more, connections. The
popular press ran with this information, and soon fanciful renderings
of babies’ brains likened to overgrown trees appeared, appended
with unsettling images of novice parents clumsily wielding
gargantuan pruning shears.
At the same time, news of a so-called critical window or critical
period of brain development broke into the popular consciousness,
revealing that the first three years of an infant’s life were crucial for
brain development. Yet without the good news of neurogenesis and
neuroplasticity, the combination of synaptic pruning and the critical
window theory resulted in a frightening message: if pruning during
this critical period were botched, it could hold permanent and
disastrous consequences throughout the life of the child.
This barrage of scientific and pseudoscientific brain news
coupled with arresting brain images and hyped-up parental anxiety
all collided during the 1990s, inflaming media coverage of the Mozart
effect and galvanizing child welfare activists, whose calls for early
intervention garnered national attention. In the spring of 1997, First
Lady Hillary Clinton hosted a White House conference on early
childhood development and learning. The keynote speaker for this
event, actor and child activist Rob Reiner, sounded the alarm for the
“critical period” of development:

If we want to have a real significant impact, not only on

children’s success in school and later on in life, healthy
relationships, but also an impact on reduction in crime, teen
pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse, welfare, homelessness,
and a variety of other social ills, we are going to have to address
the first three years of life. There is no getting around it. All
roads lead to Rome.[24]

The same year, Reiner created the I Am Your Child foundation

and spearheaded the campaign to pass Proposition 10 in California
(later named the California Children and Families First Act), which
diverts a percentage of the sales tax on tobacco products toward
early childhood programs based on the “determination” that “a child’s
first three years are the most critical in brain development.”[25]
 At the same time, another nonprofit organization, originally
founded in 1977 and dedicated to child development, Zero to Three,
gained traction. The current aims of Zero to Three are to “provide
parents, professionals and policymakers the knowledge and the
know-how to nurture early development” because, they claim,
“neuroscientists have documented that the earliest days, weeks and
months of life are a period of unparalleled growth when trillions of
brain cell connections are made.”[26]
As well-meaning as all these initiatives are, experts caution that,
when the topic is the human brain, the issues are far more nuanced
and complex than can be covered by journalists on a deadline or by
activists and politicians who have little patience for verifying their
beliefs through the slow work of science.
One of the more prominent critics of the first-three-years theory
is John Bruer, a leading figure in the fields of cognitive neuroscience
and education policy and author of The Myth of the First Three
Years.[27] Bruer convincingly argues that Proposition 10, Zero to
Three, and the like all ironically evince a “strong formulation of the
thesis of infant determinism [which is] the doctrine that early
childhood experiences have irreversible, lifelong effects.” Bruer cites
evidence from an opposing viewpoint, indeterminism, which offers “a
view of child development that emphasizes long-term complexity”:

The first steps on life’s path are important, but still leave many
routes open to diverse outcomes. This indeterminist thesis is
relatively unpopular in policy, parenting, and even some
academic circles. . . . [Indeterminist ] research has indicated that
children are highly resilient and show remarkable recovery from
early privation, if their life circumstances improve.[28]

At its core, the indeterminist view promotes plasticity and is

actually highly optimistic. Despite this, Bruer projects that it is
“unlikely to turn the popular pro-determinism tidal wave.”[29] And this
helps explain why the myth of the Mozart effect is yet so enduring.
Set against a sea of parental angst about getting the first three years
“right,” the idea that Mozart’s music can be served up daily, right
alongside the milk and gummy vitamins, is alluring because it is so
easy. The Mozart effect is simply an inexpensive insurance policy
even if it proves to be wrong, so what’s the harm in trying? In this
light, there is certainly no harm to supper served up with a savory
side of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. And if this is all the child
ever experiences of music, it is perhaps nothing more than a missed
opportunity. Perhaps. The trouble comes when experience becomes
confused with engagement. The enduring harm of the Mozart effect
is that it spawned the neuromyth of exposure.

EXPOSURE IS NOT LEARNING

A buzzword that often connects music and childhood education is
exposure. I play Mozart during mealtimes to expose my family to
high art. If I allow my child to bring home a shiny trumpet from the
school band program and he later loses interest, well, at least he
was exposed—right?
A basic tenet of learning from the field of cognitive science holds
that a thing is truly learned as evidenced by its repeatability. This is
true for both facts and muscular movement. While exposure may be
the necessary first step in the learning process, it must be followed
by practice in order to encode it in memory and make it habitual. Just
as musicians need not be convinced of the value of music instruction
or advised that music arouses emotion, we need no convincing to
agree that learning an instrument—any instrument—requires
physical engagement; it is no wonder that many music schools have
dubbed their performance studies curriculum “applied music.” But
the exposure account implies that, by simply allowing ourselves to
be passive receptacles for tonal vibrations or letting our kids noodle
around on a keyboard, some kind of cognitive benefit will occur.
Exposure is not learning because it lacks engagement, and
engagement is a fundamental requirement of learning and, really, for
understanding anything. Neural plasticity makes lifelong learning
possible, but at its core, this potential cannot be realized through
mere exposure. Motivation, attention, and effort are required. These
are basic maxims of cognitive science, passed on as folk wisdom for
millennia and recently confirmed at the cellular level by
neuroscience. These basic maxims are very important for music
teachers and learners to keep in mind. But they are utterly critical
when a cash-strapped school board must choose between funding
instrument repair or funding a field trip to the local symphony. The
former represents a long-term investment in the future of music-
making; the latter is a one-off experiment in exposure. Just imagine if
all the infants born in the state of Georgia in 1998 had been gifted
music engagement via enhanced funding for music instruction
instead of a single CD in a cheap plastic case.

THE LEFT BRAIN–RIGHT BRAIN DICHOTOMY

The second exhibit in the neuromythology pantheon is the left brain–
right brain dichotomy, which stands out both for its immense
popularity and for its attractiveness to artists. The belief that humans
possess right- or left-brain personalities or talents is almost as
pervasive as the notion that the mind is wiser than the body—the
classic mind-body problem of philosophy. While the latter springs
from ancient roots in Western culture, the former is an artifact from
the early history of modern neuroscience. Like most persistent
myths, its staying power is rooted in the desire for it to be true and in
the chunk of truth that feeds this desire. And like many stories about
the brain, this one begins with damage.
Indeed, the annals of neuroscience are filled with tales of
damage and loss because, up until very recently, the only way to
study the brain was within those parameters. Lesion-deficit analysis
is a method by which neurologists link the loss of an ability with a
damaged area of the brain and then infer that the formerly healthy
process must have resided there. The story of modern neuroscience
begins in 1848 with just such a tale. Phineas Gage, an American
railroad worker, suffered a shattered left frontal brain lobe when a
three-foot-long metal tamping rod propelled by gunpowder shot
through his jaw, traveled behind his left eye, and exited through the
top of his skull. Remarkably, Gage eventually recovered (albeit with
only his right eye intact), but his accident had produced a radical
change in his temperament. After the accident he was given to such
irascible fits of temper, indecision, and foul language that his friends
and family pronounced him “no longer Gage.”[30] Gage’s ruined brain
tissue dissolved the very core of what had once been Gage, a
“capable and efficient foreman . . . with a well-balanced mind,” and
left behind an ornery stranger, raising the unsettling possibility that
the brain, not the soul, is the seat of personality and behavior.
Gage’s case advanced the theory of functional specialization,
the observation that specific parts of the brain are responsible for
specific functions and a theory that in turn paved the way for the left
brain–right brain dichotomy. But unlike the stories of many brain-
damaged individuals of the nineteenth century, Gage’s story is one
of hope, not despair. Gage went on to live another twelve years after
his horrific accident, holding down the physically vigorous and
(according to his biographer) mentally demanding job of stagecoach
driving in South America. An observer who met him there reported
him to have been “in the enjoyment of good health, with no
impairment whatever of his mental faculties.”[31] The last chapter of
Gage’s life story makes a compelling case for the brain’s remarkable
ability to heal itself.[32]
The stories of Gage and other brain-damaged patients are
landmarks in the annals of brain science, though patients’ identities
came to be hidden, the patients identified only by their initials, their
maladies subsumed under the names of their famous physicians.
Such was the case with Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, two
nineteenth-century European physicians who advanced functional
specialization theory (also called brain localization theory) by
discovering the main locations in the brain for speech production and
language comprehension. These brain areas were subsequently
named for them, like provinces of a previously uncharted territory.[33]
But Broca went down in neurohistory for yet another fundamental
discovery.
Besides the location of speech, Broca’s autopsies of speech-
afflicted patients revealed that their deficits were located exclusively
in the left hemisphere. But here was Broca’s dilemma: to reveal
these findings would be to challenge the reigning orthodoxy of
absolute symmetry in the human body (such symmetry being seen
as proof that humans descended from the divine). Thus Broca
deemed his insight as dangerously “subversive,” for evidence of
asymmetry would surely disrupt this dogma. Eventually, however, his
proof was too strong to deny, and Broca was moved to announce his
findings in 1865 by the strength of his evidence—and also perhaps
by a looming claim to the same knowledge by the disgruntled son of
a deceased neurologist who is said to have made the speech-to-left-
brain connection some twenty-five years earlier.[34] Nonetheless,
Broca is largely credited with advancing the theory of brain
lateralization (named after the brain’s two largest lateral divisions,
the left and right hemispheres), laying a solid foundation for the left-
right dichotomy for decades.
Wernicke’s lesion-deficit analyses, which revealed the left as the
seat of language comprehension, soon followed in 1874, further
elevating the status of the left brain as the seat of that most
treasured of human abilities, language. By that time, it had long been
known that the left-brain was also the location of right-handedness,
and because over 90 percent of humans vastly prefer the use of their
right hand for most tasks, it did not take long for scientists to equate
the left-brain location of language and right-handedness with
dominance. From there it was but a stone’s throw to assert the left
brain’s superiority as the seat of reason and to disparage the right as
vastly inferior, a stance maintained through the twentieth century.
The late neuroscientist Roger Sperry acknowledged this state of
affairs in his 1981 Nobel Prize lecture:

Thus, with few exceptions, the bulk of the collected lesion

evidence up through the 1950s into the early ’60s converged to
support the picture of a leading, more highly evolved and
intellectual left hemisphere and a relatively retarded right
hemisphere that by contrast, in the typical righthander brain, is
not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and
apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function.[35]

Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for three decades of

pioneering research on split-brain patients, so called because the
dense plate of fibers that connects the two brain hemispheres (the
corpus callosum), had been permanently severed in these people.
That this severing, a procedure called corpus callosotomy, occurred
by choice is evidence that the epileptics who underwent it viewed
this extreme brain surgery as a last resort to combat their severe
seizures.
Experiments in hemispheric specialization with these rare
individuals demonstrated both the great degree to which the human
brain is lateralized and the startling effects that occur when the two
hemispheres cannot communicate.[36] Split-brain research confirmed
the left hemisphere’s dominance for many tasks, but perhaps more
importantly, it also revealed that the right hemisphere, far from being
“retarded,” word-deaf, or word-blind, was actually quite the opposite.
The right processes motor tasks, visual and spatial relations, and
certain aspects of emotion. And where language is concerned, while
the left is responsible for the mechanics of speech production and
the literal meaning of words, the right hemisphere translates such
parameters as pitch and timbre to effect a more nuanced
understanding of language. Sperry reported that findings like these
were so disruptive to the prevailing neuro-orthodoxy at the time that
a coauthor of one of his early studies “felt obliged in good
conscience to withdraw his name.”[37]
This split-brain news did not stay confined to the lab. In 1967,
Michael Gazzaniga (who had joined Sperry’s lab in the 1960s as a
PhD student) published an article in Scientific American titled “The
Split Brain in Man,” its header proclaiming, “The human brain is
actually two brains, each capable of advanced mental functions.”[38]
Similar articles in mainstream print media soon followed, sparking a
rush of imaginative interpretations.[39] As tartly noted by a prominent
debunker of neuromythology, “demonstration of the specializations of
the two halves of the brain brought a well-deserved Nobel Prize to
Roger Sperry and much unearned income to a swarm of
hemispheric ‘educators.’”[40]
One of those educators was art instructor Betty Edwards. In the
mid-1970s, curiosity about why her students experienced random
successes in her drawing classes compelled her to seek “an
organizing principle that would pull it all together.”[41] Edwards found
her way to the accounts of the split-brain studies, which, she said,
 provided me with the sudden illumination that an individual’s
ability to draw was perhaps mainly controlled by the ability to
shift to a different-from-ordinary way of processing visual
information—to shift from verbal, analytic processing (in this
book called “left-mode or “L-mode”) to spatial, global processing
(which I have called “right-mode or “R-mode”).[42]

Edwards’s illumination was purveyed in her best-selling 1978

book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Now in its fourth
edition, it has been translated into seventeen languages and has
sold over three million copies worldwide. Quoting Richard Bergland,
she bases her method on the claim that

you have two brains: a left and a right. Modern brain scientists
now know that your left brain is your verbal and rational brain; it
thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and
words. . . . Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive brain;
it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of “whole things,”
and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or
words.[43]

Edwards claims that learning to draw requires staying in one

“processing mode” (the right brain) “without significant interference
from the other” (the left brain).[44] As such, she is a member of that
“swarm” derided by academics as a neuromythmaker, although such
derision has not dampened enthusiasm for her method, as
promulgated by the many thousands of satisfied art students over
the past couple decades who have testified to its success. At best,
critics say, hers and others’ similar claims about left- and right-brain
processing oversimplify complex cognitive processes. So what does
it look like when a neuroscientist investigates these processes in a
creative brain?
Neuroscientist Charles Limb investigated this question through
that most creative of musical enterprises, jazz improvisation. After
rolling a jazz pianist into an fMRI scanner and observing his brain
while he played, Limb hypothesized that creativity flourishes when
portions of the right hemisphere are allowed to ramble freely,
unfettered by the self-evaluation of the left hemisphere.[45] As Limb
explained in a TED Talk,

we have this combination of an area that’s thought to be

involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this [other] area
that’s thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning
on. . . . A reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you
should have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One
area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you’re not
inhibited, you’re willing to make mistakes, so that you’re not
constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses.
[46]

This echoes Edwards’s claims. Yet the notable difference

between Limb and Edwards is Limb’s science credentials. Limb’s lab
coat seems to add a cloak of respectability to such subjects as
creativity, just as his fMRI images make what Edwards had already
observed over decades of experience seem more “real,” thus adding
more proof to what multiple studies have shown: we are more likely
to believe experts when they possess degrees, dress in uniforms,
and display tools of the trade, like stethoscopes. Psychologists call
this “stage-setting,” and it is used to display “expert power.”[47] It
seems we are even more likely to believe accounts that are
accompanied by florid pictures of the brain—what critics have
derisively labeled “brainporn.”[48]
Similarly, the credibility of Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard researcher
who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and lived to tell the tale, was
arguably enhanced by her previous career as a neuroscientist (which
she considered a “cool” perk because in the midst of her brain
trauma it offered “the opportunity to study [my] own brain from the
inside out”). Taylor, in one of the five most-viewed TED Talks of all
time, claims that our “two hemispheres are completely separate.
Because they process information differently, each of our
hemispheres think about different things, they care about different
things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities.”[49]
In tone and words more comparable to those of a preacher than
a scientist, Taylor has described the months she spent consigned by
her brain trauma to the domain of her right hemisphere variously as
“euphoric,” a “nirvana,” and “la la land.” She says that her motivation
for healing was borne from the desire to lead others to this land if
they could but “choose to step to the right of their left
hemispheres.”[50]
Another neuro-expert and advocate for the right hemisphere is
psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose highly acclaimed masterwork
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of
the Western World promotes a view similar to Taylor’s. Like her,
McGilchrist assigns personalities to each hemisphere (the “master”
and the “emissary” of the title, after a tale by Nietzsche), asserting
that “the left hemisphere manipulates the world, the right hemisphere
understands the world.”[51] McGilchrist holds that the left brain’s habit
of deconstructing and categorizing our experiences in ordered,
manageable bits has spawned a mechanical, uninspired view of the
world because we never return these component shards to the right
brain for synthesis, interpretation, and nuance; instead, we allow the
left hemisphere’s penchant for processing experiences in a one-
dimensional way to define and validate reality for us. In other words,
we practice one-sided thinking—and as I will show, practice is
powerful. McGilchrist maintains that this left-biased state of affairs,
begun during the Industrial Revolution, has since gathered steam in
Western culture to the detriment of practically everything since, from
individual happiness to world peace. McGilchrist’s book, twenty
years in the making, has inspired a string of laudatory reviews and
prominent champions (including British actor John Cleese), the
obligatory TED Talk, a documentary film, and a pilgrimage to spread
his message throughout the world.
Into the left-right fray has stepped yet another neuro-expert,
positing a division in a different direction. Cognitive neuroscientist
Stephen Kosslyn (with cowriter Wayne Miller) has put forward the
theory of cognitive modes, which posits that the brain is best
understood from top to bottom, challenging the left-right dichotomy
as “the dominant mainstream brain story of the last half century” that,
while “broadly embraced by the popular culture,” is nevertheless
“scientifically unsound.” Their theory, they say, is the “first time that
these findings have been systematically brought to a mainstream
audience.”[52] Perhaps, but Roger Sperry hinted at this difference in
directionality back in 1981: “The left-right dichotomy in cognitive
mode is an idea with which it is very easy to run wild. Qualitative
shifts in mental control may involve up-down, front-back, or various
other organizational changes as well as left-right differences.”[53]
Sperry’s remarks presaged the current, prevailing view of how
the brain actually works, which is that brain functions are best
understood as interrelated systems. In the healthy brain, these
systems, located in both hemispheres, communicate with each other
while doing practically everything but especially during complex
cognitive processes. Yet no matter which direction these processes
run, there are observable physical differences in the two brain
hemispheres as well as in their processes—which is precisely the
basis of McGilchrist’s argument and why he holds that “the old story
deserves to be buried, but the real left brain/right brain story is one
we are only just beginning to understand.”[54] That new story is a
unified theory of network connectivity, and like all things involving
that most complex object in the known universe, it is an interwoven
and constantly evolving tale.

BRAIN PERSONALITIES AND LEARNING STYLES

Despite the current understanding of the brain as an interconnected
network of subsystems, the notion that the left brain is rational and
the right brain is creative persists in popular culture. Similarly
persistent are related beliefs about right-brain versus left-brain
personalities and learning styles. Against this backdrop, a team of
neuroscientists at the University of Utah in 2013 made headlines
with a two-year study that investigated the neural substrates of the
left brain–right brain theory of personality. Their host institution did
not mince words when it announced in a press release,
“Researchers Debunk Myth of ‘Right-Brain’ and ‘Left-Brain’
Personality Traits.” The researchers themselves are a bit more
circumspect; they note that “lateralization of brain connections
appears to be a local rather than global property of brain networks,
and our data are not consistent with a whole-brain phenotype of
greater ‘left-brained’ or greater ‘right-brained’ network strength
across individuals.”[55] In other words, while it is true that certain
functions can be seen to occur in only one hemisphere of the brain
or the other (“a local rather than global property”), according to the
lead researcher, “people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-
sided brain network.”
Equally spurious is the theory of learning styles, the belief that
people evince a specific aptitude for receiving information (a “visual”
rather than a “verbal” learner, for example). A recent review of the
scientific literature reveals virtually no compelling evidence to
support this hypothesis. In fact, related research has made a
compelling case against the theory of learning styles despite the fact
that it remains enormously popular and, as one research team notes,
has spawned a “thriving industry” of resources for parents and
teachers.[56]
Again we must ask if there is some detriment to maintaining
these scientifically invalid notions. The simple answer is yes, for at
least several reasons. First, these notions do not mesh with what is
currently known about how learning actually works and, by
extension, how best to boost it. A major finding from cognitive
science is that learning of any sort involves effort. So while the
existence of learning styles has not been proven to be demonstrably
true, it is true that most of us have particular abilities and
preferences—things we are good at and things we prefer. But absent
any frank learning disorder, preferences are not styles—they are just
preferences.
Another reason we should eschew the linked neuromyths of
brain personalities and learning styles is because these myths are
actually quite limiting to learners. This is ironic because many of
these ideas were first promoted within a rigid educational system
meant to free students (particularly children) from strictures that were
thought to restrict learning. So if these are truly myths and hold no
validity, why are they both appealing and persistent? One answer is
that the urge to label others or oneself is natural because humans
generally seek order. Neat categorizations of personality types are
appealing, particularly in occupations that require us to assess and
manage large groups of people, like classroom teaching or coaching
athletics.
 Labeling oneself may also be attractive, for we would all like to
believe that we are unique. Self-labeling can therefore be seductive,
especially if we wish to project a certain air: that of the freewheeling
artist, the down-to-earth rational thinker, or the creative genius, for
example. Such labeling can be a get-out-of-jail-free card when we
behave impulsively, unemotionally, or forgetfully—neglecting the
anniversary bouquet is perhaps more easily excused when
committed by an unapologetic “left-brainer,” as is the rash
countercultural behavior of the family’s artsy black sheep. It is more
appealing to pass off such lapses as part of who we believe
ourselves to be, especially since doing so guards against any
expectation that we will change these behaviors in the future.
Labels may be seemingly harmless, but they have long-term
negative consequences when children are taught that their right-
brain learning style excuses poor math grades or that their left-brain
personality may shield them from learning social graces, like how to
engage in conversation. As I explain in chapter 5, these labels are
symptoms of what psychologist Carol Dweck dubs the fixed mindset,
and, instead of providing freedom and psychic healing balm, such
mindsets stunt growth and constrain potential and possibility.
In the arena of music, imagine how limiting it is for the baritone
who harbors the notion that, as a rational left-brainer, he has a talent
for sight-reading but just isn’t cut out for acting, or the budding
percussionist who excuses her musical mistakes as those of a right-
brain learner who has never been any good at rhythm. There exist
talented musicians who play their instruments reasonably well by ear
but refuse to learn to read music because they have an “aural
learning style.” Perhaps. But in the absence of a diagnosed learning
disorder like dyslexia, such a self-affixed label is ultimately a barrier
to learning, not a door to freedom.
When we limit ourselves and our children with labels that restrict
and restrain, it is time to replace these neuromyths with the more
wholistic view of network connectivity and to embrace the new
findings of neurogenesis, or how the brain can change. Who wants
to make music—or do anything for that matter—with half a brain?
Besides, real findings from neuroscience about the brain and music
are actually far more intriguing than the neuromyths.
 REAL BRAIN GAINS
The research field called the cognitive neuroscience of music is
primarily devoted to music perception, or what happens in the brain
when we listen to music. More noteworthy (but less studied) is what
happens in the brain when we do music. One researcher who has
pursued this question is Gottfried Schlaug, director of the Music and
Neuroimaging Lab at Harvard Medical School.
Schlaug calls musicians “auditory-motor athletes” and was
initially intrigued by the related question of whether accomplished
musicians show any brain differences as compared to nonmusicians
and whether they show any brain changes due to training, which
typically begins in early childhood. His seminal studies showed that,
not only are the brains of accomplished adult musicians generally
larger in areas of the brain that serve musical functions, but the
corpus callosum (the main band of fibers that connects both left and
right hemispheres of the brain) is both larger and more fibrous in
musicians than nonmusicians.[57] This was very exciting news for
musicians, but thanks in part to wariness over the Mozart effect, a
skeptical view of this research held that perhaps these asymmetries
and size differences were there all along due to inborn aptitude or
talent.
To investigate this nature-versus-nurture question, Schlaug and
a team of researchers were able to demonstrate structural
differences in the motor and auditory brain regions of young children
after only fifteen months of keyboard instruction.[58] The fact that
these differences actually correlate with improvements in movement
and hearing skills is notable. The takeaway message from this
landmark study is that music training actually induced brain plasticity,
which is a necessary precursor to cognitive enhancement. In other
words, while music training didn’t make these children “smarter,” it
made their brains more receptive to learning. This is a theme we see
repeated again and again in music and learning: there is no easy
musical potion that makes us instantly smarter, but music
engagement seems to rev up the brain and make it fertile territory for
learning.
 Schlaug’s lab has gone on to research another aspect of brain
plasticity, not in the developing brains of children, but in people who
have experienced brain damage through stroke or other brain
trauma. Because the mechanics of speech reside in the left
hemisphere, when damage occurs there, a typical impairment is
aphasia, characterized by damaged speech and comprehension.
This disorder affects about 2 million Americans, with over 180,000
new cases added each year.[59] Melodic intonation therapy (MIT)
was developed for such patients in the early 1970s based on the
observation that some speech impairments seemed to improve with
singing. But it was only recently that neuroscience could confirm the
effects at a cellular level.
MIT essentially hacks into the undamaged right side of the brain
(which is responsible for certain aspects of speech, like motor control
and emotion) and hitches it to speech through singing. Patients are
taught to elongate common words in a singsong style while
simultaneously tapping the rhythm with their left hands. This tapping
links to motor neurons in the right hemisphere that then charge the
organs of speech. With persistent work over time, Schlaug’s lab has
shown that, as the right side of the brain takes over for the damaged
abilities of the left, it actually grows and strengthens with practice.
This is truly a remarkable finding.
Schlaug notes that, as a therapy, music is an “ideal” stimulus
because it is a “multisensory motor experience,” stimulating
movement and emotion by engaging the pleasure and reward
systems, which encourages perseverance. Remarkable stories of
such persistence—such as that of Laurel Fontaine, an American
woman who suffered a stroke at the age of eleven that left her barely
able to speak but for whom MIT restored that function to almost 100
percent—demonstrate how effective MIT can be with disciplined
practice.[60] Even though Fontaine’s remarkable recovery was owed
in part to her youth, older patients have shown dramatic
improvements with MIT—it just takes a bit longer with an older brain.
Indeed, neuroscientist Nina Kraus, who has spent decades
researching how music training transforms sound processing in the
brain, has boldly stated that “a lifetime of playing an instrument
protects musicians from age-related neural declines.” Kraus calls
musicians “auditory experts” who, through practice, are “constantly
mapping sound to meaning.”[61] She has linked this auditory
expertise to such critical cognitive skills as attention and memory. As
I explain in the next chapter, attention and memory bookend
learning, not only the act of learning but in the entire human lifespan
of learning, from attention as learning’s prerequisite (and thus of
primary importance to the development of young brains) to the age-
related neural decline that is most cruelly visited upon memory, as
seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Attention is part of the executive function system in the brain, an
umbrella term for the cognitive processes located in the frontal lobe
that govern such critical and related attributes as planning and
impulse control—the very components that are undeveloped in
children. Indeed, we might say that a large percentage of parents’
and teachers’ jobs is devoted to nurturing and refining these
attributes in young children. So the initial results of an ongoing
longitudinal study overseen by Antonio Damasio at the University of
Southern California are noteworthy, for they demonstrate significant
structural brain changes in school-age children who receive music
instruction in comparison with two age-matched control groups.
Tests performed on children who began training at age six showed
that two years of music training accelerated growth in areas of their
brains responsible for, among other things, executive function.
Earlier tests in the study showed that music instruction boosted
areas in the brain responsible for sound processing, language
development, speech perception, and reading skills.[62]
That the test group was comprised of students from a low-
income area of Los Angeles marked by “extreme poverty levels,
gang violence, and drug trafficking” adds to the urgency of exorcising
the ghost of the Mozart effect once and for all. Exposure does not
equal learning, yet engagement does. The evidence of the negative
effects of poverty and violence on the minds of children is mounting,
but so is evidence of the positive effects of music training as, in the
words of the researchers, “a powerful intervention that may facilitate
regional brain maturation during childhood.”[63]
The hyped-up claims that music per se somehow makes people
vaguely smarter has overshadowed deeper and more significant
research, such as that produced by Schlaug, Kraus, Damasio, and
others. The question of whether we will ever be able to claim that
music makes us smarter is perhaps an open one, but what is now
clear is that music engagement feeds brain plasticity and molds the
vital building blocks of cognition (such as attention, memory, motor
movement, and emotion) upon which learning is built. The question
of why humans pursue music is an even deeper question.

WHAT IS THE USE OF MUSIC?

The cognitive revolution has permeated ancient intellectual pursuits
like philosophy, but it has also spawned new fields like evolutionary
psychology, which traces the development of the human brain over
evolutionary time by posing the ultimate questions of Darwin’s theory
of natural selection: Why did a certain human trait or ability survive
(or “persist,” in the parlance of evolutionary theorists)? What is its
use? As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker points out, to most
evolutionary theorists, music is a mystery in this regard: “Music is an
enigma. . . . What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy
to the making of plinking noises, or to feeling sad when no one has
died?”[64] Good questions. But Pinker goes on to pronounce this
enigma a “pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs
that we ingest through the ear” with no adaptive function. Thus they
are only so much “auditory cheesecake.” “Music,” Pinker infamously
declared, “is useless.”[65]
Pinker’s musings resonate with another similarly dismissive
evolutionary theory that regards music as a purely hedonistic
invention that sprouted by hitching onto the developing language
ability in primitive humans’ brains, offering its ability to both auditorily
parse chunks of information and provide meaning by way of pitch
and rhythm. This theory holds that, over evolutionary time, as the
human vocal tract developed and once language was up and
running, these acoustic properties of speech (pitch and rhythm) were
no longer needed but hung around anyway as a “parasitic” leftover
that eventually morphed into music.[66]
Esteemed psychologist Howard Gardner, writing years before
Pinker’s now-infamous valuation of music, proffers a profound
assessment of music and the human condition that makes the
cheesecake and parasite explanations seem positively churlish and
suggests that it is music’s very “uselessness” that ought to set
anthropologists on fire to figure it out:

Precisely because [music] is not used for explicit

communication, or for other evident survival purposes, its
continuing centrality in human experience constitutes a
challenging puzzle. The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss is scarcely
alone among scientists in claiming that if we can explain music,
we may find the key for all human thought—or in implying that
failure to take music seriously weakens any account of the
human condition.[67]

One who did take up the challenging puzzle of music’s

persistence was Steven Mithen, a pioneer of yet another new field
borne from the cognitive revolution, cognitive archaeology. Mithen
acknowledges music’s evolutionary survival as warranting a full-on
evolutionary history of music:

We can only explain the human propensity to make and listen to

music by recognizing that it has been encoded into the human
genome during the evolutionary history of our species. . . . While
several other attributes of the human mind have recently been
examined and debated at length . . . music has been sorely
neglected. Accordingly, a fundamental aspect of the human
condition has been ignored and we have gained no more than a
partial understanding of what it means to be human.[68]

Mithen wields his considerable cognitive archaeological might

against the vexing question of music by investigating how and why
music has endured throughout evolution by marshaling evidence
from the archaeological record and combining it with research in
child development and brain science. The result is his provocative
book, The Singing Neanderthals. Mithen and others argue that, on
the evolutionary timeline, our first utterances were a kind of blended
“musilanguage” that conveyed both information and emotion.[69]
 Several other theories on why music has persisted for millennia
have been posited by anthropologists and evolutionary theorists.
One is that music may have functioned as a type of mating call
among early humans. Another is that the voice of the mother
crooning her baby to sleep, which morphed into the lullaby, in a small
yet significant way may have helped ensure the survival of the
species. Another theory notes music’s social bonding power: those
who sing together stick together and defend each other.
Evolutionary theories necessarily consider adaptive function and
therefore only serve as evidence to explain music’s persistence. But
what evidence could ever prove music’s ultimate worth? Perhaps
musicians already know, in which case, we need no proof of music’s
worth.
Yet many of us would still like to know why. Most musicians
have at least paused to wonder, Why am I doing this? Musicians
who play in bands with friends likely have a ready social answer. But
what about instrumentalists who endure seven-hour practice
sessions alone in windowless practice rooms? Or musicians who
experience debilitating stage fright and yet persist? Or singing actors
who trudge from one cattle-call audition to another, only to be
rejected (by the laws of supply and demand) a majority of the time?
Of what use is music, and why are so many musicians
compelled to make it? As Gardner and Mithen note, if we can
definitively answer this, we can perhaps explain the human condition
—a tall order indeed, one that at present anyway is unanswerable.
But one thing about music and utility is certain: juxtaposed against
these existential questions, Pinker’s cheeky analogy to cheesecake
is silly at best. At worst, it is deeply insulting to musicians who have
made music their lifework, not to mention music-lovers for whom
utility is the last thing they seek from music.

THE BIG ONE

With rapid advances in neuroscience, the gulf that once separated
mind and body is rapidly eroding, as evidenced by Descartes’s
famous insight “I think, therefore I am,” now challenged by Pinker’s
neurocreed “The mind is not the brain but what the brain does.”[70]
Neuroscience is confronting some of the most confounding
questions of human existence, and one of the most fundamental of
those is the very nature of consciousness itself.
An easily grasped definition of consciousness is to say it is a
kind of self-consciousness; that is, I am not only aware, but I am
aware that I am aware. This state of mind—awareness of awareness
—is also called sentience, or even subjectivity. Psychologist Daniel
Robinson describes consciousness as that thing which “every man,
woman and child know to be true during every waking hour of daily
life.”[71] Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David
Chalmers calls the question of consciousness “the hard problem of
consciousness.”[72] Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux labels the
question simply “the Big One.”[73]
LeDoux recounts how, until recently, this question was primarily
the province of elderly scientists facing their own mortality while
younger researchers avoided the Big One altogether for fear that
confronting it would give budding scientists a “bad reputation.”[74] Yet
the question is now at the forefront of scientific research, abetted in
part by the pairing of philosophy with neuroscience.
At first glance, this pairing might seem a strange combination,
yet philosophy has been concerned with the workings of the human
mind as far back as the ancient Greek philosophers. The most
recent union of philosophy with neuroscience began in the 1970s,
when cognitive psychology (the science of how the mind works)
started marching toward its inevitable merger with neuroscience (the
science of the brain), eventually producing the new field of cognitive
neuroscience. Experiments, such as those with split-brain patients,
proved so enthralling that age-old existential questions were
reignited. Did splitting the brain split the soul? The soul was
supposed to be indivisible, but split-brain research showed that, if
the brain’s hemispheres are disconnected, mental states are
disconnected. And this was powerful support for the hypothesis that
mental states are states of the physical brain itself, not states of the
nonphysical soul. Into this breech stepped the neurophilosophers,
who have given us the theory of embodied cognition as a step
toward repairing the mind-body split by “developing cognitive
explanations that capture the manner in which mind, body, and world
mutually interact and influence one another.”[75]
The merger of such disparate fields as philosophy and artificial
intelligence into cognitive neuroscience also secured a central place
for biology in the study of mental processes. Nobel laureate and
pioneer in neurobiology Eric Kandel writes that “the new biology
posits that consciousness is a biological process that will eventually
be explained in terms of molecular signaling pathways used by
interacting populations of nerve cells.”[76]
But LeDoux opines that the quest to explain consciousness is
“being overemphasized” and asks us to imagine a scenario in which,
somehow, “an indefatigable neuroscientist finally has solved the
consciousness problem. Would that really tell us what makes people
tick?” LeDoux’s answer is “No!”[77] LeDoux contends that “the
mystery of personality crucially depends on figuring out the
unconscious functions of the brain,” among which are

the many things that the brain does that are not available to
consciousness . . . from standard body maintenance like
regulating heart rate, breathing rhythm, stomach contractions
and posture, to controlling many aspects of seeing, smelling,
behaving, feeling, speaking, thinking, evaluating, judging,
believing and imagining.[78]

The fact that scientists are even discussing the Big One, let
alone musing on consciousness as grounded in the body, is
revolutionary. Until now, the ancient binary of know-that (facts) and
know-how (movements) has ruled the way we comprehend being
human. The new science of mind reveals that thought is a far more
integrated process than this simple binary can capture. What is
coming into view is the ultimate resolution of the ancient mind-body
problem.

KNOW-THAT AND KNOW-HOW

With the advent of psychology as a formal discipline in the
nineteenth century, many learning theories sprang forth, but the
majority of the mainstream ones reflected a fundamental division
between the mind and the body. The terminology still in use reflects
this split: explicit learning versus implicit learning; declarative versus
procedural; propositional knowledge versus tacit knowledge.
Whatever terms are chosen, at their base level, they all share an
assumed division between the purely mental and the purely physical.
Yet the big news from neuroscience is the steady erosion of this
historic dichotomy.
This dichotomy has its roots in the ancient world, when Greek
philosophers used the word epistêmê to mean “knowledge” and the
term technê to signify “craft” or “general know-how.” They
understood knowledge as a product of the mind and craft as a
product of the body via activities. This ancient distinction is known in
academic philosophy as knowledge-that and knowledge-how, or
simply know-that and know-how. As such, we are not born with
knowledge-that; rather, we must be taught in order to receive it.
Know-that is why we go to school (as in “I know that 2 plus 3 equals
5”). Thus a hallmark of know-that is learning that is dependent upon
knowledge of facts. Since that is the case, know-that requires many
important prerequisites, and at the top of the list are motivation and
attention. We have to want to learn, to pay attention. This very fact is
embedded in the use of the word pay, which reflects our fund of
attention and implies that learning costs us something. Knowledge of
this sort (learning to read musical notation, for example) may not
come easily, and it is often distinguished by layers of difficulty. Once
one has mastered the first layer, one must persevere ever outward,
in a concentric ring of challenge. Knowledge-that is seemingly
limitless and requires a dogged commitment to repetition and
practice when the going gets tough. Knowledge-that is unmoved by
petitions regarding learning styles.
Conversely, know-how is bound to the body. It is often linked to
the tacit knowledge that is one’s birthright, as in knowing how to
walk. Thus know-how is described as a kind of learning that occurs
automatically and outside one’s conscious attempts to learn. But this
description immediately raises questions: Does this mean that all
types of know-how never first require attention? What about learning
to ride a bicycle, which first requires learning certain things (facts,
perhaps?) and yet later is conducted automatically, outside our
conscious awareness? And what about fine-motor activities, like
playing the piano? How do descriptions of know-how work in the
realm of higher-order muscular activities like fine singing or dancing
or playing an instrument? Surely these activities require learning
facts before we can execute them, do they not?
Thus the title of a 2013 neurophilosophy paper is a provocative
one; “Motor Skill Depends on Knowledge of Facts” is a deliberate
mash-up of these divided ways of thinking about thinking.[79] The two
authors, Jason Stanley and John Krakauer (a philosopher and a
neuroscientist, respectively), take issue with the ancient assumption
that the mind is wiser than the body. Or, as they put it in a later
opinion piece, “It is hard, and perhaps not possible, to forge a
theoretically significant distinction between working with one’s hands
and working with one’s mind.”[80]
Howard Gardner accounts for the privileged place of knowledge
in his theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory) and also
acknowledges that “body intelligence may have been taken for
granted or minimized in importance by many researchers [because]
motor activity has been considered as a less ‘high’ cortical function
than functions subserving ‘pure’ thought.”[81]
In just a matter of a few decades since the debut of MI theory,
results from neuroscience research have radically shifted our notion
of how the mind works from a top-down processing model (the idea
of a wise superbrain controlling the dumb body) to an integrative,
bottom-up model, revealing that emotions and physical actions are
more fundamental to the way we make decisions and take action
than was previously understood. Taking recent research into
account, it is no longer plausible to talk of the muscular movements
of the body as always (to borrow Gardner’s terminology) “subserving
high cortical function.”
Stanley and Krakauer translate this idea in colloquial terms in an
opinion piece with the catchy headline “Is the Dumb Jock Really a
Nerd?” They hold that any motor skill presupposes that some kind of
direction is given and that the skill has to be practiced until it is
mastered. This, they conclude, shows that “motor skill, like any other
cognitive task, requires knowledge.”[82]
 To musicians, this conclusion is not exactly earth-shattering or
particularly revelatory. Of course, singing and playing instruments
are motor skills that involve both gross- and fine-motor coordination.
Of course this kind of coordination is a higher-order function than,
say, brushing one’s teeth. And of course, fine playing and singing
require knowledge. Depending upon the musical style, learning to
make music at a professional level requires particular and special
knowledge of the sort that can only be gotten from an experienced
guide: knowledge of repertoire, of technique, of language, of historic
style periods, of literature and dramatic conventions. So why then
should performing artists care about philosophy or neuroscience—or
its hybrid, neurophilosophy? Because, in the words of Stanley and
Krakauer, “We are not supposed to call LeBron James a ‘genius’
because cultural biases have infected science without the
moderating input of the humanities.”[83]
We care because athletes and musicians who inhabit the realm
of the body are heirs to these cultural biases and because, despite
the erosion of the mind-body dichotomy, like the left brain–right brain
theory of personality, this division yet remains alive in the culture.
Just take a look at what is emphasized in school curricula and even
the notion of intelligence itself. The products of the mind are still
privileged over the products of the body—and not just any mind.
Gardner calls this mind “the law professor mind—somebody who’s
very linguistic and logical.”[84]
In performance art and high-level athletics, the boundary line
between the declarative and the procedural is blurred. We must have
knowledge of facts before we can effect that knowledge in a
procedural, physical form. Singers, instrumentalists, dancers, and
athletes must first know-that in order to know-how.
But this is only an initial step. Know-how has to quickly progress
to encoding deep in our memory so that later retrieval of know-how
is automatic. LeDoux asserts that “cognitive processes are not
dependent upon consciousness.”[85] In fact, he says, there is so
much activity that occurs outside our awareness that “actually,
consciousness depends upon unconscious cognitive processes.”[86]
For athletes, dancers, and musicians, it is the unconscious bits of
cognitive processes that concern us. While the Holy Grail for
neurophilosophers is the question of consciousness, a perpetual
quest for musicians is the automaticity of learned actions—that is,
how reliably can we access our technique without consciously
thinking about it?
Stanley and Krakauer state that, “in the enterprise of uncovering
truth, the paths of the scientist and the humanist must often
intersect.”[87] Agreed. At that intersection, let us imagine a kind of
performance art where the neuroscientists set to examining the
biological processes of consciousness, the neurophilosophers
exercise their minds over their “hard problem,” and we musicians
simply do music.
Experienced musicians have known all along that the ancient
mind-body problem is no problem at all because, for us, the division
between body and mind is recognized through experience as false.
When we sing, whether through our throats or through our
instruments, we are all in, as the song goes, body and soul.

HOW THE THING WORKS

The date was April 14, 2005, and the setting was the Vanuxem
Public Lecture Series at Princeton University. An enthusiastic
audience had gathered to hear the famous neuroscientist Michael
Gazzaniga give a speech titled “Personal Identity, Neuroethics and
the Human Brain”:

Bingo! Modern neuroscience! So we’re moving down this path,

and everybody is being told that we are coming to a greater and
greater understanding of the mechanistic nature of the human
brain and we are; that’s just the deal, we are. Someday,
somewhere, somehow, someone is going to figure out how the
damn thing works![88]

Audience reaction to this public declaration by such an

esteemed neuroscientist as Gazzaniga ranged from delight to
bemusement to consternation.[89] Given his outsize history as a
pioneer of the field, Gazzaniga’s zeal is understandable, but the
quest to understand the mechanistic nature of any system, be it the
human brain, the human hand, or the human voice, is only part of
the question. We must also ask what revealing the mechanism might
tell us about how we learn, remember, create, feel, and
communicate—the essence of what makes us human—and in doing
so, help us do those things better. The final, related existential
question—why what we do matters at all—is left to the poet, the
painter, and the musician to answer simply by plying their art.
The human brain functions as both artist and scientist by
producing abilities and then comprehending them—by bringing forth
actions and interpreting them. It takes two hemispheres in constant
communication with one another to experience and interpret the
world, just as it takes a whole brain to bring forth and perceive
compelling music.

NOTES
1. Christof Koch, “Decoding ‘the Most Complex Object in the
Universe,’” NPR, June 14, 2013,
www.npr.org/2013/06/14/191614360/decodingthe-most-complex-
object-in-the-universe.
2. Eric Kandel, “The New Science of Mind,” Scientific American Mind
(April/May 2006): 65.
3. See B. L. Beyerstein, “Brainscams: Neuromythologies of the New
Age,” International Journal of Mental Health 19, no. 3 (1990): 27–36;
S. Della Salla, ed., Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions
about the Mind and Brain (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999); and
S. Della Salla, ed., Tall Tales about the Mind and Brain: Separating
Fact from Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
4. See UPI, “Poll: Music Education Is Important,” April 21, 2003,
www.upi.com/Top_News/2003/04/21/Poll-Music-education-is-
important/UPI-99891050959298/#ixzz35CK0oZUx; and NAMM,
“New Gallup Survey by NAMM Reflects Majority of Americans Agree
with Many Benefits of Playing Musical Instruments,” April 29, 2009,
www.namm.org/news/press-releases/new-gallup-survey-namm-
reflects-majority-americans.
5. Francis Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky, “Music and
Spatial Task Performance,” Nature 365 (October 1993): 611.
6. Quoted in Alix Spiegel, “Mozart Effect, Schmozart Effect: Science
Misinterpreted,” NPR, June 26, 2010,
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128104580.
7. “Governor Wants Babies to Hear Classical Music,” Augusta
Chronicle,
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/1998/01/14/met_220543.shtml.
8. State of Florida Senate Bill 660, May 21, 1998.
9. The Mozart Effect Resource Centre, 2016, www.mozarteffect.com.
10. Karen Auge, “Baby Einstein DVD Creators Find Redemption in
Documents Suggesting Negative Study Was Flawed,” Denver Post,
June 30, 2011, www.denverpost.com/ci_18381772.
11. Tamar Lewin, “‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court,” New York
Times, January 13, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/education/13einstein.html.
12. Spiegel, “Mozart Effect, Schmozart Effect.”
13. Joel Schwarz, “Baby DVDs, Videos May Hinder, Not Help,
Infants’ Language Development,” UW News, August 7, 2007,
www.washington.edu/news/2007/08/07/baby-dvds-videos-may-
hinder-not-help-infants-language-development/.
14. Ibid.
15. Auge, “Baby Einstein DVD Creators.”
16. Tamar Lewin, “No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund,” New
York Times, October 24, 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/education/24baby.html.
17. Christopher Chabris, “Prelude or Requiem for the ‘Mozart
Effect’?” Nature 400 (August 26, 1999): 826–27.
18. See Pippa McKelvie and Jason Low, “Listening to Mozart Does
Not Improve Children’s Spatial Ability: Final Curtains for the Mozart
Effect,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 20, no. 2
(2002): 241–58.
19. Spiegel, “Mozart Effect, Schmozart Effect.”
20. E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Music Lessons Enhance IQ,”
Psychological Science 15, no. 8 (2004): 511–14.
21. Adrian Bangerter and Chip Heath, “The Mozart Effect: Tracking
the Evolution of a Scientific Legend,” British Journal of Social
Psychology 43, no. 4 (December 2004): 608.
22. Ibid., 619.
23. See Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself (New York:
Viking Penguin, 2007).
24. Quoted in Sarah Moughty, “The Zero to Three Debate: A
Cautionary Look at Turning Science into Policy,” PBS, January 31,
2012,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/science/zero.ht
ml.
25. Ibid.
26. Zero to Three, “Our Work,” 2019, www.zerotothree.org/our-work .
27. John T. Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years (New York: Free
Press, 1999).
28. John T. Bruer, “A Path Not Taken,” 2002, James S. McDonnell
Foundation, www.jsmf.org/about/j/path_not_taken.htm.
29. Ibid.
30. Malcolm Macmillan, “The Phineas Gage Story,” Cummings
Center for the History of Psychology, University of Akron,
www.uakron.edu/gage/story.dot .
31. Ibid.
32. Malcolm Macmillan and Matthew Lena, “Rehabilitating Phineas
Gage,” Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 20, no. 5 (2010): 641–58,
doi:10.1080/09602011003760527.
33. While Broca’s area is designated for speech production,
Wernicke’s contribution was the location of the place for language
processing. This area, named after him, is far, in “brain
measurements,” from Broca’s area. Thus Broca’s aphasics typically
cannot utter much beyond a few syllables but comprehend what is
being said to them, while Wernicke aphasics can speak perfectly
well but make little sense.
34. See Sam Kean, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons (New
York: Little, Brown, 2014); and Hugh W. Buckingham, “The Marc Dax
(1770–1837)/Paul Broca (1824–1880) Controversy over Priority in
Science: Left Hemisphere Specificity for Seat of Articulate Language
and for Lesions That Cause Aphemia,” Clinical Linguistics &
Phonetics 20, nos. 7–8 (2006): 613–19.
35. Roger W. Sperry, “Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral
Hemispheres,” Nobel Prize,
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1981/sperry/25059-roger-w-
sperry-nobel-lecture-1981/.
36. For information on split-brain patients, see Michael S.
Gazzaniga, “Spheres of Influence,” Scientific American Mind
(June/July 2008); and Emily Esfahani Smith, “One Head, Two
Brains,” Atlantic, July 27, 2015.
37. Sperry, “Some Effects of Disconnecting.”
38. Michael Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain in Man,” Scientific
American 217, no. 2 (1967): 24–29.
39. For an excellent overview, see Stephen M. Kosslyn and G.
Wayne Miller, Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How
You Think (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), ch. 5.
40. Barry L. Beyerstein, “Brainscams: Neuromythologies of the New
Age,” International Journal of Mental Health 19, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 32.
41. Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Los
Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1979), vii.
42. Ibid.
43. Richard Bergland, The Fabric of the Mind (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1985). Dr. Bergland served as a neuro-expert for art
teacher Betty Edwards. According to Bergland’s son, his father later
regretted abetting this popular account of the creative right brain; see
Christopher Bergland, “The Split-Brain: An Ever-Changing
Hypothesis,” Psychology Today, March 30, 2017,
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201703/the-split-
brain-ever-changing-hypothesis.
44. Edward, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
45. Charles Limb and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of
Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz
Improvisation,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 2 (February 2008).
46. Charles Limb, “Your Brain on Improv,” TED Talk, November
2010, www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.
47. Bertram Raven, “The Bases of Power: Origins and Recent
Developments,” Journal of Social Issues 49, no. 4 (Winter 1993):
237–38.
48. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla:
How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown, 2010), 142.
49. Jill Bolte Taylor, “My Stroke of Insight,” TED Talk, February 2008,
www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight/tra
nscript.
50. Ibid. I met Taylor as she was writing the first, self-published
version of what would later become her best-selling memoir, My
Stroke of Insight. A subsequent invitation to accompany her on a
late-night guided visit to the cadaver lab at Indiana University
revealed a person who truly believed in these two brain
“personalities” and was unequivocal about which side—the right—
held the promise of a “deep inner peace,” both interpersonally and
globally.
51. Iain McGilchrist, “Of Two Minds: The Origins of Our Mental
Malaise,” YouTube, March 7, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=6JbImYfRaZ8.
52. Kosslyn and Miller, Top Brain, Bottom Brain, xii.
53. Sperry, “Some Effects of Disconnecting.”
54. Iain McGilchrist, “Echange of Views: Top Brain, Bottom Brain: A
Reply to Stephen Kosslyn and Wayne Miller,”
http://178.62.31.128/exchange-of-views/.
55. Melinda Rogers, “Researchers Debunk Myth of ‘Right-Brain’ and
‘Left-Brain’ Personality Traits,” University of Utah Health Care,
August 14, 2013,
https://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/2013/08/08-14-
2013_brain_personality_traits.php.
56. Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork,
“Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” Psychological Science in
the Public Interest 9, no 3 (2008): 105–19. See also Polly R.
Husmann and Valerie Dean O’Loughlin, “Another Nail in the Coffin
for Learning Styles? Disparities among Undergraduate Anatomy
Students’ Study Strategies, Class Performance, and Reported VARK
Learning Styles,” Anatomical Sciences Education 12, no. 1 (2019):
6–19.
57. Christian Gaser and Gottfried Schlaug, “Brain Structures Differ
between Musicians and Non-Musicians,” Journal of Neuroscience
23, no. 27 (2003): 9240–45. See also Gottfried Schlaug, Lutz
Jäncke, Y. X. Huang, and H. Steinmetz, “In Vivo Evidence of
Structural Brain Asymmetry in Musicians,” Science 3 (1995): 267.
58. Krista L. Hyde, Jason Lerch, Andrea Norton, Marie Forgeard,
Ellen Winner, Alan C. Evans, and Gottfried Schlaug, “The Effects of
Musical Training on Structural Brain Development: A Longitudinal
Study,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1169 (2009):
182–86.
59. National Aphasia Assocation, “Aphasia FAQs,”
www.aphasia.org/aphasia-faqs/.
60. Richard Knox, “Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Speak
Again,” NPR, December 26, 2011, www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2011/12/26/144152193/singing-therapy-helps-stroke-patients-
speak-again.
61. See Northwestern University, “Auditory Neuroscience
Laboratory,” 2019, Brainvolts, www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/.
62. Emily Gersema, “Music Training Can Change Children’s Brain
Structure and Boost the Decision-Making Network,” USCDornsife,
November 28, 2017,
https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/2711/music-training-can-
change-childrens-brain-structure-and-boost-th/.
63. Assal Habibi, Antonio Damasio, Beatriz Ilari, Ryan Veiga, Anand
A. Joshi, Richard M. Leahy, Justin P. Haldar, Divya Varadarajan,
Chitresh Bhushan, and Hanna Damasio, “Childhood Music Training
Induces Change in Micro- and Macroscopic Brain Structure: Results
from a Longitudinal Study,” Cerebral Cortex 28, no. 12 (2017): 4336–
47.
64. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton,
1997), 534.
65. Ibid.
66. See Dan Sperber, “The Modularity of Thought and the
Epidemiology of Representations,” in Mapping the Mind: Domain
Specificity in Cognition and Culture, ed. Lawrence A. Hirschfeld and
Susan A. Gelman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
56. See also Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic
Approach (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
67. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 123.
68. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
69. For an overview of the many hypotheses about the importance
and use of music that both pre- and postdate Pinker’s infamous
“cheesecake” dismissal of it, see Mithen, Singing Neanderthals, 5,
where he cites the work of Ian Cross, Elizabeth Tolbert, Nicholas
Bannon, Robin Dunbar, John Blacking, and Alison Wray.
70. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 24.
71. Daniel Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 3rd ed.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 338.
72. David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (March 1995): 200–19.
73. Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who
We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), 10.
74. Ibid.
75. Monica Cowart, “Embodied Cognition,” Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/embodcog/#H2.
76. Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New
Science of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 9.
77. LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 10.
78. Ibid., 11.
79. Jason Stanley and John W. Krakauer, “Motor Skill Depends on
Knowledge of Facts,” Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 7, no. 503
(August 2013): 1–11.
80. Jason Stanley and John W. Krakauer, “Is the Dumb Jock Really
a Nerd?” New York Times, October 27, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs
.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/is-the-dumb-jock-really-a-nerd/.
81. Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed (New York: Basic Books,
1999), 22.
82. Stanley and Krakauer, “Dumb Jock.”
83. Ibid.
84. Howard Gardner, “Big Thinkers: Howard Gardner on Multiple
Intelligences,” Edutopia, April 1, 2009, www.edutopia.org/multiple-
intelligences-howard-gardner-video.
85. LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 23.
86. Ibid.
87. Stanley and Krakauer, “Dumb Jock.”
88. Michael Gazzaniga, “Personal Identity, Neuroethics and the
Human Brain,” Media Central, April 14, 2005,
https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Personal+Idenity%2C+Neu
roethics+and+the+Human+Brain/1_3mogkeqb.
89. My personal account, as I was in attendance. Reaction can be
heard in Gazzaniga, “Personal Identity,” starting with Gazzaniga’s
statement at 15:47.
 Chapter 3
How Learning Works
What is learning? This is the vital question of cognitive science.
Certainly learning is a fundamental—some say the fundamental—
human enterprise. Given that the relatively new field of cognitive
neuroscience is investigating the most complex system in the known
universe, it should not be terribly surprising that exactly how humans
learn is still not completely understood, yet the dogged quest to do
so continues.
The most widely accepted working theory is that learning is not
one discrete process but rather a complex, three-step process of
attention, learning itself, and memory. Let’s consider these related
processes within the binary system encountered in chapter 2 (know-
that and know-how) but only because this binary system and its
vocabulary are still very much in use in psychology. As noted in
chapter 2, this binary view was deeply rooted in the ancient world, so
it will take some time for the eroding boundaries between body and
brain to produce a new concept, and a new vocabulary, for
understanding ourselves as a unified whole.

TWO BASIC MODES OF INFORMATION

PROCESSING
Our construct of human knowledge presently rests on two pillars:
knowledge that is gained by exercising the human attribute of
reason, or rational knowledge, and knowledge gained through
sensory experience, known as empirical knowledge. This dichotomy
is still reflected in standard modern learning theories, despite the
many terms used to describe them. Two of the most accepted are
declarative learning and procedural learning.
Declarative learning (know-that) is information that one can
speak about, or “declare.” The construction know-that refers to
knowledge of facts, as in “I know that a formant is a resonance of the
vocal tract.” This kind of knowledge is not innate; it has to be
declared to the learner and is best elucidated with an expert teacher
as a guide. Declarative learning typically takes place over a time
period of days, weeks, or months. Memory for words and life
episodes also falls under the category of declarative learning.
Procedural learning (know-how) refers to learning physical skills
(procedures) by doing and is inclusive of both those innate
movements with which we are born, like crawling, and advanced
skills like learning to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument. The
field of study dedicated to research in procedural learning is called
motor learning, wherein motor refers both to motion and to the motor
neurons (brain cells) that create movement.
Procedural learning in humans begins almost from birth. We
are, one might say, preprogrammed to learn to grasp and crawl and
then walk all on our own as toddlers, which we do by trying, falling,
and trying again—no teacher is necessary. Acquisition of the
physical movements needed for survival advance relatively quickly,
usually in a matter of hours. Thus a crucial difference between
declarative learning and procedural learning is the speed with which
each adheres.
However, advanced muscular skills (also called higher-order
muscular tasks), like those on display in a concert pianist, do not
come pre-installed in humans and must be learned via a combination
of declarative and procedural learning. Singing displays this dual
nature: we explore the range and extent of our own voices by
wailing, giggling, and cooing as babies. As we mature, we can easily
find our own singing voice, particularly if our surrounding culture
provides for it and supports it: family sing-alongs and community
singing in religious services provide just these opportunities. Many
singers of popular styles report these experiences as formative and
rightfully claim to be self-taught.
However, those wishing to learn the Western, classical tradition
of singing—which is distinguished by a large pitch range, sustained
breathing, natural amplification, seamless register shifts, and agile
execution of rapid scale passages—must first be led by a master
teacher as a guide and then must practice with regularity and
discipline. Due to these requirements, this style of singing is anything
but natural; indeed, it could be called “supranatural.” Singers of
contemporary commercial styles may experience a great deal of
success on their own, but those who wish to extend their vocal
range, stamina, and control find that working with a voice coach
typically advances these aims further than going solo.
Regardless of the instrument, working with a music teacher
involves learning high-order tasks that are more complex and refined
than generic strumming or voicing. High-order and complex
muscular tasks all have one attribute in common: they require
practice over time. High-order muscular tasks are situated at the
nexus of declarative and procedural learning: as described by
Stanley and Krakauer in chapter 2, we must first know that in order
to know how. Table 3.1 illustrates the standard synonyms in use for
declarative and procedural learning and their attributes.

The Two Basic Modes of Human Information Processing and

Their Attributes
Declarative Learning (also called Procedural Learning (also called
Declarative Memory) Procedural Memory)

propositional tacit

explicit implicit

controlled automatic

learned inherent

slow fast

demands attention can multitask

avoidable unavoidable

volitional not volitional

know-that know-how

top-down (via the executive control bottom-up (via the autonomic nervous
center of the brain) system)

LEARNING DEFINED
From the inception of the field of psychology in the early nineteenth
century, learning has been its most assiduously studied topic.
Schools of thought and their resultant vocabularies arose in both
Europe and America, yet in the face of the subject’s enormity and
without the connective power of the Internet, the creation of a
commonly accepted definition of learning was nearly impossible. In
the twenty-first century, our ability to view the brain’s inner workings
in real time via fMRI and the rapid dissemination of digital
information have generated much more information yet not
necessarily more clarity toward a definition of learning.
Nevertheless, a definition of learning is needed in order to
understand some fundamental properties of learning and then apply
those properties to music teaching, learning, and performance.
Therefore two simple definitions for each of the modes of learning
are offered here, condensed from the most common elements found
in accepted learning theories.

The Classic Two Modes of Learning

Declarative Learning. A process that results in a permanent

change in behavior as a result of experience.
Procedural Learning. A process that results in a permanent
change in behavior as a result of practice.

Notice that both definitions are exactly the same except for the
crucial factor that causes each type of learning to adhere, or “cause
a permanent change in behavior.” These factors are experience and
practice.
In the case of declarative learning, if the information presented
is easily understood and there is a desire to learn it, it is often
enough to simply be introduced to a topic to be able to claim it later
as learned. More challenging types of declarative information (such
as note names and key signatures) must be studied in order to be
learned. As any student knows, studying facts to the extent that they
can be successfully recalled for an exam requires motivation and
diligence. Thus another key attribute of declarative learning that
distinguishes it from procedural learning is volition—the learner must
want to learn, as captured in this canny bit of folk wisdom: You can
lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Motivation, desire, and volition are all components of our inner
emotional landscape and undergird episodic memory (life
experiences), which, as already noted, are a subset of declarative
learning. Typically these experiences must contain enough emotion
to be remembered, like the joy of one’s wedding day or the
excruciating grief experienced by the loss of a loved one. These
events do not require practice to embed them in memory; they are
seared there by strong feelings. This explains why not all things that
are experienced are necessarily remembered, like where you parked
at the grocery store, an unarguably unremarkable event—unless you
are at the same time rear-ended by a distracted driver. The addition
of strong emotion (shock, anger, humiliation) rockets an event from
routine to remarkable in an instant.
Conversely, procedural learning requires doing. No substitutions
are viable. Procedural learning of basic human skills occurs
concurrently with the development of proprioception, which is the
body’s own sense of its movements, positions, balance, and spatial
orientation (where it is in relation to other people and objects).
Learning these most fundamental human physical skills is largely
nonvolitional; we learn them by experiencing the world, thus the
learning will occur whether we wish it to or not, as a matter of
survival.
Thus procedural learning and declarative learning exhibit
significant differences regarding speed of acquisition and volition.
But both types of learning share certain common processes, which I
will address before returning to their differences in chapter 4.

THE TRIUMVIRATE OF LEARNING

The three-step process of attention, learning itself, and memory
functions much like the ancient Roman triumvirate, a political alliance
of three separate but equally powerful players who worked together
toward a common goal. And like those ancient Roman politicians,
these three phases are complex and display their own distinct
attributes. Yet they also overlap within a connected neural network
and attend both declarative and procedural learning. A very
simplified scheme of these three phases is provided here as I
explain both the psychological and the neurobiological processes
that support learning.

How Learning Works

Step One: Attention. This is the prerequisite condition for

learning. Learning cannot happen until and unless one first pays
attention. Note: Attention has a limited capacity in the human brain.
Brain Activity—Biochemical changes, specifically the release of
chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. In the early stages of
learning, the synapses (the gaps between brain cells where chemical
messages are exchanged) are temporarily destabilized.
Step Two: Learning Itself. This is the dynamic process
whereby new information is first absorbed (called short-term
memory), sorted and manipulated (called working memory), and
then combined with what we already know (called constructive
memory).
Brain Activity—More release of neurotransmitters. With
repetition, the number of synaptic connections in the brain begins to
stabilize. This process is called memory consolidation.
Step Three: Long-Term Memory. Once a thing has been
learned, it has exited the realm of learning (short-term and working
memory) and exists in the realm of long-term memory. Long-term
memory is like a treasure chest where things of value are stored and
from which they can be retrieved. The evidence that a thing is
learned is its repeatability. In the motor realm, this is called
automaticity.
Brain Activity—Anatomical changes in brain tissue are
observed. The brain has reorganized itself.
Step One: Attention

Attention is the first and arguably the most powerful player in the
triumvirate of learning. As such, it is the subject of much current
scientific research and even the star of its own academic journal.
Given its prominence, attention is a player you will encounter
repeatedly throughout this book.
Perhaps the most important attribute of attention is that it is not
a solo entity but a complex neurological system distributed
throughout the brain via a connected neural network. Scientists’
current understanding of attention is that this network is made up of
four components, the first two being our primary ways of paying
attention: first, a state exemplified by its name, the default mode, and
second, a state called executive attention, which governs conscious
control of attention for staying on task. The third component of
attention acts an attentional switch, directing the brain’s resources
among the previous two primary two modes of attention. The fourth
component is an attentional filter, constantly patrolling the perimeter
outside our conscious awareness like a sentry poised to alert us to
the presence of danger or some other compelling distraction.[1] Let
us consider the first three components (I will revisit the fourth in
chapter 6 for its role in performance anxiety).
Default mode is the place to which the brain returns when not
engaged in a cognitive task or hijacked by some other arousal.[2]
One of the default mode’s discoverers, Marcus Raichle, notes that it
was discovered almost by accident. When people whose brains were
being scanned during cognitive tasks were given a rest, their brain
activity actually increased instead of decreasing as expected. In fact,
in subsequent experiments, Raichle and his team discovered that
“the cost of intrinsic [brain] activity far exceeds that of evoked
activity”; in other words, the great majority of the brain’s energy
budget—estimated to be an amazing 60–80 percent—is given over
to fuel this interior default mode instead of tasks that come at us
from the outside.[3] This is an enormously important finding. Raichle
nicknamed this brain energy “dark energy” to describe forces as yet
“unaccounted for.”[4]
 Two nicknames for the default mode, “daydreaming mode” and
“mind-wandering mode,” further enlighten us as to its function.
Unfortunately, these labels conjure images of laziness and lethargy,
which obfuscate not only the intrinsic brainwork that happens in this
state (as evidenced by its energy consumption) but also the deep
worth of this mode to our cognitive function. Far from being a slothful
state, the default mode is where we go to plan, project, and envision
our lives. Because of this, the default mode is also credited with
being an arena where connections occur and creativity happens.
This explains the sudden insight that can attend such mind-
wandering activities as a short doze or a walk in nature—even a bout
of mindless housekeeping chores can help our brains reset.
This research is both exciting and even vindicating for
composers, writers, and other creative thinkers who have historically
been exhorted to get their head out of the clouds and stop
daydreaming. Now it appears that the cloud of the mind (not the
Internet) may be the most fertile place for a brain to be.
By contrast, executive attention pushes out distractions when
“evoked activities” necessitate it, sharpening the mental focus
necessary for staying on task and the mental acuity needed for jobs
that require a high degree of accuracy. An important point about
these first two, primary ways of paying attention is that, when one
system is operational, the other is down. Thus we can trust that a
trained surgeon who operates on us is herself operating strictly in
executive attention and not day-dreaming (or default-moding) her
way through our procedure.

Attention Aids: Emotion and Desire

So far, a few points about attention are clear. First, attention is

the prerequisite condition for learning; a person simply cannot learn
until he first attends. In fact, it is generally agreed that all high-order
cognitive tasks depend on attention as regulated by executive
attention (the central executive network). But it is equally clear that
refreshment in the daydreaming state is not only pleasant but
essential to our mental health and our humanity and similarly
essential to becoming and being a musician. With such importance
attached to attention, we might well wonder what assists attention
and what is toxic to it. We will now consider the former and return to
the latter in chapter 7.
People with normally ordered brains can choose to switch on
executive attention by exerting the human parameter of free will but
only when inspired to do so by desire; learners must first want to pay
attention before they truly can. Furthermore, our brains are receptive
to new information relative to how much we care about that
information. Therefore, the measure of desire is a particularly
significant component of voluntary attention. But what sparks desire
in the first place? The simple answer is emotion. But like everything
else having to do with the human condition, emotion is far from
simple. Emotion is a vast and complex subject as well as an age-old
conundrum. Emotion has bedeviled human beings for as long as we
have been sentient.
Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) term for emotion was pathé, variously
translated as “desire” or “appetite.” During the seventeenth century,
René Descartes recognized the physiological upheavals generated
by these appetites as “passions of the soul” and attributed this
agitation to the pineal gland in the brain, which he believed to be
home base for the human soul.
Eighteenth-century beliefs about emotion were rocked by
romantic thought, which regarded emotion as a natural and raw
human attribute that, enchained by propriety, longed to escape its
restraining fetters. This take on emotion persisted through the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in some sense it is still
present in popular culture, particularly among artists.
As noted in chapter 1, in the early twentieth century, emotion
experienced a banishment at the hands of behaviorist psychologists,
who eschewed emotion as far too frivolous for serious scientific
study. And even though the cognitive revolution overturned
behaviorism at midcentury, the pioneers of cognitivism had as much
interest in emotion as had their predecessors, which is to say, almost
none.
Yet new research on emotion from neuroscience reveals that
emotion, rather than being rationality’s silly and polar opposite, is
fundamentally entwined with human reason. Neuroscientists like
Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and Joseph LeDoux have worked
to repair the mind-body split proposed by Descartes by plucking
emotion from the ephemeral realm of the spirit and grounding it
within the physical functions of the body. Emotions, according to
LeDoux, are solidly defined as “biological functions of the nervous
system.” Damasio, through his now-famous somatic marker
hypothesis, has advanced emotion as a critical component of human
decision-making and thus an assistant to reason—a far cry from its
centuries-old characterization as a fickle temptress who leads us
astray from reason. And as already noted, unless a person cares
enough to expend some effort, he will not learn because he will not
have “attended.” So emotion sparks desire, which in turn ignites
attention.
Emotion plays an equally critical role in memory consolidation,
which is the cognitive term for learning. Emotion helps encode our
experiences into long-term memory, all the more so if the emotions
are strong ones. It is perhaps for this reason that extreme technical
breakthroughs in a music lesson, or superlative performance
experiences, are deeply remembered.
On the other end of the emotion spectrum, extremely frightening
or humiliating events can become so encoded in memory that certain
stimuli, especially smells and sounds, can activate the so-called
alerting network of our attentional filter. Harmless sounds like
fireworks can recall a returning war veteran’s memories of enemy
fire with devastating consequences for mental health, as is seen in
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Even the scent of a certain
aftershave or a special sound (the personal ringtone on a cell
phone), if they are entangled with memories of particularly brutal or
humiliating events, can engender symptoms of PTSD. Please note,
however, that emotion’s role in the triumvirate of attention, learning,
and memory has been qualified as needing to be intense in order to
persist. Tripping during a stage entrance or enduring the snarky
comments of a nasty colleague, as unpleasant or unwarranted as
such events might be, should not deeply encode themselves in the
long-term memories of most people or to such a degree as to cause
long-term damage. An outsize reaction to such slights may be a
component of music performance anxiety, an affliction I will consider
separately in chapter 6.

Attention Aids: Motivation and Rewards

Desire is the ignition system of attention. Most musicians can

recall an event or series of experiences that first sparked their desire
to learn to play an instrument or sing. The early learning experiences
that followed may have been marked by joyful exploration. But how
do musicians keep desire alive during the long slog to mastery? How
do they stay motivated to commit to a practice regimen? Admittedly,
desire and motivation are among the most elusive conditions to
sustain, as anyone who has tried to commit to a study schedule,
exercise routine, or diet can attest. Still, there are a few things known
to ignite desire and to support continued motivation for staying on
course.
Before considering them, let us quickly dispense with a popular
yet ultimately counterproductive method for boosting desire and
motivation: the use of rewards, such as candy, praise, or money, all
of which come straight from the behaviorist playbook. As noted in
chapter 1, researcher Alfie Kohn has shown that such incentives are
not only ineffective but can actually contribute to a damaging spiral
of regression into stasis. Readers are strongly encouraged to read
Kohn’s persuasive writing on this issue, but some of his most
essential findings are summarized here. Note that these findings
apply to all people who operate within a reward system, whether as
children in a family, students in school, or adults in the workplace.[5]

Rewards are dispensed by a giver who is in a more

powerful position than the doer, who is the receiver of the
reward. Therefore, rewards are ultimately about power and
manipulation. In this configuration, there is little space for the
doer to develop their own intrinsic motivation. These are very
shallow roots upon which to build moral behavior, strong
learning, or a fulfilling career. Shallow-rooted trees blow over in
a strong wind.
 People who operate within a reward system tend to
hyperfocus on the end goal (the reward) and rush toward it, to
the detriment of quality. Similarly, people who rush toward the
reward do so to the detriment of creativity. Quality and creativity
take time to achieve.
People who operate within a reward system, whether
children, students, or adults, may respond in the short term to
rewards, but since the reward itself is the goal and not improved
behavior, stronger learning, or higher-quality work, these
attributes do not survive once the reward is removed. Treats and
financial incentives are quick fixes but do not cultivate long-term
habits.

So if rewards are not the primary forces that stimulate human

endeavor and creativity, what are? It seems that most humans are
more stimulated by intrinsic rewards—for example, joy in pursuing
the endeavor itself, the excitement of discovery, a deep sense of
meaning and contribution to a cause, or the freedom of charting
one’s own course. Indeed, autonomy has proven to be one of the
most prized characteristics cited by employees on ratings of job
satisfaction.[6]
Kohn has often noted that, in his research on this topic, he is
continually reminded that punishments and rewards are ultimately
about power and manipulation. When motivation and desire become
mixed up with power and manipulation, the propensity for coercion
always crouches close by. Yet there is this deep truth: no one person
can tempt, bribe, or force another to sincerely feel desire for learning
or experience motivation for staying on a focused path. Even in the
most extreme cases of coercion, no one can be forced to feel a false
emotion. Children pushed to take music lessons may go through the
motions (like practice) to please a coach or receive parental rewards,
but there is no way around this essential truth. The extremely
abusive childhood of internationally renowned Chinese pianist Lang
Lang bears this out.
In an interview, Lang Lang recounted a litany of abuse by his
father, Lang Guoren, who quit his job as a policeman in their
industrial hometown, left his wife (and Lang Lang’s mother) behind,
and moved with his nine-year-old son to the city of Beijing so he
could oversee a brutal practice regimen meant to ready Lang Lang
for audition at the Central Conservatory of Music. Lang Lang’s
father’s creed was “pressure always turns into motivation.” But Lang
Lang reports that, even as a child, “I found the pressure unnecessary
because I was a workaholic from the very beginning. I could
understand if I was lazy and didn’t care, but I didn’t need that kind of
push, because I knew what I wanted.”
Despite his motivation, the nine-year-old was kicked out of his
Beijing music teacher’s studio (she said he had no talent), causing
his father to go, in Lang Lang’s account, “totally nuts.” Lang Guoren
actually demanded that the boy kill himself for shame, handing him a
bottle of pills to do the deed. Lang Lang ran to the balcony of their
small apartment, but his father followed, screaming, “Then jump off
and die.” Obviously, Lang Lang did not comply, and today he is one
of the world’s reigning concert pianists. But he recalls beating his
hands violently against the wall in order to ruin them and make
practicing impossible, an embargo that lasted for months. It was only
when he found his own joy in playing that he returned to his practice
routine, motivated by an inner desire to reaudition for the
conservatory, which he accomplished at the tender age of ten,
receiving a full scholarship.[7]
This admittedly extreme example of coercion demonstrates that
if attention is completely voluntary, so too is the deployment of its
aids, desire and motivation. When these systems are firing at full
speed, there are several procedures that can also assist attention.

Attention Aid: Goal-Setting

One of the best techniques shown to sustain motivation and

keep attention on track is goal-setting, the conscious act of listing
one or several goals that one wishes to reach. Goal-setting has been
shown in the short run to stimulate motivation and in the long run to
actually increase achievement. Goal-setting works in part by
concretizing vague notions of achievement.
It also promotes focus, cultivates self-regulation by aiding
impulse control, and helps calibrate efficient use of time and financial
resources. These various benefits accrue to promote positive
feelings, which in turn feed more motivation. In order for these
benefits to occur, several factors must be taken into consideration.
Who is the goal-setter? Given the high degree of
independence needed in mastering an instrument, the goal-setter
must be the student musician himself, not his teacher, parents, or
friends. This correlates with similar findings that self-motivation is the
most effective type of motivation. In this case, mastering one’s
destiny can be an extremely powerful motivator. Interestingly, the
best learners are those who demonstrate both greater persistence
and willingness to fail—both of which are necessary conditions for
learning.
Goals must be valued by the goal-setter. Aspirations that are
not one’s own are doomed from the outset. In addition, dreams so
freighted with the wishes of others (parents, for example) can
severely compromise the mental health of the learner who takes on
another’s vision, as the biographies of wunderkinds in music and
sports have sadly attested.
Goals must be specific. Goals that are specific (“I want to
develop a more efficient fingering strategy”) are more likely to be
attained than goals that are vague (“I want to become a better
musician”). Similarly, goals that are written down, shared with a
teacher, or posted on the bathroom mirror are more likely to be
heeded than those that exist simply in the learner’s mind.
Goals must be realistic and realizable. Learners can follow
the old adage “Don’t bite off more than you can chew,” but teachers
are enormously influential in this category and can set learning
parameters that are both challenging and achievable.
There must be both short-term and long-term goals.
Learners will likely stay more motivated if they can experience
success relatively quickly with a short-term goal while keeping their
eyes on the prize of a long-term goal. Teachers can construct
lessons that guarantee early accomplishment, gradually moving the
goals outward in concentric rings of success.
Goal-setters must answer the question “How?” One study
reported that students who were required to not only state their goals
but also write exactly how they intended to achieve them were more
likely to succeed. Rather than saying “I will practice a lot,” which is
vague, a developing musician should assess how much practice
time they can devote to their instrument per week, draft a schedule,
then commit to it.
A note to teachers: You can require your students to share
these goals with you in writing at the outset of your relationship. If
musicians in your studio are failing to achieve at their predicted rate,
it can be very enlightening for both parties to return to this document
for an assessment.
Musicians can use these tools to refashion their practice
routines to ensure higher rates of success. As noted, the desire to
pay attention—what some researchers have termed the arousal, or
preattentional, phase of learning—is key. Once hooked, we must
apply effort to our learning, a certain doggedness known as grit,
which mainlines strong emotion to fuel perseverance. Without
emotion, desire, and motivation, our experiences are ephemeral;
nothing sticks. Exposure is not learning.

Attention Aid: Sleep

Besides emotion, desire, motivation, and goal-setting, one final

parameter that is known to boost attention is sleep. Lack of sleep
damages attention. The eye-popping news from neuroscience,
however, is that sleep is actually a critical phase of the learning
process itself.
Like so many other brain states under review, sleep is now
understood as a complex set of brain processes and not a single
state of being. It is known that lack of adequate sleep impairs brain
function overall, damages learning, weakens performance in
cognitive tests, and slows reaction time for tasks that require
alertness, like driving and operating heavy machinery. Yet the
underlying biological reasons for why sleep deprivation is so
damaging and conversely why abundant sleep is so restorative are
still something of a mystery. Several studies offer some clues.
An important sleep study in 2013 revealed that sleep may be
critical for what amounts to brain cleaning. According to these
researchers, the brain lacks a conventional version of the lymphatic
system (which clears cellular debris out of the body), so it evolved its
own metabolic system, dubbed the glymphatic system, which
operates during sleep to flush away waste products accumulated
during wakefulness. This waste is not benign but actually toxic to
brain cells. According to this theory, the uncluttered and detoxified
brain should rise from sleep refreshed and more able to pay
attention.
A second theory holds that sleep and attention may have
coevolved as brain states that serve to regulate each other, albeit in
different ways. This theory is based on the observation that sleep
and executive attention share two common traits essential for normal
brain function: suppression and plasticity.
Regarding suppression, this theory starts with the observation
that the sentry-like qualities of the attentional filter—agility, vigilance,
and the suppression of trivia—come at a cost: this vigilance tires the
body and requires sleep to reenergize it. During sleep, a type of
suppression different from the one that is active during the day
seems to come on duty. We might think of this as a changing of the
guard: while one sentry sleeps, the other is actively blocking external
stimuli in order that we might fall asleep and stay asleep. Recent
research suggests that the difference between these two sentries is
the degree to which their efforts affect the entire brain. The sentry on
“wakefulness watch” duty must operate alongside the other three
components of the attentional system, and so its efforts are
somewhat shared and thus attenuated. But during sleep, the
“nighttime” suppression sentry has been observed (in studies of
humans and other mammals) to completely overtake the brain,
allowing us to enjoy a deep, refreshing sleep.
The second of the two common traits of sleep and executive
attention is neuroplasticity. Note that neuro- refers to neurons, the
nerve cells that make up the brain, and -plasticity in this case refers
to the malleable nature of the brain, which undergoes physiological
changes due to experience. This is important: Neuroplasticity is
nothing less than the biological basis of learning. As such (and as
you might imagine), neuroplasticity is certainly at work during our
waking hours, but what has been discovered is that neuroplasticity is
also active during sleep. We might say we are learning twenty-four
hours a day, even during sleep! How is this possible?
It starts with the theory of synaptic pruning, the processes by
which synapses (connections between neurons) that are weak (due
to lack of attention or practice) wither away, leaving behind those
synaptic connections that are strongest. It is believed that sleep is
the state most conducive to this pruning process because the brain
is least subject to interference from incoming stimuli (recall our
suppression sentry).
Finally, a related theory is that one cognitive purpose of sleeping
and dreaming is to replay short-term memories gathered throughout
the previous day and in so doing strengthen the neural pathways of
those memories and send them along their journey to long-term
memory consolidation—the cognitive term for learning itself.

Step Two: Learning

“If you are learning, you have not at the same time learned.”
—Aristotle

Aristotle’s profound observation perfectly captures two important

facets of learning. The first is its essence, which is its dynamic
nature. That is, learning is marked by change, even instability.
Learning is messy. If approached with a no-holds-barred spirit of
adventure, learning can be fun. But learning can also be challenging
to the point of joylessness, distress, or even humiliation.
Nevertheless, we cannot take a pass on learning; it is a fundamental
—some say the fundamental—human endeavor.
Yet given learning’s dynamic nature, we cannot always be in a
state of upheaval and transition. Learned items must be stowed in
order to make way for new experiences and ideas and also for later
retrieval. Thus, once learning has progressed from the transitive to
the past tense (“I have learned”), we are no longer actively learning.
The second facet of Aristotle’s astute observation is then realized:
the learned thing is a fait accompli and is now stored in long-term
memory.
 This process—from “learning” to “have learned”—is memory
consolidation. Much research has been devoted to this process,
which leads from the moment new information is first absorbed and
held in the mind for a period of seconds (short-term memory) to the
sorting and manipulation of this information while we are actively
learning (working memory) to the final result, long-term memory.
In order to comprehend this process, see the next section,
“Working Memory and Manipulation.” Picture short-term memory as
a brainpad of sticky notes—a place to temporarily jot down
impressions, facts, or sensations—but just like a real wad of sticky
notes, short-term memories are easily misplaced if we are not
attentive to them.
Working memory is the heart of the learning process in which
we manipulate our sticky notes, toss them about with facts we
already know, and recombine them with experiences we have
already had in order to make sense of them. Researchers refer to
this part of the learning process as maintenance or maintenance
plus manipulation. An attribute of working memory that is just as
important as this juggling act is its ability to keep irrelevant
information from entering our attentional field. What follows is a
restatement of this process in condensed form so as to incorporate
one new and vital piece of information.

Working Memory and Manipulation

Learning is the process whereby we hold about seven bits, or

four chunks, of information in mind, manipulate those bits or chunks,
and recombine them with facts or experiences we already know.

Working memory, or learning, is a process that starts by

considering a few bits or scraps (or sticky notes, if you prefer) of
information. The number of bits is “seven (plus or minus two),” the
compound number famously posited in 1956 by George Miller, a
founder of cognitive psychology (and one of those early
revolutionaries introduced in chapter 1). More recently, these bits are
now understood as chunks of information, of which we seem to be
able to manage around four. Let us consider how this works.

Chunking

Working memory is what is allowing you to read this chapter and

hopefully learn from it. As your reading progresses, your success is
partly dependent upon your ability to maintain the information from
the previous paragraphs in your mind; each successive paragraph
can build on the next only by your retention of the former. For
example, if you have been reading with concentration, you know that
we are now considering step 2 of the learning process, learning
itself. Step 1 is the topic of attention, with side trips featuring bits of
information about emotion, desire, and sleep that nevertheless were
all related to the main topic of attention. As such, we may call the
topic of attention a chunk made up of the mini-components (bits,
scraps, or sticky notes) of emotion, desire, sleep, and so forth.
Researchers have invented a new verb—chunking—to describe this
amalgamation of bits. Chunking itself is the subject of much
research; for example, people with superior memories seem to be
able to manipulate greater numbers of chunks than the average
person, plus the chunks themselves contain many more bits than the
average person can juggle. Yet evidence is mounting that all of us
can learn to use chunking to improve learning and develop better
memory capabilities. It just takes practice.

Constructed Memories

One final component of learning deserves mention: the notion of

recombination. As I have already shown, learning begins with
attention, followed by absorbing new bits information into our short-
term memory, then using working attention to manipulate those bits,
and finally storing those bits in long-term memory. But no learner is a
blank slate, and our individual slates become more populated with
ideas and experiences as we navigate our lives. We call these ideas
and experiences memories.
Any process of absorbing new information will necessarily
collide with our previous memories, so in order to calm the collision
and make sense of it all, we recombine the new information with the
memories we already own. This dynamic moment in the learning
process is called constructive memory, and its product we may call a
“constructed memory,” which we may loosely liken to a dairy treat in
which the vanilla ice cream is like the foundation of our memories
and the chocolate chips, nuts, and multi-colored sprinkles mixed in
are bits of accumulated new information.
The main benefit of constructive memory is its cumulative
quality: we use past experiences to change our actions in the
present and also to imagine the future. We learn from our mistakes
and build on our little victories. But detriments due to constructive
memory abound, chief among them being memory’s fallibility. It is
known that human memory is enormously prone to distortion and
outright error. Because the information we absorb (the chocolate) is
always mixed in with what we already know—or think we know—(the
vanilla ice cream base), our memories are constantly in flux and
never completely pure or stable. This is the dynamic core of learning
itself. As our memories pile up, our minds create frameworks to keep
them organized. These frameworks are called schemas (or
schemata) and are defined as a cognitive structure for representing,
organizing, and retrieving related information. As you shall see in
chapter 4, schemas are particularly important in motor learning.

Step Three: Memory

The complex neurobiological process of learning itself is

encoded in a maxim called Hebb’s rule: “Neurons that fire together
wire together.”[8] Learning begins when the synapses (the gaps
between neurons) are excited by a thought or a sensation. With the
addition of attention, emotion, and desire, short-term memory rapidly
progresses to working memory—otherwise known as learning.
Repeated reactivation of the same neurons (through repetition or
practice) is what creates a neural pathway—a memory. The process
of encoding working memory to long-term memory is called memory
consolidation. As elegantly phrased by cognitive scientist Gary
Marcus, “the ability to learn starts with the ability to remember. An
organism can learn from experience only if it can rewire its nervous
system in a lasting way; there can be no learning without memory.”[9]
For our purposes in this book (understanding how humans learn),
the word memory may be considered synonymous with have
learned.
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2000
for his groundbreaking discoveries about the biological bases of
memory.[10] By studying the lowly sea slug (a simple animal with
relatively large neurons), Kandel discovered that short-term memory
is not a diminutive version of long-term memory, as was previously
believed, but is altogether biologically distinct. Short-term memories
cause biochemical changes in the brain by the release of
neurotransmitters, but long-term memories cause anatomical
changes in brain tissue by growing new synaptic connections. In
other words, learning stuff excites the brain, but storing stuff changes
its structure.
Kandel’s discoveries coincided with those of other researchers
around the same time and led to the astounding realization that the
brain continually remodels itself. This revelation of neural plasticity
and the related discovery that the brain continually makes new brain
cells cannot be overstressed, superimposed as they were on
centuries of fixed-brain theory. Kandel’s excitement—“We could see
for the first time that the number of synapses in the brain is not fixed
—it changes with learning!”—is palpable in his memoir tracing the
process, In Search of Memory, a book that is also a deeply personal
journey into his own past. When Kandel was a boy living in Nazi-
occupied Vienna, his family was evicted, his father arrested without
charge, and his home ransacked during the infamous Kristallnacht of
1938, the night of broken glass, in which Jewish homes, shops, and
synagogues were ransacked throughout Germany and Austria.
Kandel’s haunting memories of that night and the exhortation to
“never forget” is what led him to “investigate the biological basis of
that motto: the processes in the brain that enable us to
remember.”[11]
 Personal quests to understand have historically characterized
scientific investigation, and brain science is no exception.
Psychiatrist and author Norman Doidge (after first encountering
Kandel at Columbia University as a resident) set off on a personal
quest of his own to identify and interview researchers working in the
vanguard of neuroscience. The result was his phenomenal bestseller
The Brain That Changes Itself, one of the best popular-science
books to date about neural plasticity.
Doidge calls neuroplasticity nothing short of a “revolution”—
remember that word from chapter 1? Be alert when public
intellectuals speak of revolution for at least two reasons, the first
being its aftermath: is it over? Second, bear in mind the entity
against which the revolution is pushing. In the case of the cognitive
revolution, the antagonist is behaviorism. In the case of
neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, the antagonist is fixed-brain
theory.

NEUROGENESIS AND NEURAL PLASTICITY

For much of the past several centuries, it was believed that the adult
brain did not change much past childhood and was, by all accounts,
rather fixed. But thanks to the work of intrepid neuroscientists who
plowed ahead with their research against the dogma of the time, that
previous model of the brain as a mechanistic, ultrarational
supercomputer that houses the ephemeral mind (Ryle’s “ghost in the
machine”) has been deposed, replaced by a mutable, fizzing,
biological mass of tissue that continually changes in response to all
thought and experiences in the act of living. It is now accepted
wisdom that brain cells (neurons) can regenerate (neurogenesis)
and that the brain changes continually in response to experience
(neuroplasticity). This is truly revolutionary.
Yet, according to Doidge, this excellent news has yet to sift its
way into the general population. Many of us are still unwitting
subscribers to fixed-brain theory (recall the paranoia that fueled the
first-three-years movement in child development discussed in
chapter 2). Doidge calls this “neurological nihilism,” an outlook that
has poisoned our belief in the possibility for change.[12] The tenacity
of this outdated view is revealed when people speak of abilities as
“hardwired” or refuse to apply themselves to a task on the grounds
that they lack the talent or that it does not fit their “learning style.”
The late renowned neuroscientist Oliver Sacks used the
occasion of New Year resolutions for 2011 to combat neurological
nihilism and campaign for brain change. In an essay titled “This Year,
Change Your Mind,” Sacks laments that most people still “do not
realize that they can strengthen their brains” and exhorts readers to
think again about “cognitive fitness” in light of the doctrine of
neuroplasticity:

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new

place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking
about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to
stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to
follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a
healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active,
engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to
cognitive fitness.[13]

Indeed, just as a bicep is enlarged or a waist whittled by

sessions at the gym, the brain actually changes its structure in
response to how it is used. Except in cases of frank brain disease, it
does this continually, retaining a measure of this ability well into old
age; in fact, studies of the brains of recently deceased people reveal
that older adults produce just as many new brain cells as young
people do, even up to the moment of death.[14] The old saw “You
cannot teach an old dog new tricks” is no longer valid.
But neural pathways aren’t simply constructed. They can also
disintegrate when we deliberately stop or change our thoughts, for
example (a technique used in anger management therapy), or
through disuse from inactivity, injury, or disease. Hence an aphorism
popular in many rehabilitative therapies, including those for stroke
and dementia, has taken on new urgency due to current research in
neural plasticity: “Use it or lose it.” This aphorism applies to the
physical components of technique (see chapter 4) as well as to the
intellectual abilities needed in certain musical genres.
 Singers who have studied foreign languages may especially
appreciate this observation. When preparing an opera role or a song
cycle in a foreign language, for example, the rate at which that
language is acquired accelerates dramatically if the singer is living,
working, and performing in a country in which that language is
spoken. Unfortunately, when the curtain falls for the last time, if that
same level of practice is not maintained, most people find that their
newly acquired foreign language abilities atrophy significantly.
Practice may not make our music-making completely perfect,
but at least it aims us in that direction by keeping us fit and in the
game. In this age of brain science, our notion of fitness should
updated to include the cognitive fitness that Sacks urges us to
consider. Yet due to the complexity of the human brain, there is a
flipside to cognitive fitness of which musicians must be aware.

THE PLASTIC PARADOX

New neural pathways can be startlingly quick to emerge and can,
once constructed, become more established with use. The new twist
on an old saw is, therefore, “You certainly can teach an old dog new
tricks.” But this old saw is a double-edged sword, for, while old dogs
can continually learn new tricks, the older the dog, the more
ingrained the habit (or trick). This is fine for habits you want to
nurture. But if the habit is a chain you want to cast off, the more
robust the neural pathway, the harder it is to break free. Doidge has
called this rigidity “the plastic paradox.”[15]
So is change from rigid habit even possible? Apparently yes; it
is just difficult. Think of habit change as the most intense form of
declarative learning; thus, it demands focused attention plus a heavy
dose of I-want-to-ness (volition), and a dash of goal-setting would
not hurt either. Yet even these attributes may not be strong enough
to break up a strongly entrenched neural pathway. What is needed
then is a stronger, more visceral approach.
Doidge likens this type of approach to going around a roadblock:
just as when we are driving in heavy traffic and we encounter a
roadblock, we find a way to go around. A growing body of brain
research shows that the brain can do the same thing. This
phenomenon has been observed in blind individuals (either from
birth or blind because their visual cortex has been temporarily
disabled) and also in deaf individuals. In these cases, other sensory
systems are recruited to help, notably touch and sound for the blind
and touch and sight for the deaf.
Perhaps even more astonishing than the recruitment itself is the
speed with which it apparently happens. In early studies in which test
subjects’ vision was temporarily disabled, in only two days’ time,
their hobbled visual cortices took up the task of processing touch
and sound sensations as evidenced by brain scans. And when the
study was over, the subjects’ usual brain functions returned to
normal in just half that time.[16] In neuroscience, this has come to be
called cross-modal plasticity, or the ability of a brain system to hack
into a nearby system to take up the load for a damaged one.[17]
From this evidence, we may surmise that musicians, dancers,
and others who depend upon a high level of motor skill could create
roadblocks for themselves in order to heighten other senses.
Certainly roadblocking is what a musician does when she closes her
eyes in order to hear more acutely or wishes to sense her physical
responses with more awareness.
Given Doidge’s use of the term roadblock as a diverting of one’s
attention away from deeply ingrained and harmful habits in order to
develop new and healthy ones, this might be a particularly potent
tool for good in the music studio that nevertheless goes vastly
underutilized, especially if it causes psychic discomfort in the learner.
The twin discoveries of neurogenesis and neural plasticity offer
solid evidence for the promise of remodeling our habits of mind at
any stage in life, just as we can remake our physical selves by
dieting or embarking on an exercise regimen. Indeed, brain-training
has long been championed by Michael Merzenich, a pioneer in brain
plasticity research, who challenges us to act upon these revelations:

Your issue, as it relates to this science [of brain plasticity], is

how to maintain your own high-functioning learning
machine. And of course, a well-ordered life in which learning is a
continuous part of it is key. But also in your future is brain
aerobics. Get ready for it. It’s going to be a part of every life not
 too far in the future, just like physical exercise is a part of every
well-organized life in the contemporary period.[18]

The fact that change is possible does not, of course, imply that
change is easy. The fickle imps of motivation and desire must first be
brought to heel. Merzenich acknowledged as much in a TED Talk on
brain plasticity:

Now that you know, now that science is telling us that you are in
charge, that it’s under your control, that your happiness, your
well-being, your abilities, your capacities are capable of
continuous modification, continuous improvement, and you’re
the responsible agent and party . . . of course a lot of people will
ignore this advice. . . . Now that’s another issue, and not my
fault![19]

Nevertheless, this news that has been anointed “the most

important discovery in neuroscience in four centuries” overturns a
deterministic and ultimately pessimistic view of learning and, by
extension, of life itself, making plasticity one of the brightest sectors
of brain science research.[20]

BACK TO THE BODY

Now that we have considered the cognitive processes common to
both declarative (know-that) and procedural (know-how) learning, we
can move on to spotlight the latter and two of its most significant
differences: speed and volition. In the next chapter, I turn to a branch
of psychology called motor learning research, wherein motor refers
to muscle. Vestiges of the binary vocabulary encountered in chapters
2 and 3 are again evident in chapter 4 because they are still in use in
psychology. Yet as you move through the chapter, note that the false
boundaries between body and brain increasingly evaporate because
the mind-body split, at least from the perspective of cognitive
neuroscience, has resolved to a concept of embodied cognition.

NOTES
1. See Daniel Leviton, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the
Age of Information Overload (New York: Dutton, 2015), 37–74.
2. Marcus E. Raichle, Ann Mary MacLeod, Abraham Z. Snyder,
William J. Powers, Debra A. Gusnard, and Gordon L. Shulman, “A
Default Mode of Brain Function,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 98, no. 2 (2001): 676–82.
3. Marcus E. Raichle and Abraham Z. Snyder, “A Default Mode of
Brain Function: A Brief History of an Evolving Idea,” Neuroimage 37,
no. 4 (2007): 1087.
4. Marcus E. Raichle, “The Brain’s Dark Energy,” Science 314, no.
5803 (2006): 1249–50.
5. See Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold
Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1993); and Alfie Kohn, “Rewards Are Still Bad
News (25 Years Later),” October 28, 2018,
www.alfiekohn.org/article/rewards-25-years-later/:
6. University of Birmingham, “Autonomy in the Workplace Has
Positive Effects on Well-Being and Job Satisfaction, Study Finds,”
April 24, 2017, ScienceDaily,
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170424215501.htm.
7. Rosanna Greenstreet, “Lang Lang: ‘I’d Play the Piano at 5 a.m.,’”
Guardian, May 13, 2011,
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/14/lang-lang-piano-
china-father.
8. Attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb in his 1949 book The
Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (New York:
Wiley, 1949).
9. Gary Marcus, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes
Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (New York: Basic
Books, 2004), 99.
10. John H. Byrne, “How Neuroscience Captured the Twenty-First
Century’s First Nobel Prize,” Cerebrum, April 1, 2001.
https://www.dana.org/article/how-neuroscience-captured-the-twenty-
first-centurys-first-nobel-prize/.
11. Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New
Science of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 5.
12. Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself (New York:
Viking Penguin, 2007), xviii.
13. Oliver Sacks, “This Year, Change Your Mind,” New York Times,
December 31, 2010, www.nytimes.
com/2011/01/01/opinion/01sacks.html.
14. Cell Press, “Older Adults Grow Just as Many New Brain Cells as
Young People,” Science Daily, April 5, 2018,
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180405223413.htm.
15. Doidge, Brain That Changes, 242–43.
16. Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Roy Hamilton, “The Metamodal
Organization of the Brain,” Progress in Brain Research 134 (2001):
427–45.
17. Daphne Bavelier and Helen J. Neville, “Cross-Modal Plasticity:
Where and How?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 443–52;
see also Doidge, Brain That Changes.
18. Michael Merzenich, “Growing Evidence of Brain Plasticity,” TED
Talk, February 2004,
www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain?
language=en.
19. Ibid.
20. Doidge, Brain That Changes.
 Chapter 4
Learned Movement
Motor Learning

In chapter 3, I explained the cognitive processes that all learning

shares in common (attention, learning, and memory) as well as what
the learner must possess in order to be successful; namely, a desire
to pay attention, willingness to expend some effort to do so, and
ready submission to the brain cleaning that occurs during sleep.
Given that music learning almost always involves a partnership, the
following questions arise: If these are the necessary traits in a
learner, what are their counterparts in teachers? What must the
music teacher possess in order to be successful?
The traditional emphasis in teacher training is on content, that
is, what the teacher knows. Institutions looking to hire faculty
typically confine their parameters to a teacher’s knowledge and the
quality of that knowledge, as demonstrated by her output. Famous
universities hire faculty whose vast knowledge is reflected in their
career output, as evidenced by Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, and
Grammy Awards. From these glittering and visible signs of
accomplishment, prospective college students are meant to infer
great teaching prowess. But an open secret in higher education is
that these accomplishments do not, in themselves, guarantee the
best teaching. The reasons are as variable as are human beings
themselves, but this open secret is based on one essential truth of
teaching: what you know matters far less than how you impart what
you know. This insight certainly does not mean that possessing
knowledge in the first place is not an absolute prerequisite (it is, and
yes, generally speaking, the more knowledge the better), nor should
it be inferred that professionals do not deserve accolades for their
accomplishments. Nevertheless, there is a stark truth embedded in
this essential one: a teacher’s knowledge has little value to a learner
if the teacher cannot find a way into the learner’s mind. As education
professor Deborah Loewenberg Ball puts it, “teaching depends on
what other people think, not what you think.”[1] This epiphany was
revealed to Ball early in her teaching career as she struggled to
discover effective ways of teaching a declarative learning subject
(math) to children. This truth is equally apparent in teaching motor
skills, albeit in uniquely challenging ways.

THE QUESTION IS HOW, NOT WHAT

The successful transference of any physical technique from teacher
to student, be it in the realm of athletics, dance, or music, ultimately
hinges on the ability to impart a motor skill from teacher to student.
But what teachers know of fingering, bowing, and breathing
techniques does not guarantee that they will be able to successfully
give it to their students. Indeed, the more expert motor performers
become at their craft, the worse they can become at passing it on.
This inverse relationship is known in psychology as the “curse of
knowledge” or the “curse of expertise,” catchy monickers that
describe the testy relationship between knowing what versus
knowing how. A beginning musician in the early phase of this
relationship may vaguely understand what needs to be done, yet he
does not know how. A master musician understands exactly how to
play her instrument, but unless she can empathize with the beginner
and put herself in the beginner’s mindset, she will struggle to teach
the how. And if she struggles to teach, her student will fail to learn.
Yet the power dynamics inherent in the teacher-to-student
relationship typically mask this failing as the teacher’s, and instead
failure to thrive is ascribed to the student’s shortcomings or lack of
talent.
The good news is that recent research in cognitive science can
be employed to break this dispiriting cycle by answering the question
“How?” in motor training. Yet in order to do so, a fundamental
change of emphasis is in order, from how much teachers know (the
what) to how well they impart their knowledge (the how). This
necessitates a priority shift in pedagogy from the content of the
teacher’s brain to the landscape of the learner’s mind. Since
teachers are also lifelong learners, this shift is an ever-evolving
negotiation between accumulating knowledge for oneself (learning)
and translating it for consumption (teaching). This is an apt working
model for traversing this chapter on recent research in motor
performance and learning and realizing its potential to enrich
musicians’ teaching, learning, and performance.

MOTOR LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE

The field dedicated to understanding how movement is learned is
variously called motor learning, motor control and learning, or motor
learning and performance. For ease, throughout this chapter ML
denotes all three (although, as you will see, by cognitive measures,
there is a profound difference between learning and performance).
The field of ML research is a fascinating one, and musicians stand to
gain much from its findings. However, musicians should approach
this large and multifaceted field with at least one caveat in mind: the
majority of ML studies have been carried out on athletes. Far fewer
studies have involved musicians. Correspondingly, discrete athletic
tasks, specifically called limb tasks, such as ball throwing, dart
sticking, and keyboard tapping, form the bulk of ML experiments.
Nevertheless, expert ML researcher Gabriele Wulf and others have
stated that there is no reason to think that most of the findings from
ML research cannot be effectively applied to music training.[2] This is
a valid stance that is explored in this chapter.
As noted in chapter 3, procedural learning is a process that
results in a permanent change in behavior as a result of practice,
with practice (rather than experience) being the crucial factor that
distinguishes declarative from procedural learning. Exposure is not
learning, and in the motor realm, neither is simple experience. In
essence, motor learning must be learned by doing, through trial and
error, and can only be declared as definitively learned—note the past
tense—with practice. A more complex definition of motor learning
than that used in chapter 3 encapsulates this progression.

Motor Learning Defined

 Motor learning is a process that is inferred rather than directly
observed that leads to permanent changes in habit as the result of
practice.

Many variations of this definition exist in ML research literature,

but the most prominent ones contain the components emphasized in
this definition. In order, these are:
The term process underscores the dimension of time. The
acquisition and retention of physical skills occurs along a continuum.
Temporary breakthroughs notwithstanding, progress does not
happen all at once but over a period of time measured in hours,
days, weeks, months, academic semesters, and years. The
dimension of time in this definition underscores the complexity of
motor learning, for while the entire definition of motor learning is
shared with declarative learning—minus the crucial swap of practice
for experience—what is being built is not only a neural pathway in
the brain but the robustness and flexibility of muscles, too; we are
training strength and flexibility into our muscle tissue along with
habits of mind. This is what makes motor learning and performance
a kind of total body sport and why there is no substitution for just
doing it (a sentiment efficiently captured in the Nike company’s Zen-
like ad campaign “Just Do It”),
That this process is inferred refers to learning’s dynamism for
learning itself cannot be directly observed; we can only assume it is
happening and wait for proof that the learned thing has adhered.
This proof shows up in two guises: relatively permanent changes in
movement and the stability of these changes to the extent that they
can be called physical habits that bear up repeatedly even under
variable conditions. Finally, these changes in habit are the result of
practice—of actually doing and not thinking about doing.
Now that I have made one pass through the complex definition
of motor learning, it is time to dig a bit deeper into each of its
parameters. Doing so, it is so vital to continually bear in mind the
essential differences between learning and performance that it is
worth pausing to inspect these common words whose use is
ubiquitous. In fact, they are often used practically interchangeably.
But phrases like “lesson performance” and “invited dress rehearsal”
are, from a cognitive perspective, a contradiction in terms.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LEARNING AND

PERFORMANCE
Learning is the process by which one acquires skill or knowledge.
Performance refers to the manner in or quality with which someone
functions. Remember: learning is dynamic, unstable, and messy.
Performance, on the other hand, is like the freeze-frame button on a
video projector—it captures where the learner stands at a certain
point in time along the learning continuum. Because of this frozen
quality, most of us want our performances to be as polished as we
can manage—the opposite of unstable and messy. This is
particularly true for musicians whose art is captured by recording and
may explain both why it is so difficult to capture a live vibe or feeling
of spontaneity in a recording session and, conversely, why it is so
easy for the pall of permanence to infect a recording session. The
goals of learning and performance are—and should be—not just
different but diametrically opposed. When this is not well understood,
the goals of learning and performance are conflated, and both
typically suffer.
Learning suffers when we are not willing to seem silly,
uncoordinated, or unmusical. In a music lesson, this may unfold as
singing out of tune, messing up a scale passage, or feeling restricted
when learning to add vibrato (and here I must acknowledge that
such unwillingness may not emanate from the student himself but
could stem from his teacher). True learning is effortful, and effort is
often as messy (and as fun) as messing with mud pies! Yet most of
us would certainly avoid presenting our mud-splattered, exploratory
selves to an audience. We would rather clean up for a performance.
This is all beautifully reflected in a saying credited as one of Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping’s favorites: “If you open the window for fresh
air, a few flies will blow in.” Assuming that flies are undesirable, we
nevertheless may wager that they are a small price to pay for the
cool air. Learning is like the opening of this window; performance is
what happens after we shoo the flies out, close the window on
learning, and operate within the newly refreshed space.
Momentary flat singing or playing or klutzy movements are a
small—and critically necessary—price to pay on the path to mastery.
Indeed, without the willingness to pay this price (on both the part of
the student and the teacher), learning can be harmed if the learner
operates under performance conditions. This outcome is particularly
dire in the early stages of learning. Willingness to pay this cheapest
price of learning (with the currency of a bruised ego) is perfectly
captured in a featured term within the lexicon of ML research: trials.
ML experiments typically feature many tries, or trials, of the same
task, repeated under the same or variable conditions. Much ML
research is therefore concerned with what influences performance
outcomes over repeated trials, both positively and negatively, and
why. Data gleaned from ML trials informs the construction and
refinement of athletic training regimens. This is a near-perfect model
for training musicians.
But what if operating under performance conditions is,
paradoxically, the learning aim? It must be acknowledged that there
are certainly times when this is warranted, yet a complete
acknowledgment would have to admit that the aim, in this case, is
performance and not learning. For example, if an invited dress
rehearsal is literally just a rehearsal, there should be ample room for
the singing actors onstage to make mistakes (i.e., engage in
learning). Not so because you are two days out from opening night
and the performers need a dose of reality and a jolt of adrenaline?
Then a more accurate description would be “invited dress
performance.”
In summary, for teachers: scale your interventions depending
upon which mode your student is using. If in learning mode,
encourage exploration and freedom; if in performance mode, the
advice is simple: stop teaching! Starting from a few days to even
some weeks out from a major performance, scale back your
instruction to zero. Why is this? Because learning, at its core, is
wobbly and unstable, and in order for students to regain their
balance, they must find that balance on their own by processing all
of the feedback they have garnered at that point in time. They must,
to use the previous metaphor, push their own freeze-frame button.
Besides, as you will see a bit further on in this chapter, feedback
from the teacher at this stage is not just unnecessary; it can intrude
on the student’s own processing and actually harm learning.
For learners: as you enter a music-making situation, know which
mode you are in, learning or performance. If in the latter mode, give
it your best shot!—and don’t devolve into a spiral of self-blame if
perfection is not attained, for it rarely is. If in learning mode, like
Charles Limb’s jazz musicians in chapter 2, do not allow the
cognitive processes that stifle and constrain to come to the fore. How
is this done? Here are two possible answers: practice (yes,
messiness can actually be practiced—just ask any improvisor) and
understanding the cognitive substrates of performance shifts.

PERFORMANCE SHIFTS: UPSIDES AND

DOWNSIDES
The evidence that a motor skill is truly learned is its repeatability—
and repeatability under many different conditions. These two
parameters are called retention and transfer, respectively. Without
proof that the learning has been retained, we can only say that the
learner was merely exposed to the information. So what about
changes observed during training that are not permanent? ML
researchers call these changes during repeated trials performance
shifts, and they can be both positive and negative. Motor learners
can absorb powerful lessons from both flavors. Let us begin with
positive performance shifts.
Most musicians are familiar with the phenomenon of instant
success upon a first or second trial—which may occur in the midst of
instruction or a solo practice session—that then vaporizes moments
later. This may occur in weekly lessons, especially if the student
feels that she never sings or plays as well in her own practice or
performance as she does in her lessons. This experience is
particularly common in a one-time masterclass setting in which a
guest master teacher is able to evoke a positive response from the
student on display but only in that moment; the student is at a loss to
recapture that magical moment later in his own practice. I have
dubbed this phenomenon “masterclass syndrome.”[3]
Masterclass syndrome begins as a prime example of a positive
performance shift, yet while such an experience may have been
positive or significant for the student, lacking the proof of retrievable,
permanent change, real learning cannot be said to have occurred.
How is this possible? As is typical in this situation, while our
masterclass musician might register disappointment, he may still
reflect afterward, “Oh well, at least I learned something.” More
accurately, he experienced something. But exposure is not learning.
All is not lost for our masterclass musician, however; if what was
experienced was positive and desired, there is some evidence that
the student’s practice session immediately following may commit the
gesture to memory. The only caveat here is that the effectiveness of
this strategy is going to be relative to the student’s ability at that time.
Beginners with little previous experience will have no prior memories
with which to recombine any new input from a masterclass.
Conversely, more advanced musicians can expect some
transference from the masterclass to their own increased
performance, provided that they run, not walk, to the practice room
immediately following a positive masterclass experience.
Other stunning examples of short-term positive performance
shifts can be seen in interventions involving equipment or
manipulation with a pair of human hands. For example, gadgets to
help keep the pinky finger of the bow hand of young string players
curved range from specially produced “pinky nests” to the use of
bunion stickers (available from the drugstore) as a cheaper option. A
popular gadget among piano teachers to teach proper hand position
is a curved squeeze toy in the shape of a ladybug. Such
manipulations may feel almost magical to the student musician due
to their immediate positive effect, and indeed, these manipulations
can help learners use proprioception (feeling) rather than verbal
cues to get the knack of unfamiliar physical positions.
These and other short-term performance gains may be
worthwhile, and indeed, positive performance shifts are, at their most
basic level, what students (and their parents) probably expect as a
return on their investment in lessons. At first glance, we might also
think that positive performance shifts are what teachers proffer (and
upon which they stake their reputations and pay their mortgages). In
whatever manner short-term performance gains are accomplished
(through manipulations, equipment, or even heaps of verbal praise),
the goal of achieving them by any means necessary comes with
several cautions. The first has to do with the hallmark of motor
learning: repeatability. Unless the learner can repeatedly perform at
the same level with the manipulation removed, by herself, and under
changing conditions, the task cannot be said to have been learned
by her.
More shocking, perhaps, is this news: in certain scenarios,
teaching that improves performance in the short term can actually
harm long-term learning. In other words, intervention by a teacher
that helps a student play or sing well in the moment may cause a
regression in the student’s actual learning over time.[4] Consider the
following examples, taken from an online discussion group of string
teachers who instruct young children.[5] The topic was the use of
“bow helpers.” An initial string of comments like this one testified to
their benefit:

I started using the bow hold “buddies” a few weeks ago, and I
am so relieved, I don’t have to nag anymore, any of my students
to keep a right bow hold. Now we can concentrate on other
things, and progress faster. I highly recommend it, especially for
beginners, or as remedial work for poor bow holds. I will use it
with all new student also. It saves months of work on bow hold.
And kids just love it.

But one teacher posted a caution about immediate gain and

urged patience:

I personally do not like to use any external “helpers” for my

students’ bow holds. Each hand is different and each student
may need a different explanation, or seven, of how to make a
reliable and satisfactory bow hold. Fine motor coordination is
needed and sometimes it just takes time to develop the bow
hold.
 Another answered:

I agree. I don’t like using any helpers on the bows to teach my

students the proper bow holds.

Most interesting and insightful was this teacher’s reasoning as

to why he eschews the use of gadgets:

The more dependent [that] students get on any external helpers,

the harder it will be for them to learn to play without them. Just
taking the tapes off the fingerboards is something they find
heartbreaking and makes them unsure they’ll ever be able to
play in tune without them.

These posts illustrate a few key points. First, manipulations can

be powerful learning tools. Teachers and students alike express
passionate “love” for them. Alternatively, however, they can create
dependencies that not only harm learning but when removed can
create a cascade of humiliation, discouragement, and fear. This is
the essence of a well-known hypothesis in ML theory called the
guidance hypothesis, which holds that feedback in which the learner
is physically guided (i.e., hands-on manipulation) or that strongly
blocks error from occurring can actually harm learning if it makes
learning too easy.[6] Why is this? Part of the answer is related to
proprioceptive feedback, which I will explain later in this chapter. The
other part of the answer lies inside a factor you have already
encountered for its role in attention and learning: effort.
Research into the biochemistry of the brain reveals that the
more difficult the task, the more neuronal firing from our brains is
required; in essence, we must dig deeper for more complicated
tasks. In related findings, researchers have concluded that the
solutions learners work out for themselves, through effort, are truly
learned and are thus retained and retrievable. Taken together,
repeated firing of the neurons creates a neural pathway that
becomes stronger each time it is activated during learning. As you
have seen, this is the explanation of what happens in working
memory, and not incidentally, this is the neuroscientific definition of
practice.
With enough practice, difficult tasks become easier and
eventually, if mastered, are stored in long-term memory. Our memory
bank is not limitless, however; we must constantly update our motor
memories through practice and boot out previous motor trials to
make way for new (and hopefully improved) ones. This is one
parameter of the late ML researcher Richard Schmidt’s schema
theory, which helps us understand how performers are able to
constantly improve and why learning is fastest for beginners and
curiously slows as mastery is gained.[7]
Cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork poetically labeled the
hurdles we encounter and master through effort “desirable
difficulties.”[8] In effect, teachers are in charge of creating an obstacle
course of desirable difficulties because obstacles must form the
foundation of any viable teaching method—that is, if the goal is deep
learning that adheres over time and not simply improved short-term
performance. The latter is the downside of positive performance
shifts; positive does not always mean good. In fact, it can even be
claimed that withholding desirable difficulties can actually damage
learning. And here it must be emphatically stated that dishing up
desirable difficulties must always be accomplished with care and
empathy and compassion. The concept of desirable difficulties
sanctions no space for abusive behavior.
Admittedly, serving up desirable difficulties is a difficult
enterprise itself, fraught as it can be with any combination of balky
students, demanding parents, high expectations, and short timelines.
Teachers withhold desirable difficulties for a myriad of reasons,
ranging from misguided attempts to be nice to job burnout to lack of
will due to depression. To be sure, with particularly resistant
students, it can simply be too dispiriting to hold the bar high and
encourage that student to reach for it. An old saw says that teaching
is the only product for which customers do not demand their money’s
worth!
Indeed, learning and performance are so synonymous in the
public mind that music students who do not regularly and tangibly
improve often infer that they are not actually learning. At best, they
blame themselves for lack of effort or talent. At worst, they blame the
teacher for not advancing them. There are certainly situations in
which all these could be accurate, but that can be easily remedied by
simple solutions (work harder, practice more, bring your concerns
forward, or change teachers). But there is one scenario in which the
propensity to infer disaster is so massively in error that it deserves
special mention: when a negative performance shift coincides with
the theory of unlearning.

NEGATIVE PERFORMANCE SHIFTS AND

UNLEARNING
As previously stated, performance shifts can be both positive and
negative. But it is important not to define these terms colloquially or
emotionally. Recall that positive does not necessarily mean good. As
you have just seen, increases in ability are called positive
performance shifts only because performance improves in the short
term; it is a plus sign on the data chart and thus positive. In fact,
learning may not have occurred at all, or worse, it may actually have
been harmed. Within this topsy-turvy inversion, let us now consider
negative performance shifts.
Negative performance shifts are situations in which performance
shows short-term decrements. This is not necessarily bad, although
it can sure feel that way if brought on by illness, depression, or injury.
But negative performance shifts can sometimes be truly good
events. The reason is that a downturn in performance may signal
that unlearning is occurring.[9] This theory holds that, when someone
is attempting to learn a new motor skill, there may be a simultaneous
destabilization of a previous, habitual motor pattern. Sometimes just
knowing this theory can help the motor learner through this bumpy
transition phase.
In some learners, though, unlearning may cause psychological
distress. For example, a baritone who transitions to tenor may wager
he has nothing to lose in the attempt; he assumes the familiar voice
will always be there, just like a piece of comfortable clothing. Such
singers may be distressed to find that, after a time, the old habit no
longer “fits”—like when you return from vacation to find your reliable
pair of jeans cannot be zipped over your expanded waistline. Yet the
new technique does not fit either, for it has not yet stabilized. So this
particular juncture in motor skill learning—the unlearning phase—
appears particularly porous and unstable, and thus the learner is
probably vulnerable. Therefore, musicians in this phase would do
well to ban distraction from the practice room and pay total and
complete attention to the task before them.
On the whole, if the learner has faith in his teacher’s pedagogy,
negative performance shifts can be seen as positive signs that a
new, learned skill is actively destabilizing an old, ingrained habit. A
student’s worst lesson by this measure may actually be his best in
terms of learning gains. If the learner can hang in there and apply
effort to the cause, he may end up with exactly what he had hoped
for: a new and better technique with which to make music.
Exactly how the destabilized habit becomes a stable new skill
occurs via the last component of our complex definition of motor
learning: practice.

THE PATH TO CARNEGIE HALL

“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” the hapless New York City tourist
asks. “Practice!” goes the punch line. This is the foundational
premise of what is known in ML research as the power law of
practice.[10] Simply put, practice is recognized as the number one,
most important variable in motor learning. As such, practice is a hot
topic in current ML and expertise studies research, as are the related
topics of practice quantity and practice quality, known in the
expertise literature as deliberate practice. In this chapter, I will start
by assaying three essential findings, or rules, from ML research
regarding the most effective kinds of practice.

The Three Rules of Practice

1. Distributed practice is more effective than massed

practice.
 This rule of practice concerns timing. Translated for musicians, it
means that practicing every day for one hour per session will prove
much more beneficial than practicing twice a week for three and a
half hours per session, even though the total number of hours per
week are the same. This is because cognitive development is
nurtured by rest, not just by doing. People whose regular practice
sessions alternate with periods of rest retain more than when they
pile on information all at once in megapractice, or massed practice,
sessions. Even more compelling is the finding that the longer the rest
session between practice sessions, the better the learning, as
evidenced by both retention and transfer in later performance. This is
likely due to the cognitive benefits of sleep, as noted in the previous
chapter. Note, however, that in order for these benefits to accrue, the
spaced time between practice sessions should not be too long—
think hours instead of days. Otherwise, the neural trace that was
experienced in practice will not establish itself in long-term memory.
An added benefit of distributed, or spaced, practice is protection
from injury. Athletes studied in ML research are more at risk for injury
during massed practice. Why is this? The answer is quite simple:
massed practice without rest leads to muscle fatigue, and tired
muscles are more vulnerable to injury.
Conversely, too little practice makes musicians and athletes
vulnerable to injury due to lack of fitness. Musician guilt over lack of
preparation may feed prerehearsal panic, which fuels the desire for
massed practice, which in turn can lead to injury. Therefore,
distributed practice is not only cognitively beneficial for learning; it is
a sensible strategy for developing a safe and healthy training
regimen and has an added potential for keeping anxiety levels in
check.

2. Varied practice is more effective than constant practice.

This rule of practice concerns conditions of practice and is
somewhat dependent on whether the skill one is practicing already
displays an inherent amount of variability (called an open-skill task)
or is one that does not (a closed-skill task). Examples in athletics are
downhill skiing, in which conditions are constantly varied, versus
bowling, in which the setting is fairly predictable. We find these
variabilities among types of musical genres and the musicians who
play them. Classical music parameters may be more stable (less
varied) than those of jazz, for example.
Trained singing, especially when paired with acting, is an
inherently open skill task; variability is built in to the endeavor.
Consider the trajectory involved with learning an operatic role from
the very beginning to opening night: there are vocal technique
lessons with a teacher, coaching sessions with a pianist for style and
diction, staging rehearsals with a director, and dress rehearsals with
a conductor and an orchestra. All of these carefully rehearsed
parameters may yet be varied again by costumes, makeup, and
jitters in front of a live audience. Clearly, honing one’s craft as a
singing actor involves navigating quite a lot of variable conditions. So
how does variability make for effective practice?
Recall that the evidence that a thing is learned is its repeatability
and that a goal of motor learning is that the task remain repeatable
even under the challenge of variable conditions. So the second rule
of practice means that variation in practice, while potentially
unnerving, is actually quite good for learning—so good, in fact, that it
not only strengthens the very specific task at hand but has been
shown to positively boost other, related skills. This latter effect is
called generalizability in ML research. So instrumentalists who feel
thrown off by a change in venue or singers unnerved by the new
timbres encountered with orchestral rather than piano
accompaniment might embrace these variations as vitamin packs for
learning that boost both the target skill itself as well as the many
related skills needed for performance.
Variety is the spice of life as well as the spice of practice.
Experienced musicians can add variation to their practice via some
rather obvious strategies, such as practicing several different pieces
of repertoire per session. Varied repertoire will presumably also
feature enough variations in tempo and articulation that many
different skills will be tested. This is simple enough. Yet this rule of
practice challenges teachers who believe that no new repertoire
must be assigned to students until and unless their current repertoire
is mastered, as if to do so would be to reward sloth, accede to
sloppiness, or accept low-quality music-making. Yet by the rule of
varied practice and its codicil, generalizability, allowing students to
add on or even move past their current repertoire may paradoxically
strengthen it.

3. Randomly ordered practice is more effective than

blocked practice.
This rule of practice concerns practice modules. Blocked
practice focuses on training one discrete movement over and over
again until mastery is gained. The use of blocked practice is a
popular method for inculcating specific skills that make up complex
activities, particularly when training beginners. For example, wind
players may be required to practice tone onset exercises over and
over again until coordination improves, while pianists may practice
the onset of a difficult hand position dozens of times in a row. While
these methods may seem to make common sense, randomly
ordered practice—that is, not repeating the same task over and over
again—has been shown over decades of ML research to be more
effective for long-term learning than blocked practice.
Note my use of the phrase “long-term learning,” which highlights
an interesting twist regarding this rule of practice: blocked practice
actually boosts performance in the short term, that is, during the skill-
acquisition phase. This explains the one situation in which blocked
practice is probably preferred, and that is for rank beginners. But if
testing the viability of such boosts in real-world performance venues
is delayed or avoided altogether, blocked practice can eventually
lead to a false sense of accomplishment, for both student and
trainer. In that scenario, such musicians make excellent “practicers”
but fall apart in performance.
The salient point here is that both randomly ordered practice
and practice under varied conditions may degrade immediate
performance but boost long-term learning, as evidenced by superior
retention and transfer, because they hold up in many different
situations. This rule of practice highlights another maxim from ML
research that you have already encountered: learning and
performance are two different, indeed opposite, endeavors. What
boosts one may likely degrade the other.
 These three rules of practice are like a basic recipe upon which
variations can be made according to the instrument and the level of
the learner. The binding agent in this recipe is planning, which allows
all musicians (both teachers and students) to maximize two of their
most precious resources: time and attention. The switch from
aimless to organized practice can exert profound effects on
musicians’ progress at any stage.[11] But planning for practice also
commands a fascinating aspect of motor movement that occurs at
the cellular level in our brains and that issues an initial “go”
command before our bodies respond. In essence, our brains move
before our bodies do. This, and related findings about the neural
mechanisms for motor control and learning, are enormously
important for all performers in the physical realm.
The first consideration here is reaction time, the interval
between the impulse to move and the movement itself. In ML
research, a fine distinction is therefore made between action (which
begins life as a cognitive command) and movement (that command’s
result).[12] As might be imagined, reaction time is rapid—it is
measured in milliseconds.[13] An essential distinction between
reaction time and reflexes is that the latter is involuntary while the
former is not. A person does not choose to blink his eyelids when
dust flies up into his face, but he does choose to reach up with his
mitt and catch a baseball hurtling toward him (or, if the speed of the
ball is too unnerving, to jump out of the way). Voluntary reaction time
therefore requires decisions based upon a preexisting motor pattern
(also called motor program or motor plan). The term preexisting is
significant here; our baseball catcher must have some experience
with snagging a ball in a mitt to be successful. For musicians, our
preexisting motor patterns have been constructed through the hours
of practice that have installed the necessary neural pathways in our
brains.
Speed regarding reaction time has critical, real-world
consequences for everyone—when braking a car that’s sliding on an
icy highway, for example. But quick reaction time can be cashed in
for rewards in athletics, performance art, and music. Narrowing the
gap between choice and movement results in assured and facile
body movement versus late entrances, flubbed fingerings, and mallet
malfunctions. So we musicians will want to know that, besides just
doing it, there is a special type of practice that can strengthen our
motor program and improve reaction time, all without lifting a finger.

MOTOR IMAGERY: THINKING ABOUT DOING

An important kind of practice—one that surely belongs in a book
about music and the brain—is mental practice, which also goes by
many other names, including visualization; mental simulation; and,
most commonly in cognitive science, motor imagery.[14] A basic
description of this technique, as all these names imply, is that the
musician imagines the movements of playing or singing without
actually doing them. Musicians and athletes have been practicing
mental simulation for decades, particularly as a way to conjure
success, with results confirmed by anecdotal evidence (i.e., self-
reports by the performers themselves) as well as objective evidence
such as coach and audience approval, and in sports—winning![15]
And even though visualization is not a new concept, it has largely
been passed down from master to student rather than developed in
a systemized way in music pedagogy.
Similarly, for much of the previous century, while research on
mental practice was conducted, many ML researchers were
skeptical that actual learning could occur through mental practice
due to the (understandable) belief that the only way to truly learn an
action was to actually perform it.[16] In a way this belief holds true:
the essential fact of motor learning is that actions must be learned by
doing. Still, the cognitive substrate of motor learning, the motor plan
that is constructed while the learning happens, must also be taken
into account. So what is the thinking that accompanies the doing?
This question has hovered over ML research for over a century. Yet
without the means to investigate what was going on inside the mind,
early researchers were confined to external investigations of the
body, like the series of seminal experiments conducted in the early
1930s by Edmund Jacobson, who sought to investigate “what takes
place in the nervous or neuromuscular system during a particular
mental activity, [and] to measure the process in physical terms.”[17] In
other words, do muscle cells fire if we simply imagine their use?
Jacobson discovered that they do and noted that the only
measurable difference in the imagined versus the actuated
movement was the degree of voltage. He surmised that his results
might lead to “a branch of study analogous with physical chemistry,
and which may appropriately be called physical psychology.”[18]
Galvanic experiments on muscles continued, and research later in
the century revealed that, along with muscle cells firing through
imagination, heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration also
increased. But what was happening behind the scenes, inside the
brain, had to wait until the imaging tools of modern neuroscience
could investigate this question toward the twentieth century’s end.
The explosion of neuroscience research in the 1990s brought
forth one amazing revelation after another about the inner workings
of the brain. In ML research, on the question of mental practice,
brain imaging showed that merely thinking about an action actually
causes the related motor program in the brain to activate.[19] This
hugely important finding was called motor simulation theory, also
known as the functional equivalence hypothesis.[20] In a shout-out to
Team Music, note that one of the earliest fMRI studies successfully
tested the functional equivalence hypothesis in pianists.[21]
Another discovery related to the functional equivalence
hypothesis arose during the same decade, in which a similar
behavior in monkeys was observed. But in this case, the animals’
motor programs fired when watching other animals eat (the “other
animals” were human scientists on lunch break in the lab!).[22] The
neurons that fired in the monkey’s brains were christened mirror
neurons for their ability to mirror others’ actions. Although the initial
discovery received little attention, as the decade progressed and
turned into a new millennium, this discovery got a huge boost when
the famous and charismatic neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran,
writing for John Brockman’s Edge.com, declared mirror neurons and
their ability to mimic as “the driving force behind the great leap
forward in human evolution”:
 The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys,
and their potential relevance to human brain evolution . . . is the
single most important “unreported” (or at least, unpublicized)
story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for
psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying
framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have
hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
[23]

This was big news. Like so many other brain stories during the
intoxicating, early days of brain imaging, the mirror neuron story
quickly gathered steam and (helped along by a much sexier name
than functional equivalence) burst into the national consciousness,
perhaps most captivatingly through the use of the broken mirror
hypothesis as a possible explanation for the mystery of autism. As
the news spread, what began as the ability of lab monkeys’ brain
cells to imitate observed actions morphed into something far more
complex and profound. Imitation mutated into understanding, and
from there it was but a short leap to posit mirror neurons as the key
to empathy, the quality that allows us to feel the emotions of others,
making empathy nothing less than the bedrock of human civilization.
This was heady stuff.
Fortunately the hyperbolic reportage of mirror neurons cooled to
the objective distance needed for science to ascertain if such
neurons, proven to exist in macaque monkeys, actually do exist in
humans. While much had been inferred, up until 2010 only one study
had uncovered “direct electrophysiological evidence” of mirror
neurons in humans.[24] This phrase, and the emphasis on the word
direct, is noteworthy for a reason that many outside the
neurocommunity are unaware of, to wit: most scientific conclusions
reached in brain science imaging are inferred rather than directly
observed. For example, using fMRI, scientists make theoretical
conclusions (inferences) about what the brain is doing via
information derived through a multistep process that assesses the
ratio of oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood within the brain.
And here we must stop; if this process sounds complicated, it is. In
the words of neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, “the beautiful graphics
MRI and fMRI produce, and the excitement about what they imply,
often mask the immense complexity of the physical, biophysical and
engineering procedures generating them.”[25] So why is fMRI used?
The biggest reason is safety: as a noninvasive procedure, there is
virtually no risk. Conversely, in order to achieve directly observable
results, highly invasive brain techniques must be used, such as
inserting thin wire electrodes directly into the brain through a small
hole drilled into the skull, as is done to diagnose epilepsy. Thus it
was that researchers at UCLA were able to use this procedure,
already being used with epileptics, to find the elusive mirror neuron
in humans.[26]
With the discovery of human mirror neurons, motor simulation
theory and the functional equivalence hypothesis were back in the
news, and the news was truly big. Even one of the most ardent and
early mirror neuron skeptics now believes that human mirror neurons
do exist.[27] So we shall proceed to explore both the functional
equivalence hypothesis and the human mirror neuron system as
neatly summed up by a team of researchers this way: “Whether one
moves, or one is planning to move, or thinking about someone else
moving, overlapping neural networks are activated.”[28] These
actions involve both the planning and the actual production of action,
and, critically, they are “a direct consequence of the stored memories
of information necessary to anticipate and interpret the behaviors of
others.” In other words, our motor imagery only works if we have
done the activity enough ourselves to have developed our own motor
memories (or motor program) of the action. Remember our baseball
catcher.
Many athletes, dancers, and musicians have found mental
practice to be not only viable but powerful. It is the no-practice-
practice routine that can be utilized in a variety of situations to stand
in for the real thing, most valuably during recovery from injury. As far
as your brain is concerned, you took your instrument for a spin, yet
with no wear and tear on your body. The no-practice-practice routine
holds great promise not only as insurance against atrophy during
short-term leaves of absence but as an adjunct to rehabilitative
therapies after surgery or serious injury.
 Another asset to mental practice is its utility when making
musical noise is just not possible. (Traveling musicians, take note:
you need not disturb hotel guests when practicing for your big
audition!) These are some practical uses of mental practice. Richer,
perhaps, are the cognitive benefits of mental practice.
It is theorized that mental practice (thinking of an action)
strengthens the cognitive substrates of movement. This is
Merzenich’s “brain aerobics” in action. Indeed, one tantalizing finding
from a recent study on mental imagery found that “you can increase
muscle strength solely by sending a larger signal to motor neurons
from the brain.”[29] Researchers demonstrated this by tasking
volunteers with performing “mental contractions” of their little finger
or elbow. The volunteers were instructed to mentally “push
maximally” (i.e., as hard as they could) against an imaginary force
(one that they had already encountered for real in pretrials). The
researchers noted that

this mental exercise was not simply a visualization of oneself

performing the task; rather, the performers were instructed to
adopt a kinesthetic imagery approach, in which they urged the
muscles to contract maximally, and this was accompanied by
significantly elevated physiological responses.[30]

In other words, volunteers did not just lie about, dreaming

vaguely about moving their muscles, nor did they merely envision
themselves performing these actions from afar; rather, they were to
feel the movements in their minds. This is an important point: later
studies have shown that, in order for motor imagery to work well,
practitioners must use internal imagery (also known as kinesthetic
imagery or first-person imagery) rather than external imagery (also
known as third-person or visual imagery).
Volunteers in this study practiced internal imagery five times a
week for twelve weeks, and training sessions were fifteen minutes
each. The results were rather astonishing: the little-finger group
increased their finger abduction strength by 35 percent and the
elbow group by 13.5 percent. The human mind is truly remarkable.
 In the words of a group of motor imagery researchers, “mental
imagery research has a long past but only a short history of robust
empirical findings, so that many questions remain and new pathways
for discovery are emerging.”[31] While we await those discoveries, we
musicians can certainly apply what is known thus far about motor
imagery to develop a robust mental practice routine. The following is
a suggested mental practice regimen. The scenario is a musician
preparing for a same-day solo musical performance. The worth of
this practice regimen lies in its ability to sharpen the mind without
tiring the body.

A Mental Practice Regimen

1. Sit or lie down in a quiet room, then close your eyes to shut
out all extraneous stimuli (this is the roadblocking technique
described in chapter 3).
2. Use internal imagery. Aim to actually feel the movements
yourself rather than observe yourself doing them.
3. Take yourself through each phase of your performance. Aim
to stay on top of each of your movements (also known as
staying “in the moment”) until you can feel your instrument in
your hands, the touch of the keys on your fingers, the air
blowing thorough your lips, or the text being formed in your
mouth.
4. Take yourself through each phase of your performance in
real time. This is important; do not skip around or ahead.
Mentally manage each phase of the movement.
5. Make no actual movements or sounds but take yourself to
the edge of your imagination. Likewise, practice with maximal
effort. If any technique or portion of your program is physically
difficult, go deep into this difficulty (mentally) rather than
imagining yourself cruising past it. Know that you are accessing
the motor program for the real deal. This should be a real
workout for your brain cells.
 If musicians are to benefit from the cognitive revolution and
neuroscience, music teachers should be teaching us not merely
what to do but how to think. Mental practice is a technique that can
be taught right alongside bowing, fingering, and breathing technique.

CONTROLLED VERSUS AUTOMATIC PROCESSES

An ancient distinction has existed between things we do with
conscious attention and those things we do automatically. In motor
learning, these two modes are called controlled processing and
automatic processing, respectively, and they have received quite a
lot of attention in ML research. Two reasons for this are that
automaticity is a vaunted goal of motor training (we expect our motor
programs to run automatically), and automaticity is an attribute often
reverently assigned to expert performers: “Her movements appear
so effortless as to be automatic.” Recent research on automaticity
has painted a mixed picture, with strongly held views on both sides.
A similarly mixed picture, with equally strongly held opinions, can be
seen in the varied pedagogical approaches used by music teachers,
with some who promote a technical or even a science-based
approach and others who prefer more intuitive methods.
Teaching methods that employ specific, frank instructions, such
as “lift your soft palate as you ascend in pitch” or “engage your
abdominal muscles as you move more air for a crescendo,” are
examples of directives that require controlled processing of the
learner. In contrast, automatic processing does not call attention to
these mechanics. Teachers who use a combination of emotion (for
example, a stifled sob), imagery (“spaghetti fingers”), or allusion to
common physical gestures (“inhale through the gesture of a yawn”)
invoke automatic processing.
Many music teachers use a combination of controlled and
automatic directives on the way to achieving automaticity. Controlled
processing is helpful with beginners and when frank technical
adjustments need to be made, but, with intermediate and advanced
musicians, automatic directives may be more fruitful, especially
when considered through the lens of attentional focus, which you will
read about later in this chapter.
Regardless of whether controlled or automatic directives are
used in a music lesson, student musicians are being showered with
feedback, which is an essential part of motor learning. In fact, ML
researchers regard feedback as so essential to motor learning that it
is bested only by practice in importance.[32] Therefore, a detailed
look at the many researched aspects of feedback is in order.

FEEDBACK
An unsubtle definition of feedback is this: any and all information
available to the learner. But feedback is divided into many different
subclasses, as can be seen in figure 4.1. What is apparent at first
glance in this illustration is the sheer amount of information coming
at the learning musician as he plays his instrument. This raises many
questions: How much of this information can be processed at one
time? Are there different kinds of information, and if so, is there a
hierarchy of importance? What about differing cognitive processing
speeds; how much can the brain handle? And is more information
better information?
Divisions of feedback. Adapted from Lynn Maxfield, “Improve Your Students’
Learning by Improving Your Feedback,” Journal of Singing 69, no. 4 (March/April
2013): 472.

The first step in answering these questions begins with the

important division between feedback felt and feedback given. That
is, inherent feedback (what the learner him- or herself perceives and
feels) and augmented feedback, which is information delivered by an
external source like a coach or teacher. Let us begin with the type of
feedback that all motor learners experience naturally.

Inherent Feedback

All musicians guide their own performance through inherent

feedback (also called intrinsic feedback.) Refer to figure 4.1 and note
that inherent feedback is comprised of information that is generated
within the body through sense receptors (proprioception) and
information that is relayed back to us from outside (exteroception),
especially through vision and hearing. These two “buckets”—
proprioception and exteroception—contain huge scoops of
information, even before we account for the instructor’s directives.
Imagine a musician who is practicing alone (we’ll name her
Irena) without guidance from a coach. In this scenario, we must
further stipulate that Irena is an instrumentalist and not a singer (the
reason for this will soon become clear). She is a guitarist. As she
practices, her proprioception delivers sensory information to her, for
example, the press of her fingertips on the strings and the vibration
of the guitar body on the tops of her thighs. For exteroceptive
feedback, she can look down to ensure accurate placement of her
fingers upon her fretboard, but, like most musicians, Irena relies
most heavily on hearing to monitor her performance. This acoustic
information is composed of

1. airborne sound (also called direct airborne sound or

sidetone in some studies)
2. room-reflected sound (also called indirect airborne sound)

Airborne sound, as the term implies, arrives direct and

unimpeded to Irena’s ear. Conversely, room-reflected sound arrives
indirectly. Its alternative name, indirect airborne sound, indicates that
this sound is altered by its encounter with obstacles (like plaster
walls or padded seat cushions). If Irena were in a lesson with a
coach, from a purely physical standpoint, what Irena heard through
these two sound conduction pathways and what her coach heard
would be identical. (Arguably, a master teacher will hear artistic
differences that a young musician may miss, but for the purposes of
understanding feedback, let us agree that the sound sources for
Irena and her coach are perceived as similar.)
Now let us conjure a singer called Sanjay. Like Irena, Sanjay is
receiving proprioceptive information—quite a lot of it. For while all
instruments share an actuator (something that makes it go), a
vibrator (something that wiggles and generates sound energy), and a
resonator (an open space that gathers sound energy and molds it
into enhanced musical tone), all three of these components are
contained within Sanjay’s own body.
 Like Irena, Sanjay also receives exteroceptive information:
through vision if he is monitoring his body movements with a mirror
during practice and through hearing via both airborne and room-
reflected sound. But here the similarities between Irena and Sanjay
stop. Since a singer’s instrument is located entirely within his or her
own body, Sanjay is also receiving a third type of auditory feedback:
body-conducted (or bone-conducted) sound. And therein lies the
source of the special challenge for singers: they experience all three
sound conduction pathways simultaneously—all these facts and
“alternative facts.”[33]

The three sound conduction pathways of a singer’s perception: (a) airborne sound,
(b) room-reflected sound, and (c) bone-conducted sound. Image by the author based
on information in Manuj Yadav and Densil Cabrera, “Autophonic Loudness of Singers
in Simulated Room Acoustic Environments,” Journal of Voice 31, no. 3 (May 2017):
388.
 This phenomenon explains why the way we perceive our own
speaking or singing voice and the way others do differs enormously.
In body-conducted sound, the vibrations emanating from our vocal
folds interacts with our bones, tissues, and cerebrospinal fluid (the
clear liquid that circulates in the space around the brain and spinal
cord), which dampen certain frequencies while boosting others.
Meanwhile, airborne sounds and room-reflected sounds travel
as their names imply, boosting and dampening an assortment of
frequencies—creating distinctly different sound prints than what is
heard internally via body-conducted sound.[34] If these three sound
systems are in conflict for singers during learning (and they often
are), this conflict creates a cognitive dissonance that is particular to
singers. In the words of one researcher, “this fact poses enormous
problems in learning to sing.”[35] Yes, indeed it does, and we will
consider this problem and some remedies for it at the end of this
section on feedback.

Vision

So far I have discussed only one form of exteroception, namely

hearing, which is unquestionably crucial to musicians. The second
most common form of exteroception is seeing, though the
importance of sight is somewhat dependent upon its centrality to the
task; for example, vision is arguably more important to a baseball
pitcher than it is to a musician. But vision is an important
exteroceptive feedback system in the early stages of learning an
instrument, since it can guide the proper grip of a mallet or bow or
the instrument itself. In later learning, sight can be an aid for
corrective measures, either directly or via a mirror or film to analyze
deficiencies.
Yet examples of such blind and successful musicians as Andrea
Bocelli, Ray Charles, Diane Schuur, and Stevie Wonder also attest
to the amazing ability of other senses (notably hearing and touch) to
make up for vision loss. Besides, vision per se is not always a
bonus, especially when the plight of performers who must face
audiences straight on and contend with visual distractions is
considered. Chatting ushers or patrons who text, kiss, or fall asleep
can cause reactions in the performer that range from mildly
unsettling to so completely unnerving as to cause choking. In ML
research, choking is defined as a marked decrease in motor
performance under pressure (a subject I will turn to in chapter 6).
Without the exteroceptive feedback of sight, performers might be
spared choking in these cases, and indeed, the performance setup
for certain types of performances (classical pianists, for example)
actually shields the player from this kind of feedback. For singers,
however, this is not an option; they must not only face the audience
but show emotion through facial expression and even interact
directly with the audience. When sight is considered as part of the
barrage of feedback that musicians receive while performing, it
becomes clear why using variable practice conditions are so
important: one never knows what will happen in a live performance,
so planning change in the practice routine can help instill needed
focus.
Before we move on to consider what happens to musicians
when they dip into bucket 2 (proprioception), let us circle back to
Sanjay and delve deeper into singers’ particular challenges
processing inherent feedback.

Singers’ Alternative Facts: Cognitive

Dissonance

Within the world of musicians, singers occupy a category of their

own for this one, fundamental reason: the instrument they play is
within their own bodies. Why is it that this fact “poses enormous
problems for learning to sing”?[36] The answer lies in two competing
parameters: inherent feedback and augmented feedback. To
understand this conflict, let us first consider the following
philosophical riddle that is often used to engage learners in a lesson
about the physics of sound.
The riddle is “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to
hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer is that it depends on
which definition of sound is used. If it is this definition, “Sound is a
disturbance of air molecules that impinges upon the eardrum,” then
the answer is no. There is no one in the forest, so there is no set of
eardrums around to receive sound waves generated by the crashing
tree. The sound did not occur. (Of course, the discussion can
sidetrack here to nonhumans: what about a rabbit who happens to
be in the vicinity? A bunny is a sentient being! So let us agree that
no creature, human or otherwise, is present in our fictional forest to
hear the crash of the tree.)
If another definition of sound is used, “Sound is the compression
and rarefaction of air molecules within the medium of air,” then the
answer is yes. In this scenario, the scrunching up (compression) and
elongation (rarefaction) of air particles does occur, regardless of
whether any eardrums were there to perceive it—human or
otherwise.
It is clear that the impediment to definitively solving this riddle is
perception. With perception on the table as a necessary component
to sound, then the answer will always be no. Remove perception,
and the answer will always be yes. So it is with learning to sing: the
impediment is perception. What the teacher (as audience) hears and
what the singer hears are two different entities. Indeed, they are two
different voices. Neither of the two voices is any less real than the
other, yet in the classic teaching paradigm, the teacher’s
interpretation of what is heard takes primacy over the student’s.
If you are a teacher who protests that this just is not so because
you have developed a method whereby you always honor your
student’s experience, then bravo. There are excellent pedagogical
reasons to prime your feedback in this way. However, the primary
reason that all musicians take lessons is because they want to
sound better, thus the tacit understanding upon a student entering a
teacher’s studio is that the teacher can guide the student to that
goal. Ultimately it is the teacher who will utilize both his perception
and his interpretation of his student’s vocal sounds to improve them.
The student’s task is having the willingness to follow the teacher’s
lead—and to do that, she must agree with the teacher’s perception
of her sound. And therein lies the catch: the perception and the
interpretation of the two voices differ, often dramatically so,
particularly among young singers and their teachers or within a new
teacher-student partnership. Thus a significant impediment to
student singers’ learning is the way in which they perceive their own
sound. They must hold two impressions in mind—impressions that
are often contradictory—as they struggle to reconcile the teacher’s
facts with their own “alternative facts.” This struggle can create a
whole host of problems for student singers ranging from psychic
discomfort to outright disbelief and a burgeoning distrust of the
teacher. This struggle is the very definition of cognitive dissonance, a
theory originated in 1957 by social psychologist Leon Festinger, who
explains it this way:

Two items of information that psychologically do not fit together

are said to be in a dissonant relation to each other. The items of
information may be about behavior, feelings, opinions, things in
the environment and so on.[37]

Festinger holds that, if this dissonance were uncomfortable

enough, people will attempt, in a variety of ways, to reconcile the
conflict. In a happy coincidence of music and psychology, musicians
understand this in musical terms as resolving dissonance to
consonance.
While the what may be easy enough to comprehend, the
conundrum here is in the how, as in, how might this particular
cognitive dissonance be resolved? Here is a step-by-step scheme to
resolve the problem.

Resolving Cognitive Dissonance for Singers

1. State the problem (the what). Tell the student clearly, from
day one, this basic fact: Singers perceive their own sound
differently from everyone else in an audience. Most singers
intuitively understand this, but if examples are needed, ask them
what their impressions were the first time they heard a recording
of their own speaking voice, and relate that back to the singing
voice. Ask, “In a contest between singer and audience, whose
opinion wins?” Performers understand this: “The people who
paid for the ticket.”
2. Explain the problem (expand on the what). Here is the
space for facts and an opportunity for teaching about vocal
resonance.[38] Explain the difference between forced resonance
and free resonance—singers produce both, but forced
resonance gets stuck in the body and many of the vibrations
that we produce are quickly dampened by our own body tissues.
Free resonance is produced within the open spaces in our
heads (mostly within the pharynx and oral cavity, with a bit
within the larynx), and it is this resonance that audiences hear.
Free resonance is what we want to nurture and cultivate.
3. Agree on the challenge (of the what). The challenge is that
singers perceive both free and forced resonance
simultaneously. While they are producing tone, their ears are
receiving three versions of auditory information: (bucket 1) along
with the pallesthetic (vibratory) and kinesthetic (muscular)
sensations (bucket 2) that their body senses: facts and
alternative facts. In this scenario, cognitive dissonance often
ensues. The challenge is, students must decide which set of
facts to believe.
4. Agree on the goal. Teacher and learner must approach the
challenge and the goal as partners; therefore, agreement on
both points is crucial. The student’s challenge is “I am receiving
conflicting feedback information.” The goal is to resolve the
cognitive dissonance. Stated more frankly, the singer’s goal
should be this: “My goal is to train my motor program to match
what you and I have agreed is the optimal tone.” Of course, this
requires at least two components: aesthetic agreement on what
constitutes beautiful tone and trust. The former is generally
easy; student singers should know who their vocal role models
are. The latter requires time and empathy.
5. Plant trust with empathy. It is well known in medical
literature that the main reasons, above all others, that patients
comply with their physician’s recommendations is “physician
warmth and empathy,” that is, how much a patient feels his
doctor cares about him.[39] There are many ways to cultivate
empathy, and they can be practiced. In the music studio,
teachers can cultivate empathy by talking with their students
 about their own artistic journeys. To pursue art is to struggle, so
teachers can share their struggles with their students (without
sharing overly personal details). This sharing can plant the
seeds of empathy, which in turn inculcates trust.
6. Require objective listening. Require students to record their
voice lessons and listen to them afterward; ditto for rehearsals
and practice sessions, if warranted. Note: high-quality listening
is a must, especially if the singer has not resolved her cognitive
dissonance regarding perception of her own voice. Many
student singers are amazed at the difference between built-in
laptop speakers and high-quality headphones.
7. Require a written weekly practice journal. Students should
summarize their listening and practice week in a short but dense
journal entry. Both listening to and writing about practice, if done
thoughtfully, engages motor imagery and the mirror neuron
system, which, as you have seen, can cause the motor program
that guides singing to fire.[40]
8. Create a community of learners. An aid to objective
listening as a learning tool can be found within the student
members of the studio. Holding regular studio performance
classes allows studio mates to share their journeys, provided
that a spirit of camaraderie rather than competition has been
instilled and nurtured. Require those not singing to be active
participants by offering helpful feedback. Feedback coming from
a peer rather than a teacher can be very powerful. Another note:
it is worth a teacher’s time to instruct the entire studio in how to
both give and take criticism. An effective rule of thumb about
giving a critique is to always begin with something positive.
Never allow students to shame each other in this setting.
Equally taboo in a learning situation are comments about
personal appearance or comments that are overtly sexual (e.g.,
“You look hot in that outfit”). Not only are these types of
comments nonproductive (they typically invoke a flight-or-flight
response), they are also unethical in a learning setting.
9. Use peer feedback. If peer feedback gets to the heart of the
cognitive dissonance within the student, refer back to these in-
 class comments in private lessons to wean the student from
external auditory feedback.
10. Expect a nonlinear trajectory. Learning itself is nonlinear.
The path to learning is both circuitous and circular; it twists and
turns and doubles back on itself. Learners often have to learn
the same lessons over and over again, which is why teachers
find themselves repeating the same nostrums. Teaching
requires practicing patience, which begins with empathy.
Teachers: Circle back to step 5 and remember the struggle.

Proprioception

In ML literature, proprioception is defined as “movement-

produced sensations,” that is, what our bodies are feeling while
making music. How does this inherent feedback system operate? Let
us check in on our instrumentalist Irena, remembering that she is a
guitarist. We know she is receiving the inherent (extero-) feedback of
hearing and seeing while practicing. Also, the feeling of the fingers of
her left hand pressing on the fretboard and those of her right hand
strumming the guitar strings produce proprioception, which can be
defined simply as “the feeling of what happens.” In the next practice
room over, Sanjay is also receiving proprioception, only not through
his fingers (as for Irena) but in his throat and mouth. If Sanjay is an
opera singer, he may be feeling strong sensations in his entire
thorax.
Pause for a moment and silently imagine playing your own
instrument. Chances are, you cued into the memory of
proprioception. If you are a keyboard player, you imagined the
familiar touch of your fingertips on the keys—perhaps your right foot
on a pedal came to mind. Wind players probably imagine their lips,
while string players may call up the sensations in hands and arms as
they nestle their bodies around their instruments.
Whatever you play, the way you feel your instrument guides
your music-making and also guides adjustments to your schema, or
interior motor plan. This is why practice is the most important
variable in motor learning: our bodies must sense, then adjust, in a
continuous, “open loop” of learning. But this very flexibility is both the
power and the danger of proprioceptive learning. Just because it
feels good does not mean it produces a desirable sound or a healthy
use of the body. Motor learners who struggle to undo entrenched
and harmful muscular patterns are up against this paradox and
generally cannot guide themselves out of a movement rut but must
seek objective help from a teacher.
Very gifted teachers are usually those who have vivid and
eloquent descriptions for exactly how hard the fingers should press,
how lightly the weight of the arm should rest, how relaxed the jaw
should be. Many of us remember our teachers by their unique
sayings, especially if they were particularly imaginative and helpful.
But verbal instructions can also be negative, either by simply being
ineffective or, worse, physiologically incorrect, thus sparking
maladjustments. An infamous canard in the world of cultivated
singing is the directive to “breathe from the diaphragm.” At best, this
is ill-informed because it is not physiologically possible to do so. At
worst, it may summon in singers the vocal faults of extreme belly
distention, collapsed ribcage, and inattention to the pharynx, all of
which contribute to poor breath management.
Assuming that teachers know the basic physiology required to
play their instrument, they then need to invent a range of metaphors
to describe the technical requirements that must be met to play until
they find those that resonate just right with their learners. Indeed, the
development of refined proprioception comprises a significant
percentage of overall music instruction. But the number-one tool that
teachers use to guide the student’s proprioception is language. This
guidance is called augmented feedback.

Augmented Feedback

As the term implies, augmented feedback is extra information

beyond the learner’s own fund of inherent information. Augmented
feedback is typically verbal feedback proffered by a teacher,
although information delivered by any external source (such as a
video recorder) also gives augmented feedback. ML researchers
Schmidt and Lee note, “Most importantly, this feedback is
information over which the instructor has control; thus, it can be
given or not given, given at different times, and given in different
forms to influence learning.”[41] This description portrays augmented
feedback rather capriciously, like a tool with many interchangeable
parts that is wielded at the whim of the instructor. This is somewhat
alarming considering what is known about augmented feedback,
namely, that it is considered by most ML researchers to be “the
single most important variable (except, of course, practice itself) for
motor learning.”[42] Given augmented feedback’s powerful influence
on learning and the many different varieties available, it is of
paramount importance that music teachers understand the
augmented feedback choices available and the ramifications of
those they actually choose when training musicians.
The first consideration is the parameter of time: how often to
give feedback and when to give it. As noted in figure 4.1, the
divisions before, during, and after a task are available. Each carries
specific benefits and hazards.

Concurrent Augmented Feedback

Let us now imagine that a music student, Bo, has arrived for his
weekly piano lesson with Professor Steinway. After initial
pleasantries have been exchanged, a discussion ensues between
them about a difficulty that Bo encountered in the previous lesson
and the relative success of three different practice strategies
suggested by Professor Steinway. Bo reports “strategy number 2” as
somewhat successful, so Professor Steinway directs Bo to give it a
go with the strategy discussed, albeit at a slower tempo than he
reported using in practice. This common feedback strategy—simple
instructions given before launching—is generally efficient and
effective, mostly by focusing the student’s mind on the task at hand.
(I will return to this very important aspect of motor learning,
attentional focus, later in the chapter.)
However, if the teacher had given Bo a moment to imagine his
desired finger movements before launching and then given her
verbal directions, Professor Steinway would have set up what is
known as a feedforward scenario in ML research.[43] This very
powerful motor-learning teaching technique is linked to motor
imagery and mental practice, as previously described. Using a
feedforward scenario in a lesson is like a microversion of the mental
practice regimen reviewed earlier. In this scenario, Bo closes his
eyes (roadblocking other stimuli) while Professor Steinway describes
for Bo what he should optimally attempt to feel. This entire
microversion of mental practice should last far less than a minute. A
vivid directive to capture this process is “Feel first, then go!”
Bo “goes,” and at this juncture in the lesson—Bo is playing and
Professor Steinway is observing critically—choices must be made by
Professor Steinway about the most effective time to give Bo her
augmented feedback. Should she wait until Bo is finished or deliver it
in the moment while Bo is actually playing? Concurrent augmented
feedback is typically a stream of verbal coaching delivered in real
time while the student is playing or singing, but frequent gestures—
such as facial signs of approval or disapproval (smiles or frowns) or
hand signals (thumbs up or thumbs down)—are also forms of
concurrent augmented feedback. Whichever it might be, ML
research is pretty clear that concurrent augmented feedback should
be used sparingly for at least five reasons.

Problems with Concurrent Feedback

1. If Professor Steinway uses verbal concurrent feedback, her

words cannot adequately describe sensations; they offer a poor
substitute for feeling.
2. Professor Steinway’s language is cognitively processed in
Bo’s brain quite differently from his own proprioception. For one
thing, language is translated more slowly than sensation. For
this reason and reason number 1, verbal directives get “lost in
translation.”
3. A third problem (related to the first two) is that Professor
Steinway’s stream of verbal concurrent feedback could
effectively block Bo from receiving and processing his own
 sensory information (proprioception); this is the central
argument of the guidance hypothesis. Further, if Professor
Steinway’s verbiage contradicts what Bo himself is sensing,
cognitive overload in Bo’s brain could ensue.
4. Let us imagine that that Professor Steinway’s feedback is
not verbal but a continuous range of highly emotive facial
expressions; her face reflects a beatific glow when she is
pleased with Bo’s playing and a stormy gloom when he errs. A
fourth concern is that the student in this scenario
subconsciously focuses on gaining the beatific smile reward.
What this means is that learners who are focused on pleasing
their teachers are therefore unable to focus on what they should
actually be doing: learning. (Important note: learners at all ages
and stages are vulnerable to this influence, especially those who
rate high on measures of empathy and compassion.)
5. Finally, concurrent augmented feedback displays the
troublesome characteristics of the guidance hypothesis, which
boosts short-term performance but depresses long-term
learning.

Speaking of the guidance hypothesis: another form of

concurrent augmented feedback is physical guidance in the form of a
device (the aforementioned squeeze toy) or direct physical contact in
the form of the instructor’s hands. Let us lay aside the ethical and
legal considerations of laying on of hands for a moment and consider
what the evidence suggests about manipulative correction. It usually
leads to the same outcome as all other forms of concurrent
augmented feedback: such solutions may temporarily boost
performance, but ultimately that boost may not take root in the
student’s long-term memory. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence does
suggest that the immediate benefit from manipulation techniques
may be retained if they are not used routinely or for very long. The
trick is the removal of such training wheels earlier rather than later in
the learning process before a dependency is developed, forcing the
learner to encode the desired sensations in his own memory banks. I
will explain the ethical ramifications of manipulation later in this
chapter.

Terminal Feedback

Let us now imagine a different scenario for Professor Steinway.

In this scenario, she has learned about the pitfalls of concurrent
augmented feedback and never uses it. Instead, she relies on
terminal feedback—that is, information given after the student has
concluded playing or singing. Indeed, most music teachers likely use
some form of terminal feedback, but which one is best? This is an
excellent question, for ML research has atomized terminal feedback
into discrete segments: instantaneous, immediate, and delayed. The
results from research on these parameters of feedback timing have
yielded varied results on the question of timing, and new research
has challenged some old orthodoxies. Let us inspect them in order.
The most rapid response is instantaneous feedback, which is
verbal commentary given with no time lapse between trial and
instruction. Some instructors will even interrupt the student while he
is playing to give instantaneous feedback. Even though this kind of
feedback is not quite the same as concurrent, the effect of
instantaneous feedback on learning appears to be similar to that of
concurrent. That is, instantaneous feedback offers no quiet space in
which the learner can pause, reflect, and process what he just did. It
scripts for the learner what he should have felt instead of allowing
him to work out for himself what he did feel. It is fascinating how
often findings from ML theory validate Bjork’s theory of desirable
difficulties.
On the other end of the time spectrum is delayed feedback.
Elements that must be taken into consideration with this type of
feedback are length of time and what happens during the delay.
Regarding the former, common sense indicates that a student will
gain very little, perhaps even zero, if a lesson occurs on a Monday
but the student receives no feedback until Tuesday. So let us look at
what happens when very brief delays (as measured in seconds) are
used in teaching.
 Immediate feedback appears to be the most effective. This is
verbal feedback provided during the lesson but after a short time
delay (short, meaning a few seconds). The efficacy of delay has
been one of the most surprising findings in recent ML research, in
part because lab animals typically demonstrate learning decrements
relative to time elapsed between trial and feedback. But (surprise!)
humans are not lab animals. In studies using feedback delays
ranging from seconds to several minutes, no degradation in learning
has been noted in motor learning. But one important variable must
be mentioned here: the delays studied were “empty”; that is, nothing
happened in the interim to distract the learner. It appears critical that
the learner’s own feedback systems (inherent) be allowed to fill this
empty space before the teacher rushes in with verbal commentary.
In the words of Schmidt and Lee, “learning is enhanced when
processing of the inherent feedback occurs before augmented
feedback is provided.”[44] In studio settings, we see this when music
teachers ask a student at the conclusion of a passage, “How did that
feel?”
Conversely, filled feedback-delay intervals are those pauses in
which another activity intervenes. If this interruption is not related to
the music lesson—Look! A squirrel!—learning generally suffers.
Teachers should consider this when they allow chatting off topic, a
knock at the door, or a phone call to interrupt lessons. We teachers
must ourselves eschew distractions, no matter how attractive, in
order to prevent damaged learning.

Feedback Frequency

A final parameter of time in regard to feedback is feedback

frequency, that is, how often a teacher should provide augmented
feedback. A commonsense approach, backed up by ML research, is
for the teacher to provide frequent feedback in the early stages of
music study and then fade out the feedback as mastery increases.
Recall that, while frequent feedback in the early stages of learning
generally boosts performance, it can also create dependencies in the
learner and distract the student from processing her own inherent
feedback. Obviously the question of when to begin the fade is
paramount. ML theory might answer, “The sooner, the better.”
An alternate method to faded feedback is bandwidth feedback,
in which the learner and teacher basically agree ahead of time that
as long as certain parameters are met, the teacher will give no
feedback. In practicing bandwidth feedback, no feedback equals
good feedback; the learner can infer that her task was correct and
therefore “good enough.” Note to teachers: you may encounter
students who have been reared on frequent praise (whether by
parents or former teachers) and who will feel puzzled or even bereft
at the loss of it. A commonsense solution is to first ascertain if this is
the case and, if confirmed, solicit the student’s assent to a new form
of confirmation. Be sure to avail yourself of this research so that your
student (and, in the case of children and teens, her parents)
understands that you are not mean. Au contraire, you are operating
your studio by the au courant laws of ML theory! How lucky your
student is to be in such a modern learning environment! (You will
revisit the topic of excess praise in chapter 5.)
Finally, summary feedback allows the learner to attempt a task
several times in a row before feedback is given. This can be a
particularly effective teaching and learning method with advanced
musicians who wish to try several different ways to reach the same
goal and assess what was most effective afterward. Besides,
advanced students should not need (or even want) augmented
feedback after each and every try. But all students should want to
know about the types of augmented feedback they receive.
Therefore, now that I have described the parameter of feedback
timing, the next consideration is feedback quality. What, exactly, is
the stuff of augmented feedback?

Knowledge of Performance and Knowledge of

Results

Augmented feedback typically breaks down into two main

categories according to ML research: knowledge of performance and
knowledge of results. (This nomenclature is somewhat bedeviled by
the important distinction between learning and performance covered
earlier in this chapter.)
Knowledge of results (KR), as the name implies, is information
about the outcome of what the student just did. As such, it is very
applicable in some domains while possibly rather useless in others.
For example, a coach may need to give KR to a swimmer who, due
to the solitary, rather sightless nature of competitive swimming,
otherwise has no idea where he placed in time trials until told.
Similarly, track and field athletes fidget nervously on the sidelines
while awaiting KR.
But KR should be used sparingly in most music lessons,
depending on the pursuit. Most instrumentalists do not need a
teacher to state the obvious: “Your hand slipped, and you bungled
that scale passage.” However, singers’ special hearing challenges
(as previously described) may necessitate frank and immediate KR.
But results like “Sasha, your ultimate high C was flat” are always
best delivered with a dose of empathy: “I know this is disappointing
to hear, since you have been working so hard on intonation, but your
ultimate high C was flat. Let’s see what you can do to correct it.”
Conversely, knowledge of performance (KP) is information
about the movement or technique that led to the performance
outcome. Using Sasha as an example, KP in a lesson might be
scripted like this: “Sasha, your jaw was dropped too low, which wiped
out the higher harmonics in that high C, and so it was perceived as
flat.”
KP is the most common type of augmented feedback given in
music lessons, and most teachers use a variety of two kinds:
descriptive and prescriptive. As the names imply, teachers may
describe what happened (“You did not move your thumb under
quickly enough”) and then prescribe a remedy: “Try that scale
passage again at a slower tempo, and anticipate the movement of
your thumb a bit earlier.”

Too Much Information?

For much of the past century, a common opinion concerning the

optimal amount of feedback that learners should receive was
essentially “the more, the better.” And “more” applied to just about
every parameter of feedback: more immediate, more precise, more
frequent, more informationally rich, and as well more generally useful
—this was supposedly all good.[45] Interestingly, this viewpoint
harkens back to the beginning of this chapter, with the traditional
teacher-student paradigm emphasizing what the teacher knows and
not how best the student should receive that knowledge. Cognitive
science is concerned with the latter question, and because so much
more is now known about the way that humans process information,
a shift in emphasis is called for in the pedagogy of just about every
discipline imaginable. How much better could teaching and learning
go if the focus were switched from the content of the teacher’s brain
to the landscape of the learner’s mind? When the lens is refocused
in this way, it becomes much easier to see that the “More is better”
approach harms learning in at least four ways.
First, lots of feedback can create a dependency within the
learner. This is the aforementioned guidance hypothesis, which
holds that student dependency distracts from student effort, a
necessary component to learning. This is especially toxic when gobs
of feedback are exceptionally positive, for, when that positive
feedback is withdrawn, the student can feel set adrift, rebuffed, and
lost.
A second and related theory about the negative effect of too
much feedback holds that learners can become so addicted to praise
that they pursue the task to earn the praise reward and not to learn
the task itself. This is particularly damaging to the learning habits of
children, as you will see in chapter 5.
A third case against the “More is better” approach is that too
much feedback may evoke the same responses that concurrent and
instantaneous feedback do: when the student focuses on her
teacher’s feedback, it blocks her from processing her own.
A fourth theory as to why more feedback is not better feedback
is the truth behind the popular complaint “That’s just too much
information,” or TMI for short. Even though urban American slang
usually reserves TMI for news that is overly and embarrassingly
personal, the term captures the theory of cognitive overload
beautifully. Recall that, by our most recent estimates, most normal
humans can juggle only about four items at a time in working
memory (i.e., in the act of learning). Now refer to figure 4.1, and
allow yourself to be astonished and humbled, both as teacher and as
learner, by the sheer amount of feedback a student musician must
process and the variety of sources from whence it springs in the
quest to learn. TMI syndrome is real.
And if reading all the information in this chapter about feedback
is itself TMI, then here is a good rule of thumb: augmented feedback
is best when it is simple, delivered in one lump sum after several
trials and, at that, after a short delay. One final observation about
feedback is certain: if you prioritize a concern for how your student
learns over how much you yourself know, your feedback is bound to
be more nuanced and fruitful.

Hands Off

Before leaving this section on feedback, take a look at the

ethical considerations of the physical feedback known as
manipulation. This is literally a hands-on teaching approach in which
the teacher touches the student’s body in order to elicit a physical or
tonal response. Even though there can be some remarkable benefits
to hands-on guidance, both student and teacher should think soberly
about the risks of touching: the potential for misunderstanding,
misuse, or outright abuse is high, particularly if there are no
witnesses present, which is very often the case in one-on-one studio
teaching, where student and teacher are alone, behind closed doors.
Teachers should be aware that simply asking permission to
touch a student is not sufficiently comprehensive. Due to the
asymmetrical power dynamic inherent in the teacher-student
relationship, the student may not feel free to say no. Indeed, very
young students or introverted personality types may simply be
unable to refuse, even if that is exactly what they wish to do.
Students should know that they have the fundamental human right to
forbid touching—even if doing so creates awkwardness or anxiety. A
coping mechanism for students is to write their teacher an e-mail
clearly stating their preferences regarding touching during lessons.
 Despite these significant concerns, physical guidance or
manipulation remains a very useful tool for motor learning.
Therefore, a simple and sensible solution to this dilemma is for the
teacher to demonstrate upon her own body, never directly touching
the student but guiding the student to act in mirror imitation upon his
own. Another solution is for the teacher to give written instructions
for manipulation as homework, being sure to detail and describe the
sensations the learner should seek (“Notice when your spine is
aligned that your jaw tends to relax”). Adding together the ethical and
legal hazards that attend touching, plus the cognitive benefits for
learners who discover the right sensations for themselves, hands-off
guided manipulation seems the best approach for both parties.

THE THEORY OF ATTENTIONAL FOCUS

Across all ML domains, the central goals of skilled performance are
movement effectiveness and movement efficiency. The former
encompasses the goals of accuracy, fluidity, speed, and consistency;
the latter (also known as muscular efficiency) concerns the ability to
enact complex muscular movement with a minimum amount of
energy.[46] Exactly how to usher the performer to a place of
maximum effectiveness with an economy of effort is a question for
both performer and trainer, so the issue of attention—specifically,
where the learner should place it in both learning and performance—
is of primary concern. Much ML research is devoted to a
fundamental question: Where should performers aim their attention
while learning and performing muscular tasks? Should they focus
internally, on the various body parts and micro-movements involved
(the mechanics), or should they place their awareness externally on
the end goal of the movement (the target)?
This question—known as the theory of attentional focus—has
inspired so many studies in ML research that prominent ML
researcher Gabriele Wulf, a leading expert on attentional focus, was
invited to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature on it.
According to Wulf, the jury is no longer out on attentional focus:
 Over the past 15 years, research on focus of attention has
consistently demonstrated that an external focus (i.e., on the
movement effect) enhances motor performance and learning
relative to an internal focus (i.e., on body movements).[47]

The efficacy of external focus is perhaps best illustrated through

anecdote, and Wulf offers her own lesson in windsurfing, a sport in
which the primary attribute needed is balance. Wulf found that, when
she focused her attention internally on the position of her feet and
the location of her hands (the mechanics), she repeatedly fell into
the water. However, when she shifted her attention to the tilt of the
board as she turned, she stayed afloat. In other words, when she
focused on the goal of the movement rather than the mechanics of
her movements, she experienced “instantaneous success.”[48]
I recall a similar experience learning to play darts at a local bar.
A friend instructed me in the most minute details of throwing a dart:
the grip of my fingers around the shaft, the cock of my elbow, the
snap of my wrist, and the exact point at which I should release the
dart. After many frustrating trials and added damage to the
pockmarked wall behind the dartboard, an amused bystander
suggested that I should simply “Be the dart” and decide where I
wanted my dart-like self to land. As I intoned that mantra, like Wulf
on her sailboard, I experienced instantaneous success (and a lot of
congratulatory beer).
The principle of external focus goes by many mottos in popular
culture: “Go with the flow” and “Be in the moment” encourage a Zen-
like oneness with the experience, while exhortations like “Get out of
your head” and “Don’t overthink” imply an anti-intellectualism that
some find appealing when working in the physical realm. Remedies
offered for difficult musical tasks include “Don’t fight it,” “Just let it
happen,” and “Throw your voice to the balcony!” These sayings are
appealing because they offer simple solutions to difficult challenges,
and they are popular because they so often seem to work. Indeed,
the principle of nonattention to mechanics is so ubiquitous that
philosopher (and former ballet dancer) Barbara Montero dubbed it
“the Maxim”:
 Both in the ivory tower and on the football field, it is widely
thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while
performing them hinders their execution. Once you have
developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the
piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to your bodily
movement is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and
sometimes even utter paralysis. At the pinnacle of achievement,
such skills, it is urged, should proceed without conscious
interference. In the oft-spoken words of the great choreographer
George Balanchine, “Don’t think, dear; just do.” Let me call the
view that bodily awareness tends to hinder highly accomplished
bodily skills “the Maxim.”[49]

Montero is an erudite opponent of the Maxim, which she later

renamed the just-do-it principle.[50] I will return to consider Montero’s
and others’ challenges to the Maxim, but let us begin by looking at
the current, prevailing view in ML research: “In almost all situations,
an external focus of attention results in more skilled performance
than an internal focus of attention.”[51]
Several theories have been developed by various researchers in
support of the Maxim. Wulf’s own is her constrained action
hypothesis, which holds that an internal focus of attention interferes
with automatic control processes based on the premise that
automatic responses are accomplished much more rapidly than are
consciously controlled ones. Refer to table 3.1 in chapter 3 and note
that declarative learning is generally slow, while procedural learning
is relatively fast. Since processing speed has been positively
correlated with motor learning goals, the constrained action
hypothesis holds that all of these goals (fluidity, accuracy, speed,
etc.) are harmed when performers slow down their own motor
systems by, in popular parlance, “thinking too much.” In other words,
when rapid, bottom-up brain-processing speed clashes with top-
down, cognitively measured processing speed, we mess up.
Other robust hypotheses in support of the Maxim suggest that
directing attention to mechanical movement while learning ironically
causes existing (poor) muscular patterns to stabilize, thus working in
opposition to the positive benefits of unlearning. Another theory
related to this “ironic effect” involves the degree of freedom with
which the body operates most efficiently and posits that an internal
focus of attention seems to exert a freezing effect on the joints.[52]
Finally, the limitations of language have been noted as a barrier
to motor learning because of the difficulty in describing physical
sensations in words. It is reasoned that poorly described sensations
are tracked into the nonmotor regions of the brain, where they are
essentially lost in translation.[53]
A vote in favor of external focus (or any ML research finding, for
that matter) is its so-called generalizability to other domains. Wulf
states that the worth of external focus is “now well established,” as
evidenced by its “generalizability to different skills, levels of
expertise, and populations, as well as its impact on both the
effectiveness and efficiency of performance,”[54] and she suggests
that the case is closed regarding the veracity of the Maxim:

In my review I found no exception to the rule that external-focus

instructions or feedback result in more effective and efficient
performance or learning than those inducing an internal focus.
[55]

ATTENTIONAL FOCUS IN MUSIC

Wulf steps out of the boundaries of her own field of expertise (sports)
and flatly declares, “I am convinced that the enhanced movement
effectiveness and efficiency seen when individuals focus externally
applies to all human beings,” implying that the external focus “rule”
can be applied across virtually every skilled motor pursuit.[56] In her
book Attention and Motor Skill Learning, Wulf includes guest
chapters from practitioners across the ML spectrum. Adina Mornell,
concert pianist and professor of instrumental pedagogy at the
University of Music and the Dramatic Arts in Graz, Austria, testifies
for music:

In performance, musicians’ most valuable assets can become

their worst enemies. The same finely tuned ear that enables
musicians to weave intricate musical lines can suddenly pick up
 a disturbing sound in the hall. The same emotional sensitivity
that generates beauty in their playing exposes musicians to
vulnerability and self-doubt. In the moment concentration
becomes interrupted, for whatever reason, self-consciousness is
created. A sudden shift in attentional focus—towards what
Gabriele Wulf defines as “internal focus”—throws the brain
engine into a lower gear with a loud roar and pulls the hand
brake, disrupting a fluid glide through the musical composition.
In short, nothing is worse for a musician than the sudden urge to
deliberately manage movement, a departure from external
focus.[57]

Indeed, many musicians can likely recall a moment in which

nonattention to mechanics was the magic wand that allowed their
musicianship to blossom. This observation was the seed of tennis
pro Timothy Gallwey’s 1974 best-selling book, The Inner Game of
Tennis. Gallwey describes his teaching method as based on
“establishing harmony between mind and body” and learning to “get
out of your own way so that you can learn and perform closer to your
potential.”[58] Gallwey’s book with coauthor bassist Barry Green, The
Inner Game of Music, generated a veritable inner-game mini-industry
on the topics of golf, skiing, and general work. Inner-game themes
have been promulgated by many who train instrumentalists and
singers, like voice scientist Katherine Verdolini-Abbott, who has
written and lectured extensively on principles of ML theory as they
relate to voice training.[59] In an article intended for choral directors,
Verdolini-Abbott invokes the Maxim by implying the efficacy of such
popular directives as “Stop trying” and “Don’t judge”:

Principle #5: Motor Learning Does Not Involve Trying. Now

we come to an interesting contradiction. Although motor learning
appears to require cognitive effort, intentional trying may be
harmful. What we mean here by “trying” refers to conscious
cognitive effort to identify, use, and judge specific information,
rather than letting the non-conscious mind solve the motor
problems. In motor learning, conscious “trying” not only has a
high likelihood of introducing unwanted muscular tension; it
 probably invokes the “declarative” or “explicit” memory
processes which are probably largely irrelevant to motor
learning.[60]

These ideas are appealing in part because they resonate with

the current zeitgeist and also because they are backed up by
anecdotal accounts of musicians’ “unwanted muscular tension”
melting under the soothing directive to leave off trying. But how do
we know that muscular tension is caused by “overthinking”? How do
we know for sure that, in Mornell’s words, “nothing is worse for a
musician than the sudden urge to deliberately manage movement”?
Ironically, Mornell’s unequivocal statement in Wulf’s book is
immediately followed by her equally unequivocal concession that,
“as logical and obvious as this sounds, there has been almost no
empirical research done to date on this phenomenon.”[61] Given that
the scientific method is still the best mechanism we have for
validating a claim, Mornell’s acknowledgment of the dearth of hard
evidence regarding the efficacy of external focus in music should at
least give musicians pause.
Before investigating this issue further, let’s take a short side trip
to the one arena in which at least some ML theorists—even those
who espouse the benefits of external focus—allow that there may be
some advantages to an internal focus.

NOVICE LEARNERS AND INTERNAL FOCUS

Despite both anecdotal and research evidence that testifies to the
success of external focus, it is not unreasonable to wonder about its
efficacy for beginners, not to mention its very availability. After all, a
beginner in the motor learning realm is a beginner precisely because
he has no baseline of efficient function; therefore, the training of
beginners is all about establishing a foundation of physical skills. So
it ranges from ineffective to irresponsible to exhort beginners who
are struggling to just “go with the flow” because it ignores their basic
reality: there is, as yet, no flow with which to go.
Sian Beilock, a leading ML researcher on the question of
choking in motor performance, concludes that, for this reason, an
internal focus is beneficial in the early stages of learning motor skills:
[62]

Different teaching styles are required at various stages of

learning to address the changing attentional mechanisms of the
performer. . . . It may be beneficial to direct performers’ attention
to step-by-step components of a skill in the early stages of
acquisition.[63]

Beginners accounted for, the question of where advanced and

expert performers place their attention yet remains. These people
possess an established foundation of physical gestures from which
to draw—colloquially, we call these habits. Using inner-game speak,
we might call it “a flow with which to go.” Yet even with established
physical habits, is “go with the flow” really the best strategy in motor
learning and performance? Or are there better tactics that actually
usher the performer to the heart of learning and performance
challenges instead of away from them? Researchers besides Wulf
who study expert populations are offering some alternatives to
external focus and “go with the flow.”

CHALLENGES TO THE MAXIM AND JUST DO IT

Psychological research on skill acquisition throughout the previous
century established theories that largely account for today’s popular
view of experts in the motor realm. The buzzword that accompanies
adoring fans’ assessment of superstar athletes is automatic. As
Montero drily notes, “in the Psychology literature, the stand-in for
divine inspiration is automaticity.”[64] The idolatry of automaticity has
certainly helped bolster the theory of external attentional focus,
popularized as “getting out of your own way.” This veneration has
spawned the interrelated views that (1) experts operate
“automatically,” outside their own awareness, and therefore (2) motor
training toward a goal of automaticity is paramount, while (3) thinking
or verbalization during motor performance spoils automaticity.[65]
To account for these interwoven accounts, Montero redubbed
the Maxim the just-do-it principle, defined as follows:
 For experts, when all is going well, optimal or near performance
proceeds without any of the following mental processes: self-
reflective thinking, planning, predicting, deliberation, attention to
or monitoring of their actions, conceptualizing their actions,
conscious control, trying, effort, having a sense of the self, or
acting for a reason. Moreover, when all is going well, such
processes interfere with expert performance and such mental
processes should be avoided.[66]

Montero wrote a book-length argument against the just-do-it

principle, in which she challenges “whether thinking interfere[s] with
doing” and counters with a principle of her own about how human
thought works when human bodies are in action,[67] called the
“cognition-in-action” principle:

For experts, when everything is optimal or near optimal,

performance frequently involves some of the following
conscious mental processes: self-reflective thinking, planning,
predicting, deliberating, attending to or monitoring actions,
conceptualizing actions, controlling movement, trying, making
an effort, having a sense of the self, and acting for a reason.
Moreover, such mental processes do not necessarily or even
generally interfere wth expert performance and should not be
avoided.[68]

Other significant challenges to the just-do-it principle have been

mounted by researchers John Toner, Aiden Moran, and John Sutton,
among others. The following five key criticisms are the most salient
for musicians:

Key Criticisms of the Just-Do-It Principle

1. Most ML research subjects are not experts.

2. ML lab studies do not study complex motor skills.
 3. Studies conducted in a lab rather than on a court or on a
mountainside—let alone in a concert hall—are not “ecologically
valid.”[69]
4. Elite performers in some domains actually reject
automaticity, either for artistic reasons (jazz) or because ever-
changing conditions do not allow it (skiing and stand-up
comedy).
5. Experts seek continually to improve, and improvement
demands practically all of the attributes eschewed by the just-
do-it principle (e.g., self-reflective thinking and making changes
based on variable conditions).

Musicians should carefully consider each of these points before

swallowing the just-do-it principle whole. Let us consider each one of
them here. The first, the fact that most ML research is conducted on
nonexpert subjects, highlights a central challenge in research across
disciplines: there is an overabundance of so-called naive subjects.
Why is this? There are two basic reasons. Most research in the
United States is conducted at research universities that by their very
nature house an abundance of naive subjects (students).
Conversely, experts become expert by pursuing what they do with a
laser-like intensity that brooks few interruptions. This zeal is
precisely what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found while
developing his famous theory of “optimal experience,” or “flow.”[70]
Many of the experts whom Csikszentmihalyi contacted flatly refused
his invitation to interview them because they viewed participation as
a distraction from their work. Several experts politely explained that
they became expert precisely by refusing invitations like
Csikszentmihalyi’s. Expert test subjects are difficult to snare.
On the second point, ML lab studies are generally confined to
simple, so-called limb tasks such as ball throwing, dart sticking, and
keyboard tapping. Yet music making is a complex activity. A related
concern is that most ML research is based on studies in athletics
and not the performing arts. While performing artists have much in
common with athletes, performance goals for artists are different
than those for athletes, often wildly so. Without getting into the
weeds over whether Olympic-worthy gymnastics are more or less
cognitively complex than the musical skills on display at the Cliburn
International Piano Competition (not to mention the relative artistry
between the two), no one would argue that both are decidedly more
complex than, say, balance-boarding (an oft-studied skill in ML
research). When expression and artistry are added to the
fundamental ML goal of muscular efficiency, cognitive load must
surely increase. Classical singers have the added cognitive burden
of language and must appear emotionally convincing and fluent in a
language that is often not their own.
Comparing simple physical-sports tasks with expert-level
musical technique seems, at best, careless. At one time Wulf herself
(a lead researcher and champion of external focus) coauthored a
study bluntly titled “Principles Derived from the Study of Simple Skills
Do Not Generalize to Complex Skill Learning.” The study calls “into
question the adequacy of utilizing primarily simple tasks in the study
of motor learning and control” and concludes that research on simple
skills should stick to its simple lane.[71] Expert music-making, in any
genre, is not a simple skill.
On the third point, musicians well know that the environment in
which they play has a strong effect (for good or for ill) on
performance, and a laboratory environment may be uninspiring or
worse. One wonders just how spontaneous and, frankly, capable
those jazz pianists of Dr. Limb’s were able to be while placed inside
an fMRI scanner, using a custom-built keyboard that was

placed on the subjects lap in supine position, while the knees

were elevated with a bolster. A mirror placed above the subjects’
eyes allowed visualization of the keys during performance.
Subjects were instructed to move only their right-hand during
the scanning and were monitored visually to ensure that they did
not move their head, trunk, or other extremities during
performance. The subjects lay supine in the scanner without
mechanical restraint.[72]
 This awkward setup elicited giggles from the TED audience to
which Limb presented his experiment, as did an interview with one of
the subjects, a jazz pianist, who gamely reported on what it was like
to play as normally as possible in an exceedingly abnormal (not to
mention claustrophobic) environment:

The hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing, you know, of
just looking at my hands through two mirrors, laying on my back,
and not able to move at all, except for my hand, that was
challenging . . . but again, you know . . . there were moments,
for sure . . . you know, I mean, there were moments of real
honest-to-god musical interplay, for sure.[73]

In the audiotape of this interview, the listener can hear this

musician trying to rationalize the disparity between the highly
unnatural setup and his ability to improvise. Limb himself later
coauthored a paper, allowing that

if a creator is placed in an abnormal, constraining environment

during the course of a scientific study, the creative process itself
is threatened, calling into question the validity of any
observations made thereafter.[74]

Indeed, and seconded. Outside the laboratory setting, there

remains a world of difference separating practice and performance
or between a rehearsal and the real deal. In research, this problem is
known as ecological validity. This, along with other challenges when
conducting psychological research, have upended the entire field
and ignited a full-on “reproducibility crisis.”[75] We should keep in
mind that fMRI studies can only reveal brain activity during an
experiment—not how performers actually think in performance,
much less how they mentally prepare for them.
These questions are posed by research psychologist Roger
Chaffin in his longitudinal case studies of expert musicians, which
offer a treasure trove of information for musicians in training and
those who teach them. Chaffin’s partnerships with expert pianists,
cellists, and singers have revealed that these musicians develop and
access “memory retrieval cues,” which he has called performance
cues:

Performance cues are the landmarks of the piece that an

experienced musician attends to during performance, carefully
selected and rehearsed during practice so that they come to
mind automatically and effortlessly as the piece unfolds, eliciting
the highly practiced movements of fingers, hands, and arms.
Performance cues become an integral part of the performance
and provide a means of consciously monitoring and controlling
the rapid, automatic actions of the hands.[76]

Note that Chaffin’s performance cues “provide a means” of

conscious monitoring and control. This is the opposite of external
focus, or “non-attention” to mechanics. Research on attentional
focus has suffered due to a lack of expert subjects generally and a
lack of performing artists as subjects specifically. If this state of
affairs could somehow be rectified, Chaffin’s studies offer a
refreshing and egalitarian model for how research partnerships
between art and science might proceed most fruitfully. His

studies combine the third-person perspective of the scientist,

which provides objectivity and rigor, with the first-person
perspective of the musician, which provides a rich
understanding of the musical judgments that shaped the
performance. Often the studies confirm the musicians’
understanding of their experience of performance, providing
objective support for their intuitions. Sometimes the musicians
are surprised and then everybody learns something new.[77]

Let us now consider a fourth criticism of the vaunted goal of

automaticity, namely, that automaticity is actually scorned in some
domains even though the ability to execute skilled movement
“without thinking” has been lionized in ML theory as a hallmark of
expertise, with “automaticity” revered as the Holy Grail of expert
performance across multiple pursuits:
 With talent and a great deal of involved experience, the
beginner develops into an expert who sees intuitively what to do
without applying rules and making judgments at all. . . . Normally
an expert does not deliberate. He or she neither reasons nor
acts deliberately. He or she simply spontaneously does what
has normally worked and, naturally, it normally works.[78]

This account is hardly new, owing much to romantic-era notions

of genius in which inspiration supposedly gushes forth as long as the
rational mind does not staunch it (ironically, much popular writing has
sought to take Limb’s fMRI discoveries as scientific proof of this
romantic account). To those outside the border of expertise, revered
players within the magic circle of talent appear to issue forth their
gifts effortlessly. Is it any wonder, then, that lack of effort is inferred to
be the reason for their success? Yet a deeper look at the work habits
and opinions of actual experts across many domains reveals
common threads of effort, discipline, and pointed disdain for the “no
effort” myth. The late Sam Snead (anointed by former USGA
president William Campbell “the best natural player ever”) got at the
heart of how insulted many experts feel when their abilities are
ascribed to mere talent:

People always said I had a natural swing. They thought I wasn’t

a hard worker. But when I was young, I’d play and practice all
day, then practice more at night by my car’s headlights. My
hands bled. Nobody worked harder at golf than I did.[79]

While athletes and musicians may view the intersection of talent

and effort similarly, they may part ways at attitudes toward risk. Risk-
taking in sports can carry significant consequences, as when a star
pitcher’s throw or golfer’s stroke goes awry, while the sportscaster’s
phrase “off his game” is an admonition against straying from the path
of automaticity. Athletes’ risk-taking can result in even graver
consequences, like torn ligaments and broken bones. So while
automaticity may be a desirable trait in some athletic pursuits, in
music performance it is, at best, confined to its role in fluidity and
dependability. At worst, musicians risk criticism for wooden or
uninspired performances when they are judged as being too
automatic. In fact, risk-taking in music (particularly in jazz) is highly
valued and even considered a badge of honor among elite
musicians.
So how might musicians find the sweet spot between cultivating
enough automaticity to withstand the rigors of performance (and the
adrenaline rush that attends it) while resisting uninspiring
performances? The solution, according to Chaffin and colleagues, is
to “interweave thought and action” by practicing automaticity and
performance cues at the same time, enfolding both technique and
expression in one gesture.[80] That is, practice the emotional
response along with the physical one, and tuck them away in the
mind as one unified cue, available for retrieval at will.
A final critique of the just-do-it principle rests on the clear-eyed
observation that experts seek continually to improve; that is why they
are expert. And improvement demands practically all of the attributes
eschewed by just-do-it (self-reflective thinking, planning, predicting,
deliberation, attention to and monitoring of actions, and so forth). If
this is true of the expert, it necessarily follows that this should be true
of the students of expertise. The cognitive skills needed for
improvement should be taught to expertise seekers.
Given the robust arguments against it, then, why does the
veneration of automaticity persist? The vision of someone like
musical titan Itzhak Perlman mindlessly practicing his violin while
watching television certainly helps, endearing him to fans as a
regular guy:

“Actually, the best show to practice on is baseball,” Perlman

said. “It’s terrific, because you can turn off the sound, and you
know what’s going on, and you practice your technique. I’m not
talking about practicing thinking or anything like this,” he said.
“That’s a totally different thing. I did some of my greatest
practicing when I was in London watching cricket. It’s a very,
very low game. That’s when you practice.”[81]

Even though in this and other interviews Perlman is always

careful to explain that, when he puts himself “on automatic pilot,” he
is working on “technique, as opposed to musical content,” that
nuance may be lost on learners who emulate him.[82] We may
assume that Perlman (a child prodigy who made his Carnegie Hall
debut at age eighteen) has logged well over ten thousand practice
hours and so possesses a motor program that runs on track like a
well-oiled machine. Apparently all he has to do is push the “on”
button. But for lesser musicians and for student musicians in training,
the possibility of practicing mistakes while on autopilot—and thereby
encoding them into memory—is probably fairly high. This is yet one
more argument against automaticity.
So if automaticity is so bad (toxic to creativity and an intoxicant
for damaged learning), why is it so popular? Is there anything good
about playing on automatic pilot? The answer is a qualified yes. For
one thing, it would be cognitively impossible to consciously process
each and every mundane motor task we do every day. Imagine
issuing commands to yourself to twist a doorknob with just the right
amount of wrist flexion, and you get the idea. Musicians ply their
craft with similarly mundane tasks: once we know how to flip our
thumbs under on a keyboard to achieve velocity on a scale passage,
hours of practice seal it up in the vault of long-term memory, and we
never have to think about it again—unless, due to injury, we have to
retrain that habit in a new way.
Absent the latter scenario, the most cogent argument for
automaticity is the former: routine tasks can be marked “done,”
shelved, and stocked in the vault of the mind for retrieval at will. This
stockpiling of simple tasks, it is thought, reduces cognitive load,
leaving more mental real estate available for other cognitive tasks,
like expressivity. This is the upside of automaticity. Yet this very
advantage (more room in the brain) is also the Achilles’s heel of
automaticity, which I will discuss in chapter 6.

FLEXIBLE ATTENTION
Now that I have explained the just-do-it principle, questions remain:
Are musicians to focus internally or externally? Should we chase
automaticity? Foreswear overt self-commands? They beg an
essential one for musicians: Are these either-or propositions? Must
musicians make a definitive choice between an internal or an
external focus of attention (as Wulf’s opinion clearly implies), or
might we toggle between them in the midst of our music-making as
training and performance conditions demand? If automaticity
reduces cognitive load, might we access a dash of automaticity and
use our cognitive balance in the service of art? To answer these
questions, let us look to a team of Australian researchers who have
proposed a “flexible attention” approach they call “applying
intelligence to the reflexes,” or AIR:

By the notion of “applying intelligence to the reflexes,” then, we

mean that certain patterns of behaviour which might appear
stably chunked, automated, and thus inflexible are in skilled
performance already and continually open to current
contingency and mood, past meanings, and changing goals.
Experts have opened their “reflexes” up into acquired adaptive
patterns, and constructed, over time . . . dynamic repertoires of
potential action sequences which can be accessed, redeployed,
and transformed appropriately.[83]

In other words, experts exhibit the ability to rapidly switch their

technique. They do this by employing what appear at first glance to
be rather fixed (automatic) gestures. But a closer look at very skilled
performers (like musicians) offers a completely different
interpretation. Sutton’s team proposes that these “patterns of
behaviour” are actually “chunked” abilities that the researchers say
operate like “Lego blocks . . . scattered around a musician” as he
begins to play. These blocks remain handy to deploy or leave on the
table—performers’ choice. How might we deploy these blocks? ML
researchers John Toner and Aidan Moran note that performers use
executive control (also called cognitive control) to deliberately deploy
these chunks in all three phases of motor learning and performance
(training, preperformance strategizing, and the performance itself).
[84]

The reasons that performers might choose to alter their

techniques vary, but they all spring from the aforementioned
characteristic of expert performers: experts seek continually to
improve.[85] Sometimes this quest to improve is within our control; at
other times, it is sought by necessity.

PLANNING FOR DISRUPTIONS: TRAINING HOW

TO THINK
In the ongoing search for excellence, many trainers and expertise
seekers will deliberately alter practice conditions in order to
challenge themselves. Musicians may do this by changing their
practice space or holding an invited dress rehearsal. This is the
“varied rule of practice” in action.
At other times, altered performance conditions are not of our
choosing. They are visited upon us either by injury or by the
conditions of the activity. For example, musicians recovering from
repetitive strain injuries may have to alter finger or bowing patterns,
and singers recovering from abdominal surgery have reported
having to relearn how to breathe. Executive control must be used by
these musicians to intentionally attend to their previously automated
abilities.
Similarly, Toner and Moran note that experts who perform under
challenging situations do so by accessing their executive control in
order to heighten their technique or retrain their motor programs.
This effect has been studied in expert skiers, who must continually
adapt to changing weather patterns that affect snow conditions, both
in the preplanning stage and in real time as they speed down the
slope.
Musicians cope with rapidly changing situations just like downhill
skiers do. Any number of surprises can happen during a live
performance, all of which require quick thinking and flexibility.
Common challenges include unfamiliar acoustics in a new
performing space or adjusting to the feel and touch of a new
instrument, a recurring professional hazard for pianists, who cannot
pack their instruments with them. Singing actors are equally familiar
with challenging scenarios. Singing through an upper respiratory
infection or dealing with an ill-fitting costume are only a few
obstacles that require quick thinking and expert technical
adjustments, not automaticity. And let us recall that there are also
positive reasons why a performer may wish to avoid automaticity and
suddenly change their interpretation “in the moment” for artistic
reasons.
Indeed, Toner and Moran note that “disruptions” are a fact of the
motor-performing life, and thus we are probably better off devising
“creative solutions in order to address these disruptions” proactively.
[86] While a just-let-it-go directive may be successful when

performance conditions are excellent, if this is attempted during

disrupted performance conditions, the move is, at best, a gamble. In
this light, planning for disruptions ahead of the game seems more
sensible, and in order to do that, we must integrate this flexibility in
our training. As Sutton, McIlwain, Christensen, and Geeves note, the
pursuit of excellence in action involves “training up of the right
indirect links between thought and action, not the evacuation of
thought from action.”[87] Ergo, musicians should practice how to
think, not just what to do.

TRAINING-EMBODIED COGNITION
Even though musicians are often showered with best wishes before
a performance, as actor Dennis Hopper scolded in a popular ad
campaign about retirement preparation, wishes don’t cut it: “You
need a plan,” he intoned. But how to create a musicians’
performance plan? You might start by considering how motor-skill
learning really works, and you could encrust it with details. Sutton
and colleagues’ description of “building and accessing flexible links
between knowing and doing” is an accurate and elegantly concise
description of motor learning for music.[88]
At the beginning of motor learning, these links between thought
and action are first bequeathed to the student as directives from his
teacher, who uses her tools (usually verbal) to inculcate her own,
ultimately ineffable sensations within the student’s body. But this
transference is incomplete; it depends on the learner to finish it. A
musician’s performance plan can only be built by the musician
himself by creating the links between knowing and doing, within his
own mind and body, through deliberate practice.
 Indeed, distinct directives, flexible links, mental Lego blocks—
the stuff of any musician’s performance plan—are all just ideas until
and unless they are literally made incarnate, made flesh, through
doing. This is, in essence, a description of embodied cognition, the
philosophy that challenges the dualistic mind-body split.[89]
Once established, these links must be at the beck and call of the
musician. They must be automatic, yes, to a degree, but they must
also be consciously retrievable. In highly skilled performance art, in
both practice and performance, musicians continually traverse
between top-down and bottom-up processes, plying these flexible
links in service of their art—changing, and being changed by, the
constantly shifting interactions.

NOTES
1. Quoted in Elizabeth Green, “Building a Better Teacher,” New York
Times, March 7, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html.
2. See Gabriele Wulf, Attention and Motor Skill Learning
(Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007); and Ingo Titze and
Katherine Verdolini-Abbott, Vocology: The Science and Practice of
Voice Habilitation (Salt Lake City, UT: National Center for Voice and
Speech, 2012), ch. 7.
3. Lynn Helding, “Master Class Syndrome,” Journal of Singing 67,
no. 1 (2010): 73–78.
4. Robert Bjork, “Memory and Metamemory Considerations in the
Training of Human Beings,” in Metacognition: Knowing about
Knowing, ed. Janet Metcalfe and Arthur Shimamura, 185–205
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
5. Suzuki Association of the Americas, “Bowhold Training Aids,”
June 24, 2011, to May 5, 2014,
https://suzukiassociation.org/discuss/6730/.
6. A. W. Salmoni, R. A. Schmidt, and C. B. Walter, “Knowledge of
Results and Motor Learning: A Review and Critical Reappraisal,”
Psychological Bulletin 95 (1984): 355–86. See also Richard Schmidt
and Timothy Lee, Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral
Emphasis, 4th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2005), 359–60.
7. R. A. Schmidt, “A Schema Theory of Discrete Motor Skill
Learning,” Psychological Review 82 (1975): 225–60. See also R. A.
Schmidt, “Motor Schema Theory after 27 Years: Reflections and
Implications for a New Theory,” Research Quarterly for Exercise and
Sport 74 (2003): 366–75.
8. Bjork, “Memory and Metamemory.”
9. See Schmidt and Lee, Motor Control and Learning, 428.
10. Ibid., 322.
11. See performance psychologist and musician’s Noa Kageyama’s
website for more researched practice tips: “Turn Your Practice Up to
11,” Bulletproof Musician,
https://bulletproofmusician.com/resources/.
12. Tadhg E. MacIntyre, Christopher R. Madan, Aidan P. Moran,
Christian Collet, and Aymeric Guillot, “Motor Imagery, Performance
and Motor Rehabilitation,” Progress in Brain Research 240 (2018):
145.
13. The average reaction time for humans is 0.25 seconds for a
visual stimulus, 0.17 seconds for an audio stimulus, and 0.15
seconds for a touch stimulus. Daisy Yuhas, “Speedy Science: How
Fast Can You React?” Scientific American, May 24, 2012,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-reaction-
time/; Backyard Brains, “Experiment: How Fast Your Brain Reacts to
Stimuli,” 2017, https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/reactiontime.
14. Aidan Moran, Aymeric Guillot, Tadhg MacIntyre, and Christian
Collet, “Re‐imagining Motor Imagery: Building Bridges between
Cognitive Neuroscience and Sport Psychology,” British Journal of
Psychology 103, no. 2 (2012): 225.
15. See Alvaro Pascual‐Leone, “The Brain That Plays Music and Is
Changed by It,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 930,
no. 1 (2001): 315–29.
16. Schmidt and Lee, Motor Control and Learning, 353–55.
17. Edmund Jacobson, “Electrical Measurements of Neuromuscular
States during Mental Activities: I. Imagination of Movement Involving
Skeletal Muscle,” American Journal of Physiology—Legacy
Content 91, no. 2 (1930): 569.
18. Ibid., 607. According to his obituary in the New York Times, Dr.
Jacobson came to be known as the “father of progressive muscle
relaxation” and maintained clinics in both Chicago and Manhattan,
where he taught this technique to patients. He authored over one
hundred articles as well as thirteen books, including How to Relax
and Have Your Baby: Scientific Relaxation in Childbirth (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1959), which joined the rising “natural birth” movement.
19. For an extensive overview of this research, see A. Guillot, M.
Louis, and C. Collet, “Neurophysiological Substrates of Motor
Imagery Ability,” in The Neurophysiological Foundations of Mental
and Motor Imagery, ed. A. Guillot and C. Collet, 109–24 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010). See also S. L. Beilock and I. M.
Lyons, “Expertise and the Mental Simulation of Action,” in The
Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, ed. K. Markman, B.
Klein, and J. Suhr, 21–34 (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2009).
20. M. Jeannerod, “The Representing Brain: Neural Correlates of
Motor Intention and Imagery,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17
(1994): 187–202; and M. Jeannerod, “Neural Simulation of Action: A
Unifying Mechanism for Motor Cognition,” Neuroimage 14 (2001):
S103–S109, https://doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2001.0832.
21. Ingo G. Meister, Timo Krings, Henrik Foltys, Babak Boroojerdi,
M. Müller, R. Töpper, and A. Thron, “Playing Piano in the Mind—An
fMRI Study on Music Imagery and Performance in
Pianists,” Cognitive Brain Research 19, no. 3 (2004): 219–28. See
also Pascual‐Leone, “Brain That Plays Music.”
22. G. Rizzolatti, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, “Neurophysiological
Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitation of Action,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, no. 9 (2001): 661–70,
https://doi.org/10.1038/35090060.
23. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, “Mirror Neurons and Imitation
Learning as the Driving Force behind the Great Leap Forward in
Human Evolution,” Edge.org, May 31, 2000,
www.edge.org/conversation/mirror-neurons-and-imitation-learning-
as-the-driving-force-behind-the-great-leap-forward-in-human-
evolution.
24. Roy Mukamel, Arne D. Ekstrom, Jonas Kaplan, Marco Iacoboni,
and Itzhak Fried, “Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during
Execution and Observation of Actions,” Current Biology 20, no. 8
(2010): 750–56. See also Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola,
“Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Recorded in
Humans,” Current Biology 20, no. 8 (2010): R353–54.
25. Nikos Logothetis, “What We Can Do and What We Cannot Do
with fMRI,” Nature 453, no. 7197 (2008): 870.
26. American Association for the Advancement of Science, “UCLA
Researchers Make First Direct Recording of Mirror Neurons in
Human Brain,” EurekAlert! April 12, 2010,
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-04/uoc--urm041210.php.
27. Raleigh Mcelvery, “How the Brain Links Gestures, Perception
and Meaning,” Quanta, March 25, 2019,
www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-links-gestures-perception-
and-meaning-20190325.
28. Gerry Leisman, Ahmed A. Moustafa, and Tal Shafir, “Thinking,
Walking, Talking: Integratory Motor and Cognitive Brain
Function,” Frontiers in Public Health 4 (2016): 94.
29. Phillip Cohen, “Mental Gymnastics Increase Bicep Strength,”
New Scientist, November 21, 2001,
www.newscientist.com/article/dn1591-mental-gymnastics-increase-
bicep-strength/.
30. Vinoth K. Ranganathan, Vlodek Siemionow, Jing Z. Liu, Vinod
Sahgal, and Guang H. Yue, “From Mental Power to Muscle Power—
Gaining Strength by Using the Mind,” Neuropsychologia 42, no. 7
(2004): 945.
31. MacIntyre et al., “Motor Imagery, Performance and Motor
Rehabilitation,” 142.
32. Schmidt and Lee, Motor Learning and Performance, 258.
33. Lynn Helding, “Cognitive Dissonance: Facts versus Alternative
Facts,” Journal of Singing 74, no. 1 (September/October 2017): 89–
93.
34. See Manuj Yadav and Densil Cabrera, “Autophonic Loudness of
Singers in Simulated Room Acoustic Environments,” Journal of
Voice 31, no. 3 (May 2017): 13–15.
35. N. Scotto Di Carlo, “Internal Voice Sensitivities in Opera
Singers,” Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 46 (1994): 79–85.
36. Ibid.
37. Leon Festinger, “Cognitive Dissonance,” Scientific American 207,
no. 4 (October 1962): 93.
38. See Scott McCoy, Your Voice: An Inside View, 3rd ed.
(Delaware, OH: Inside View Press, 2012).
39. World Health Organization, Adherence to Long-Term Therapies:
Evidence for Action (Geneva, Switzerland: World Health
Organization, 2003), 137.
40. See Lynn Helding, “Mindful Voice: Teaching Voice with the Brain
in Mind,” Journal of Singing 70, no. 3 (January/February 2014): 349–
54.
41. Schmidt and Lee, Motor Learning and Performance, 258.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 68.
44. Ibid., 282 (emphasis mine).
45. Ibid., 262.
46. Gabriele Wulf, “Attentional Focus and Motor Learning: A Review
of 15 Years,” International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology
6, no. 1 (January 2013): 78.
47. Ibid., 77.
48. Ibid., 78–79.
49. Barbara Montero, “Does Bodily Awareness Interfere with Highly
Skilled Movement?” Inquiry 53, no. 2 (March 2010): 105–6.
50. Barbara Gail Montero, Thought in Action: Expertise and the
Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
51. Schmidt and Lee, Motor Learning and Performance, 56.
52. Wulf, “Attentional Focus,” 89.
53. See R. A. Poldrack, J. Clark, E. J. Paré-Blagoev, D. Shohamy, J.
Creso Moyano, C. Myers, and M. A. Gluck, “Interactive Memory
Systems in the Human Brain,” Nature 414 (2001): 546–50; and R. A.
Poldrack and M. G. Packard, “Competition among Multiple Memory
Systems: Converging Evidence from Animal and Human Brain
Studies,” Neuropsychologia 41 (2003): 245–51.
54. Wulf, “Attentional Focus,” 99.
55. Quoted in Cary Groner, “Internal vs. External Focus: Effects on
Motor Learning,” Lower Extremity Review Magazine, September
2014, 2.
56. Gabriele Wulf, “Why Did Tiger Woods Shoot 82? A Commentary
on Toner and Moran,” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 22 (January
2016): 337–38 (emphasis mine).
57. Adina Mornell, in Gabriele Wulf, Attention and Motor Learning,
140–41.
58. W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, rev. ed. (New
York: Random House, 1974), xii–xiv.
59. See Katherine Verdolini-Abbott, “Perceptual-Motor Learning
Principles: How to Train,” in Vocology: The Science and Practice of
Voice Habilitation (Salt Lake City, UT: National Center for Voice and
Speech, 2012), ch. 7.
60. Katherine Verdolini, “On the Voice: Learning Science Applied to
Voice Training: The Value of Being ‘In the Moment,’” Choral Journal
42, no. 7 (February 2002): 49–50.
61. Adina Mornell, in Wulf, Attention and Motor Skill Learning, 141.
62. Wulf, “Attentional Focus,” 91; Sian Beilock, Thomas Carr, Clare
MacMahon, and Janet Starkes, “When Paying Attention Becomes
Counterproductive: Impact of Divided versus Skill-Focused Attention
on Novice and Experienced Performance of Sensorimotor Skills,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 8, no. 1 (March 2002):
6–16; and Sian Beilock, Bennett Bertenthal, Annette McCoy, and
Thomas Carr, “Haste Does Not Always Make Waste: Expertise,
Direction of Attention, and Speed versus Accuracy in Performing
Sensorimotor Skills,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11, no. 2
(April 2004): 373–79.
63. Beilock, Carr, MacMahon, and Starkes, “When Paying Attention,”
15.
64. Montero, Thought in Action, 25.
65. See H. Dreyfus and S. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine (New York:
Free Press, 1986); and P. M. Fitts and M. I. Posner, Human
Performance (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1967).
66. Montero, Thought in Action, 237.
67. Ibid., 77.
68. Ibid., 237–38.
69. P. W. Burgess, N. Alderman, C. Forbes, A. Costello, L. M.
Coates, D. R. Lawson, N. D. Anderson, S. J. Gilbert, I. Dumontheil,
and S. Channon, “The Case for the Development and Use of
‘Ecologically Valid’ Measures of Executive Function in Experimental
and Clinical Neuropsychology,” Journal of the International
Neuropsychological Society 12 (2006): 194–209.
70. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
71. Gabriele Wulf and Charles H. Shea, “Principles Derived from the
Study of Simple Skills Do Not Generalize to Complex Skill
Learning,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9, no. 2 (2002): 185–
211.
72. Charles Limb and A. Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous
Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLOS
One 3, no. 2 (2008): e1679.
73. Charles Limb, “Your Brain on Improve,” TED Talk, November
2010, www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.
74. Malinda McPherson and Charles J. Limb, “Difficulties in the
Neuroscience of Creativity: Jazz Improvisation and the Scientific
Method,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1303
(November 2013): 80.
75. For a succinct overview, including links, see Benedict Carey,
“Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says,”
New York Times, August 27, 2015,
www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-
not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html.
76. Roger Chaffin and Topher Logan, “Practicing Perfection: How
Concert Soloists Prepare for Performance,” Advances in Cognitive
Psychology 2 (2006): 115.
77. University of Connecticut, “Roger Chaffin, Professor: Biography,”
https://musiclab.uconn.edu/roger-chaffin/#.
78. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, “The Ethical Implications
of the Five-Stage Skill-Acquisition Model,” Bulletin of Science,
Technology & Society 24, no. 3 (2004): 251–64.
79. Guy Yocom, “My Shot: Sam Snead,” Golf Digest, August 12,
2010, www.golfdigest.com/magazine/myshot_gd0204?
currentPage=1.
80. Tânia Lisboa, Alexander P. Demos, and Roger Chaffin, “Training
Thought and Action for Virtuoso Performance,” Musicae Scientiae
22, no. 4 (2018): 527.
81. CBSNews.com staff, “Revisiting the Violinist: Itzhak Perlman,
Virtuoso, Now Conductor, Too,” 60 Minutes, January 17, 2000,
www.cbsnews.com/news/revisiting-the-violinist/#1995.
82. Ira Berkow, “A Musician Connects with Baseball,” New York
Times, October 14, 1981, www.nytimes.com/1981/10/14/sports/a-
musician-connects-with-baseball.html.
83. J. Sutton, D. McIlwain, W. Christensen, and A. Geeves,
“Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits
between Dreyfus and Descartes,” Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 42 (2011): 96. See also Andrew Geeves, Doris J. F.
McIlwain, John Sutton, and Wayne Christensen, “To Think or Not to
Think: The Apparent Paradox of Expert Skill in Music Performance,”
Educational Philosophy and Theory 46, no. 6 (2014): 674–91. One
fact that makes this research particularly appealing to musicians is
that they studied musicians, and one of their members (Geeves) is a
music performance coach for Opera Australia (“Andrew Geeves,”
Academia, 2019, https://mq.academia.edu/AndrewGeeves).
84. See John Toner, Barbara Gail Montero, and Aidan Moran,
“Considering the Role of Cognitive Control in Expert Performance,”
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 4 (December
2015): 1127–44.
85. See K. Anders Ericsson, “The Influence of Experience and
Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert
Performance,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert
Performance, ed. K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. Feltovich, and R.
R. Hoffman, 685–706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
86. John Toner and Aidan Moran, “Enhancing Performance
Proficiency at the Expert Level: Considering the Role of
‘Somaesthetic Awareness,’” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 16,
no. 1 (January 2015): 115.
87. Sutton, McIlwain, Christensen, and Geeves, “Applying
Intelligence,” 93.
88. Ibid., 95.
89. For an excellent description of this complex topic, see Monica
Cowart, “Embodied Cognition,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
www.iep.utm.edu/embodcog/#H2 .
 Chapter 5
Performance Studies
Chapters 3 and 4 on learning have at their core the twin
suppositions that there is something to instill (on the part of the
trainer) and something to learn (on the part of the student). That
something is skill. But just as attention exhibits a preattentional
phase, the pursuit of musical skill displays a similar prelude—let us
call it a demonstrated ability—as well as the shared spark of desire.
Yet are ability and desire enough? Or is the pursuit of musical skill
altogether impossible without that special kind of ability known as
talent?
As Mama Rose intones in the musical Gypsy, “Ya either got it,
or ya ain’t!” The “it” of which Mama sings is talent. Mama observes,
“Some people got it, and make it pay” while others (the poor losers)
“can’t even give it away.” If “you ain’t got it,” according to Mama,
“you’ve had it!”
Whether the severity of this judgment is true or not, the majority
of people who pursue musical training, either for themselves or on
behalf of their progeny, do so inspired by the belief that there are at
least some embers of musical talent glowing in the center of the
soul. But just what is talent, exactly? Psychologists Michael Howe,
Jane Davidson, and John Sloboda observe,

It is widely believed that the likelihood of becoming exceptionally

competent in certain fields depends on the presence or absence
of inborn attributes variously labeled “talents” or “gifts” or, less
often, “natural aptitudes.”[1]

This totally uncontroversial opinion, published in their landmark

1998 paper “Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?” nevertheless
concludes with this bombshell: “Innate talents are, we think, a fiction,
not a fact.”[2] By throwing down this gauntlet, Howe, Davidson, and
Sloboda go far beyond the equally uncontroversial observation that it
is training, not talent, that ultimately transforms inborn gifts into
accomplishment. They set out to debunk the entire notion of inborn
gifts, an agenda they brand “the talent account,” claiming that “even
people who are not believed to have any special talent can, purely
as a result of training, reach levels of achievement previously
thought to be attainable only by innately gifted individuals.”[3]
“Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?” aroused strong reactions
among the reigning luminaries in psychology at the time of its
publication. Thirty opinion pieces were published as peer
commentary along with the target article, taking a variety of stances
against the extreme environmentalist views of Howe, Davidson, and
Sloboda. (Note that, in this case, an environmentalist is not a tree-
hugger but a person who sides with nature in the historic nature-
versus-nurture debate, holding that environment trumps heredity in
the development of humans. Translate this into modern inspirational
speak, and you get a popular aphorism: “Try hard enough and
anything is possible!”)
Esteemed psychologist and Flow author Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi grumps that Howe and others are “flogging the
dead horse of the nature versus nurture controversy,” an exercise
“particularly useless in the context of talent” due to recent research
in the heritability of certain traits (or gifts).[4] Of gifts and heritable
characteristics, there is much disagreement. However, there is one
parameter about which most experts agree: body or body part size.
In activities like basketball, where height is crucial, this must be
deemed an inborn gift given the fact that nothing can be done to
effect a change after childhood growth is complete. Arguably the
same could be said of the attributes needed for success in certain
instruments, most obviously the human voice. The big, hardy voices
required for certain opera roles are simply born and not made
(though training is absolutely required to bring this gift to full fruition).
Likewise, the span of one’s hand plays a role in one’s success at
tackling a keyboard or a large stringed instrument.
Apart from body or body part size, though, many critics of Howe,
Davidson, and Sloboda simply cite a highbrow version of Mama
Rose’s opinion: regardless of what you call it, some people got it,
and some people ain’t, and we know it when we see it. After all, one
critic reasons, the lookouts that professional sports teams send on
reconnaissance are “talent scouts, not practice scouts.”[5] Cognitive
psychologist Robert J. Sternberg follows with a comment, the snarky
title of which presages his opinion: “If the Key’s Not There, the Light
Won’t Help.”[6]
Even Howe and his coauthors admit that, while they think talent
is a myth, they still “do not claim to have a full or precise answer to
the question ‘If talents do not exist, how can one explain the
phenomena attributed to them?’” Phenomena like the spectacular
talents of extraordinary people and the curious cases of musical
savants are perennially listed as exhibit A in the evidence for
giftedness:[7]

If anyone can prove that the works of these individuals can be

explained without recourse to a construct like natural talent, we
will concede that talent does not exist: Mozart, Picasso,
Shakespeare, Martina Hingis, Baryshnikov, Pavarotti,
Ramanujan, Judit Polgar, Michael Jordan, and Robin Williams.
Practice, indeed.[8]

Another researcher allows that, even though Howe, Davidson,

and Sloboda’s article demonstrates scant evidence to support the
talent account, he still isn’t buying training and exposure as the only
factors that might account for individual achievement. This critic’s
plaintive plea “Might we adopt the learning-related account instead of
the talent account?” and his subsequent suggestion that there are
“problematic social implications” in stressing hard work alone,
“especially in cultures in which effort is emphasized,” reveal his own
biases: the late Giyoo Hatano was a professor of cognitive science
at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, a country that suffers one of the
highest suicide rates among industrialized nations.[9] The causes for
suicide are varied and complex, but most experts attribute Japan’s
epidemic suicide problem to the toxic result of personal failure within
a culture that values extreme effort.
Several critics stress the importance of “industriousness,”
sidestepping the talent question entirely with the observation that, by
emphasizing talent, Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda vastly underrate
the importance of hard work.

DELIBERATE PRACTICE
Hard work has been the focus of psychology professor K. Anders
Ericsson’s research career. Ericsson, widely recognized as one of
the world’s foremost authorities on expertise and human
performance, has studied both the quality and the quantity of hard
work that it takes to become an expert at anything. Ericsson coined
the term deliberate practice, which he defines in a seminal 1993
study of violin students as “an effortful activity designed to optimize
improvement.”[10]
This research is also the original source of the vaunted number
10,000, the number of practice hours that it supposedly takes for
anyone to attain a level of mastery at just about anything. Ericsson
suggests this number in a 1996 academic publication with the
subheading The 10-Year Rule of Necessary Preparation, in which he
acknowledges the many studies previous to his that, spanning
almost a century, demonstrate this conclusion, along with the related
observation (in yet another denomination of 10) that it seems to take
about decade of dedicated practice to become an expert.[11]
Despite the availability of this information, it wasn’t until author
and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell christened it the
“10,000-Hour Rule” in his best-selling popular psychology book that
the idea was planted in the public consciousness. It is now
Gladwell’s name that is most associated with this popular concept,
not Ericsson’s, nor any of the other eleven researchers whose own
deliberate practice provided the data for the theory.
“Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness,”
Gladwell states, a glib interpretation that misses some crucial
nuances detailed by Ericsson himself in a popular science book
published over a decade later.[12] Under the brusque subheading
“No, the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule Isn’t Really a Rule,” Ericsson
takes Gladwell to task for the several ways in which Gladwell gets it
wrong about practice—and acknowledges the one way in which he
gets it right.[13]
The wrongs include the number 10,000 itself. Some domains
require far fewer than 10,000 hours for mastery, while some actually
require far more. For example, Ericsson notes that most elite concert
pianists (the type who win prestigious international piano
competitions) tend to do so when they are around thirty years of age,
and by that time, he estimates they would have logged 20,000–
25,000 hours of practice.
Gladwell also lumps together practice, performance, and
generic playing—what musicians might call “noodling”—conflating all
the Beatles’ musical activity during their formative years as an
ensemble in the early 1960s. But in failing to distinguish playing from
practice, Gladwell misses a crucial detail. As you saw in chapter 4,
learning and performance are diametrically opposed. Practice is
learning, and learning is messy. Performance, conversely, is all
about best impressions, and therefore it is anything but messy. This
conflation echoes Gladwell’s most fatal translation error: it is not the
sheer number of hours played or practiced that matters most but the
quality of those hours. Quality is the defining characteristic of
Ericsson’s deliberate practice. And quality of practice can be
measured by at least one main attribute you have already
encountered in this book: effort.
This crucial component of practice is typically ignored by young
students in training in favor of sheer repetition. Consider the average
music teacher’s standard query at the beginning of each weekly
lesson: “Did you practice your assigned repertoire this week?” The
desultory response “I ran over it every day” calls to mind the sad,
splattered carcasses of animals left for dead on the highway. Music
practiced effortlessly profits about as much as those unlucky little
beasts.
Besides, mindlessly “running over” repertoire yields more than
just stagnancy; it causes learning to actually regress. Unless effort is
expended toward intentionally correcting parts that are difficult,
mindless practice just digs the rut of error deeper. Seasoned
musicians will recognize this as practicing one’s mistakes.
Deliberate practice is an altogether different animal,
distinguished by a number of traits with which Ericsson has since
enhanced his original definition of deliberate practice. These
enhancements carry important implications for both teachers and
learners. For teachers, Ericsson’s enhancements include knowledge
of the history of the field, of fads and traditions, and of what works
and what does not work based on experience with various training
regimens. At first glance this may seem a rather quotidian addition,
yet it should not go without notice that some of the best teachers are
those who have experimented with a variety of approaches and have
selected the best components of all they sampled. In contrast, and
for this very reason, some of the best performers in the motor realm
who hew to one technique may not make the best teachers. Related
knowledge includes the importance of foundational skills, an
admittedly unsexy yet essential topic and one that is beset by the
curse of expertise noted in chapter 4.
For students, Ericsson’s enhancements of the qualities needed
for deliberate practice include accepting discomfort, complete
attention, feedback (to self), and constructing mental representations
of what to do. Common to both teachers and students are goal-
setting; feedback; and that ubiquitous parameter, effort. For music
teachers, a condensed job description according to the new tenets of
deliberate practice might read as follows:

Wanted: Music teacher of deliberate practice. Must be well-

versed in the efficacies (or lack thereof) in training regimens for
the instrument over the length of its history through his or her
own performance experience. Must design regimens of effortful
activities, starting with building fundamental skills and modifying
these to suit the individual student’s developing abilities and
needs over time. Must meet with student to craft well-defined
goals in advance, then meet periodically thereafter for lessons
to proffer honest yet empathetic augmented feedback.

This job description may seem simple, yet a variety of pitfalls

can lead teachers away from the essential responsibilities of
directing deliberate practice, responsibilities that echo Bjork’s
desirable difficulties encountered in chapter 4. Withholding desirable
difficulties, while perhaps well intentioned, does not square with the
number-one requirement of deliberate practice, which is effort.
Trainers who err on the side of being “nice” do so at the expense of
effective training. At the same time, it must be stated unequivocally
that psychologically abusive training should never be construed as
firm and stringent teaching. Rigor must never be confused with
cruelty. The story of pianist Lang Lang should be chilling enough, but
those trainers who swear by a tough love approach to teaching
should be sure to read in chapter 6 about the cascade of physical
symptoms that attends perceived threat. Psychologically abusive
teaching is not only morally reprehensible; it is ultimately ineffective.
Related to the pitfall of being too nice is a propensity for some
trainers to skip training fundamentals altogether. Admittedly, this part
of training can be rather dull for both trainer and trainee, but akin to
skipping the veggies and heading straight for dessert, a student
trained in this way may find himself flabbergasted to learn in later
years that his training has failed to nourish him by failing to build and
sustain an identifiable and secure technique. Retooling one’s
fundamental skills midcareer is a humbling process and one with no
guarantee of success.
Another common pitfall for teachers involves the phenomenon
known as inattentional blindness, a condition whereby (barring any
physical problem with vision, of course) people fail to see what is
right in front of them. This phenomenon was hilariously
demonstrated in the now-infamous gorilla experiment, in which
subjects who watch a video of others engaged in a ball-throwing task
and are asked to count passes of the ball often fail to see an actor in
a gorilla suit who waltzes through the midst of the game.[14] The
auditory equivalent of inattentional blindness can infect the music
studio so that teachers evince a tendency to hear the same faults in
each and every student or to harbor the same timbral goals for all of
them.[15] The result is undifferentiated template teaching, insensitive
to the unique needs and abilities of each student. Teachers should
design individual practice regimens for each student based on that
student’s unique needs and well-defined goals. As already noted in
chapter 3, goal-setting is known to boost learning generally, since it
ignites motivation. But goal-setting is also a particularly crucial
component of motor learning, since attempting a specific action has
been shown in ML research to be a far more effective learning tool
than a vague directive to “do better.”[16] Ericsson includes goal-
setting in his definition of deliberate practice to distinguish it from
what he called “purposeful practice”—though well-intentioned, it is
just deliberate practice without the sting of effort.[17]
 Even though deliberate practice relies on the expertise of
teachers who by job description must design effortful practice
regimens, it must be emphasized that the success of deliberate
practice is a two-way street: learners must meet training demands
with an eager willingness to fully participate. A fantasy job
description for student musicians bound by the tenets of deliberate
practice might read as follows:

Wanted: Music student who is seeking teacher of deliberate

practice. Must craft agreed-upon, written-out goals with teacher
before embarking on commitment to daily regimen of effortful
activities with complete attention. Practice regimen includes
building fundamental skills and self-reflection activities with
repertoire to advance in difficulty as skills improve. Expect
occasional feelings of psychic discomfort and empathy from
teacher during these learning moments. Joint celebrations of joy
to occur during occasions of superior accomplishment.

A deliberate practice regimen, as designed by the teacher and

followed by the student, targets specific movements, notes
successes, scrutinizes flaws, and—by analysis—continually
redesigns the regimen. There is nothing vague about this type of
practice. The requirements for the learner—an ability to work alone,
to confront one’s weaknesses, and to pay focused attention for a set
amount of time each day—all highlight the fact that the kind of effort
demanded of motor learners engaged in deliberate practice is not
purely physical but also requires building and accessing emotional
and cognitive resources.

THE COGNITIVE DEMANDS OF DELIBERATE

PRACTICE
All humans use mental pictures to navigate everyday life, as
reflected in such phrases as “Call to mind” and “Picture if you will.”
These visualizations even define the word imagine. Expertise
researchers in the 1970s noted that experts—specifically, chess
grandmasters—turn this human trait to their advantage through
hours of deliberate practice. They do not merely picture the board in
their mind but are able to push the fast-forward button and predict
the most advantageous moves several steps in advance. Whereas a
novice might simply visualize random pieces, experts chunk
individual pieces into groups based on their relationships. From
there, they are able to manipulate those chunks and move them
around in their imagination. As discussed in chapter 3, chunking is a
critical component of working memory (otherwise known as
learning).
The same phenomenon is at work with language. A string of
random words like this one: woke our who noisy the long barked all
angry then dog night and became neighbors is much harder to recall
than the same words rearranged: the noisy dog barked all night long
and woke our neighbors who then became angry. Individual words
gain resonance only when they carry meaning.
Motor experts do much the same thing by forming a mental
picture of what to do. Ericsson calls these “mental representations”
of the task at hand. Like verbal memory, motor pictures carry
meaning. Yet motor performers’ mental pictures differ from the
mental pictures of chess players in several important ways.
First, what the motor performer imagines are her own bodily
actions rather than an external, objective setup like a chessboard.
This is a bit like the difference between a video and a photograph:
one is moving, and one is static. And even though chess masters
mentally move their pieces forward in time, it is not the movement
per se that is the focus of this mental manipulation. But for motor
performers, movement is entirely the point. Mental plans do not just
offer a helpful little jolt to motor learning; they are, in fact, integral to
success in the motor realm. This point is most easily seen through
an extreme example: the high-risk sport of ski jumping.
Moments before our jumper takes flight, she calls to mind her
most advantageous movements, picturing them in her mind and
feeling them within her body. Not only will this imagery ensure a
better chance of success, but it will also lessen the chance of injury.
We might call this the “look (inside) before you leap” rule.
But there is a crucial catch: mental representations cannot exist
without our first actually experiencing the movements upon which
they are based. This is the quandary of flow, as noted in chapter 4:
beginners have no flow with which to go—they have not yet mounted
and affixed their mental videos in the screening room of their mind,
so how can they possibly just go with it?
This chicken-or-the-egg dilemma must be progressively
overcome, albeit with giant heaps of perseverance on the part of the
learner. If he sticks with it, each time he experiences the necessary
movements through trial and error (in the case of high-risk sports like
skiing, a few bruises and broken bones), his mental representation of
the skill grows. In turn, the more complete the mental representation,
or schema, the more effectively he can practice, which in turn
increases the mental representation, and so on. Ericsson nicknames
this symbiosis the “virtuous circle of deliberate practice.”[18]
Another catch of mental representations is that, in order to be
effective, they must be what researchers call domain-specific. In
other words, while both skiers and musicians may accurately be
labeled “athletes”—both train their bodies in highly skilled ways—the
actions specific to their calling and therefore their mental
representations are radically different from each other. Therefore,
neither will achieve excellence (or even above-averageness) without
practice devoted to targeted movements specific to their disciplines.
A string player profits little by learning how to shift her weight like a
skier.
Skier and musician represent two different genera in the
taxonomy of athletics: genus/skier and genus/musician. The
genus/musician can be further subdivided, resulting in two distinctly
different species: instrumentalist and singer. You can reasonably
expect that each species will follow the domain-specific rule insofar
as it applies to developing specific mental representations: singers
have little need of mapping the movements of their fingers, and
string players need not consider the shape of their lips. And even
though wind players and singers share the same actuator (breath
energy), the specifics of how that breath is applied is very particular
to each instrument.
This domain-specific rule seems rather obvious, and yet some
music curricula in American universities, particularly those with
strong music education schools, favor the cultivation of limited
proficiency in a broad number of different instruments over what is
viewed as a narrow (and, by inference, restricted) course of study.
We might call this a wide-versus-deep approach to musical skill. The
opposite approach (deep-versus-wide) characterizes the ethos at
many music conservatories and preprofessional programs.
Certainly by the laws of practice as outlined in chapter 4, there
are cognitive benefits to breaking up the intensity of deep, vertical
practice with variation. Indeed, the development of Schmidt’s
schema theory spawned later evidence regarding the value of
variation in practice versus the monotony of repetition. This evidence
may seem to support a wide-versus-deep approach to music
learning. Yet the domain-specific rule cannot be ignored, and in light
of new evidence regarding the erosion of attention due to the lure of
digital media (the topic of chapter 7), it is wise to reassert its truth to
aspiring musicians. At this cultural moment, most novice musicians
are not in danger of cognitively diving too deeply into practice.
The cognitive demands of deliberate practice—Ericsson’s
mental representations—are similar to those concepts encountered
in chapter 4: Schmidt’s schema theory, Sutton’s patterns of behavior,
and Chaffin’s performance cues. As the motor learner becomes
more expert, these mental structures coalesce into what athletes,
dancers, and musicians call technique. And as already noted, fluidity
of movement is a major objective of motor learning. Within this
parameter, musicians have much in common with athletes,
particularly those who transform fluid movement into art, like figure
skaters and dancers. But here we musicians part ways with our
artist-athlete colleagues, for musicians are not just visualizing what a
movement looks like. While we are imagining the feel of our
movement (our proprioception), our ultimate objective is translating
that feeling into sound. This last point is a critical distinction between
musicians and all other motor performers.
Musicians spend an extraordinary amount of time experimenting
with the many ways that differences in movement will alchemize to
musical tone. The weight of the wrist over a keyboard, the handgrip
on a mallet, the crispness with which a string is plucked, and the
degree of glottal closure within the larynx are all subject to a variety
of choices. So how do musicians create these choices? The answer
is through deliberate practice that builds mental representations of
movement to sound. Yet, as fully fledged musical artists, exactly how
have we acquired these mental representations to mix and match at
will? The simple answer is more deliberate practice—this is
Ericsson’s virtuous circle. I will return to these elemental questions
later in this chapter, but let us first consider a question that ML
researchers, as nonmusicians, have largely failed to explore, and
that is the question of artistic expression. After all, compelling
musicians with ardent followers are not successful because they are
awesome practicers. Musicians’ fans adore them because they
spark emotion in their listeners. And in order to do that, the first
requirement is that musicians must feel emotion deeply themselves.

THE EMOTIONAL DEMANDS OF DELIBERATE

PRACTICE
How do musicians create technical choices that are so unshakably
trained that they are available on command yet still result in fresh
and emotionally compelling performances? The answer (at least
according to Chaffin and colleagues) is a composite type of
deliberate practice, one that involves targeted effort over time, like
regular deliberate practice, yet adds the element of expressive
intention. Cellist Tânia Lisboa teamed up with Chaffin and fellow
researcher Alexander Demos to describe this process in great detail.
Lisboa first created a set of performance cues (PCs)
strategically placed at transition points in the score to aid
memorization of a Bach prelude and serve double duty as
guideposts to rescue her from potential memory lapses in
performance. Along the way, she found that the PCs she developed
were not merely safety nets; they helped her play more expressively,
too:

My PCs at these musical transitions reminded me of my musical

goals, for example, to bring out the “singing” qualities of the
melody, ensuring that I remained fully engaged with the music.
When a performance is going well, I experience the sound
flowing from my cello out into the auditorium as I listen for
 musical qualities that I have worked to create in my
performance. Musical thoughts are in the foreground, technical
options in the background, available when needed.[19]

Lisboa’s account is a beautiful example of the worth of

practicing how to think, not just what to do. In practicing how to think,
musicians can also practice how to emote. Some musicians may
reject this suggestion, citing the risk of an emotionally stale
performance. But if that were the case, then virtually every
successful actor could be slapped with a charge of emotional fakery.
What do actors do except rehearse a scene over and over again,
practicing not just what to do but how to feel?
An actor’s job is to absorb another’s emotional state to such an
extent that the audience, for a time, inhabits the portrayed
character’s soul. This is most tangible in actors who play known or
historical characters such as Meryl Streep as Julia Child, Olivia
Colman as Queen Anne, or Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi.
These actors are lauded for their ability to transcend mere mimicry
and inhabit the soul of a fellow human being. And while it is perhaps
easier to elicit sympathy from an audience for likeable characters,
the ability to do so while playing a detestable one deserves
especially high honors, which Frank Langella earned for his portrayal
of American president Richard Nixon, who left office in disgrace.
In postproduction interviews, Langella stressed that the secret to
his eerie likeness of Nixon was his ability to link Nixon’s
vulnerabilities to common traits in all of us:

His pain, and the obviousness of his pain, stays with you. It’s not
a sentiment that’s new to any of us—you could see it on him at
all times, his discomfort in public—but I discovered he could be
equally funny and charming. He just wasn’t a relaxed man, and
was forever churning away, trying to achieve greatness.[20]

Exactly how these actors achieve this emotional depth is by

practicing the emotion, both on and off the set, even if it means
staying in character throughout the entire production period. This
acting method was first developed by the great nineteenth-century
Russian director and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski, whose Method
of Physical Action was later promoted in the United States by actors
Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, where it came to
be known as simply “the Method.” A core principle of the Method
entails complete sublimation of oneself in the character being played
and staying in character even while backstage, even if it makes
fellow actors squirm. Anne Hathaway described being Meryl Streep’s
costar in the movie The Devil Wears Prada this way:

When I met her she gave me a huge hug, and I’m like, “Oh my
god, we are going to have the best time on this movie,” and then
she’s like, “Ah sweetie, that’s the last time I’m nice to you.” She
then went into her trailer and came out the ice queen, and that
was really the last I saw of “Meryl” for months, until we promoted
the film.[21]

Frank Langella’s description of his own total character

immersion while on the film set of Frost/Nixon is a perfect description
of the Method at work and the spell it casts over an entire artistic
enterprise:

Richard Nixon was so pervasive in my thoughts and my mind

that I asked if once I put him on, [once] we had created him and
I was finished in my trailer, when I stepped out of the trailer I
tried and maintained it really for ninety-five per cent of the film.
When I left my trailer, I was Nixon and I stayed Nixon on the set,
sat quietly—and I love to knock it around with actors, I love to
make jokes and have fun between takes; I think the more
relaxed you can be, the better your work is. But I thought, if I let
down, if I showed myself too much to the company, it wouldn’t
be as good for them. So when I walked on the set, everybody
said, “Good morning Mr. President, how are you Mr. President,”
and it created a wonderful separateness for Nixon so that I
could maintain his feeling of isolation. . . . I wanted that sense
that this was the President of the United States, both for them
and for me. And it worked.[22]
 The virtuous circle of deliberate practice that begets embodied
cognition for athletes must be widened for musicians, actors, and
other performance artists to include emotion. This enriched version
of the virtuous circle is essential to developing a comprehensive
musician’s practice plan, for it creates a space for the emotional
demands of deliberate practice. And while a musician’s virtuous
circle is not fraught with the physical peril that attends high-risk
sports, it can be fraught with emotional peril, the most extreme form
of which is performance anxiety (also called stage fright). This
serious affliction must be considered apart from the emotional
demands of deliberate practice primarily because the topic itself is
many-layered and deserves its own chapter (see chapter 6). As
unsettling as performance anxiety is, it does not alter the fact that
much music practice requires emotional stamina. Almost all music
performance requires emotional courage. Let us now consider a
concept that claims to roll these and similar virtues into one
monosyllabic construct, a compound virtue that can be taught.

GRIT
Much has been made recently of a quality known as grit, which is
defined by sociologist Angela Duckworth as “the tendency to sustain
interest in and effort toward very long-term goals.”[23] Duckworth’s
research netted her a MacArthur Genius Grant as well as one of the
most viewed TED Talks of all time. The concept of grit (and
Duckworth’s best-selling book of the same name) struck a chord in
the public consciousness for several reasons: it codified folk wisdom
(Grandpa was right! Hard work pays off!); reified a historic and
particularly American brand of work ethic; and, most tantalizingly,
following the playbook of deliberate practice, suggested that grit is a
skill that can be trained by teachers and acquired by learners. Grit
has been championed by proponents of the latest iteration of an
educational movement, known as character education.[24]
But grit has also attracted its share of detractors in proportion to
its extraordinary success. Critic David Denby acknowledges grit as
“a pop-psych smash,” yet fears that its zealous application by
education reformers could have the unintended consequence of
knocking the stuffing out of what makes us human (qualities like
empathy, honesty, kindness, exploration) and, worse, does so during
childhood, our most absorbent age.[25] Alfie Kohn dismisses grit as
just the latest “social science craze” while worrying that there is a
sell-by date for persistence, past which it begins to smell and
eventually curdle into a full-on psychological disorder called
“nonproductive persistence.”[26] Which is to say, there is an upside to
quitting (mental health) that the grit narrative completely ignores.
Among academics, a research team headed by Marcus Credé
at Iowa State University conducted a meta-analysis of the grit
literature, charging Duckworth with exaggerating her effect sizes and
making outsize claims about grit’s effectiveness, both of which were
judged as expected outcomes for a study whose subjects were
confined to already high achievers.[27] This defect dogs expertise
research in general: studying a homogenous group of subjects
begets homogenous results.
The Iowa State University group also convincingly argues that
grit is just part of a suite of strongly heritable personality traits long
identified in academic psychology as the Big Five:
conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, neuroticism, and
openness. Grit, according to its detractors, is just conscientiousness
in new clothing.
But grit’s most ardent criticism centers on social justice. Children
who are hungry, sleep-deprived, or anxious stand little chance of
achieving academic success if their basic needs for food, shelter,
and a loving adult go routinely unmet. Now, in the age of brain
science, there is corroborating neuroscientific evidence of poverty’s
toxicity to brain development.[28] In short, grit’s detractors cry, how
dare educational reformers fly the flag of grittiness above the heads
of disadvantaged children! And how dare they unwittingly hand
social services budget-cutters yet more ammunition to pursue their
austere agendas.
Even Duckworth herself is now somewhat chastened by grit’s
rapid rise and vehement rebuke. In a recent interview, when asked
about grit’s “misapplication,” she replied, “I think the more I know, the
more I worry”:[29]
 Sometimes, I think people believe that I, or others, see grit as
the only thing kids need to be successful and happy. In fact, I
think character is [on] a very long list of things that kids need to
be happy and productive. It’s not just grit. It’s also curiosity. It’s
not just curiosity. It’s also gratitude and kindness. It’s not just
that. It’s emotional and social intelligence. It’s not just that. It’s
open-mindedness. It’s not just that. It’s honesty. It’s not just that.
It’s humility.
I think when we are talking about what kids need to grow up to
live lives that are happy and healthy and good for other people,
it’s a long list of things. Grit is on that list, but it is not the only
thing on the list. I’ll tell you, as a mother, but also as a scientist
and as a former teacher, that it’s not the first thing on the list
either.[30]

Above grit’s fray, beyond grit’s hype, and besides the social-
justice argument against weaponizing grit, there yet remains this
implacable reality: performers in the motor realm need resilience in
order to commit to all the requirements of deliberate practice and to
withstand the rigors of performance. There is no way around this
requirement. The obstinacy of this truth is charmingly captured in a
children’s book about family members who go on a journey to hunt a
scary beast, bravely chanting,
We’re going on a bear hunt.
We’re going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We’re not scared!

As they encounter a series of obstacles (a tall gate, a muddy

bog), they stop and reckon with their predicament:
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it![31]

So it is with pursuit of excellence. There is no way around hard

work. Duckworth echoes this obstinacy:
 I don’t think we’re born knowing how to work hard. I don’t think
it’s automatic that we know how to work on our weaknesses with
a certain discipline and to accept feedback on what we could do
better. I think those are hard things to learn.[32]

For all motor performers, daily practice and its attendant daily
dose of feedback is a stark reality. For musicians, an added fact of
professional life is the audition, an exercise almost no musician
enjoys yet all serious performers know is necessary. Nevertheless,
for many musicians, rejection after audition ranks as the number one
soul-crusher—even worse than flubbing in performance. Perhaps
this is because responsibility for the latter rests solely with ourselves
(which means we can improve with more practice) yet in the former
scenario, our fate rests partly in the hands (and ears) of others.
Either way, the choice of responses ranges wildly between smashing
your instrument to pieces and reverently placing its shards on the
altar of what is left of your ego or accepting your audition results
(which are, after all, just another form of feedback) and—sigh—
returning to deliberate practice.
And yet, is quality practice the only requirement for achieving
excellence? Just like grit, deliberate practice has had its Warholian
fifteen minutes of fame. Its legitimacy as the one factor that
transforms ability to mastery is now being questioned.

BEYOND DELIBERATE PRACTICE

In 2014, the journal Intelligence published a special issue, “Acquiring
Expertise: Ability, Practice, and Other Influences,” entirely devoted to
challenging Ericsson’s conclusions about the efficacy of deliberate
practice. “Ericsson,” the editor writes, “argues that anybody can be
good at anything” and introduces the eight papers in the issue
written by expertise researchers who are “in general disagreement
with the suggestion that abilities do not influence the development of
expertise.”[33] (Note the choice of the word abilities as opposed to
talent.) Authors of one of these papers proclaim deliberate practice
as “not even close to sufficient” as an explanation for why some
people become experts and others do not.[34]
 So what factors fill the gap between rigorous training and
accomplishment? There are several significant ones that have been
well known in expertise literature for quite some time. They are
(listed here in no particular order of importance) IQ, working memory
capacity, early starting age, caring adult mentors, and supportive
family structures.
All these factors involve a complex interplay between genes and
environment, and so they are challenging to tease apart. Take, for
example, IQ and working memory capacity (i.e., the ability to learn).
The former is somewhat heritable, and the latter grows with
challenge and use, but inherited intellectual ability will not fully bloom
until and unless it is stimulated and challenged. If this sounds
circuitous, it is. While studies suggest that genetic factors underlie
intelligence, researchers caution that genetics account for
differences in intelligence among individuals only about 50 percent of
the time; the rest is up to the environment.[35] This cautionary
analysis can be read in an opposite manner, depending upon the
agenda of the researcher. Authors of a recent article in Scientific
American who are known critics of the deliberate-practice
explanation take the same figure and, in a glass-half-full
interpretation, declare both working memory and music aptitude as
“substantially heritable.”[36] Regardless of the heritability of these
factors, the environment in which budding musicians are raised is
the other half of the story of whether inborn gifts will bloom or wither.

EARLY STARTS AND CARING MENTORS

It has long been known that an early starting age and, by extension,
early intervention by adults in the form of parents and teachers
cause defining differences between superior and average performers
in almost every domain of accomplishment: academic, athletic, and
musical. One of the seminal studies on this subject was the
Development of Talent Research Project, conducted by educational
psychologist Benjamin Bloom in the early 1980s at the University of
Chicago. Bloom’s team examines the role of giftedness “as
necessary prerequisites of talent development” by closely examining
the underlying structures—specifically, parents and teachers—that
helped accomplished concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers,
tennis champions, research mathematicians, and research
neurologists actually develop whatever inborn gifts they might have
possessed as children.[37]
Bloom identifies three phases of development that eventually
result in adult expertise: an early “fun” stage (noodling around with
an instrument); a second stage of middle development, where
parents typically decide to find a teacher for the child; and a third
stage, where the child (usually a teenager) takes over his own
disciplined practice. Ericsson and colleagues have proposed a fourth
stage to account for the arrived expert, or master.[38] In the musical
realm, we would anoint such a person a fully fledged artist, one who
not only demonstrates technical ability but actually has something
unique and compelling to express and, in one of the hallmarks of an
expert, seeks continually to improve.
Yet it is the second stage of talent development that matters
here, for this is a critical stage of learning not only for children but for
parents, who must insist on a certain amount of regular practice for
the child if he is to progress to mastery. Some parents of young
musicians (especially those who are not musicians themselves) are
repelled by this idea for fear of wringing the fun out of music-making.
Yet a reliance on fun versus nurturance is equivalent to the
difference between exposure and learning. Recall from chapter 2
that exposure is not learning. Likewise, noodling is not practicing. A
commonsense approach is informed by the child’s age and the first
rule of practice from chapter 4: Distributed practice is more effective
than massed practice. For very young children, this translates to a
daily practice regimen of about twenty minutes per session, perhaps
five times per week. As children grow, these increments can be
increased.
Does this mean that parents must suck the joy out of music in
order for their child to succeed at it? Hardly. There is a certain joy in
mastery, and even the smallest victories can bring celebration.
Nevertheless, Bloom’s conclusion stands as an unambiguous
rejoinder to the talent account:
 No matter what the initial characteristics (or gifts) of the
individuals, unless there is a long and intensive process of
encouragement, nurturance, education and training, the
individuals will not attain extreme levels of capabilities in these
particular fields.[39]

A similar study to Bloom’s, yet larger in scale, was conducted in

England in the mid-1990s by Jane Davidson, Michael Howe, Derek
Moore, and John Sloboda, nicknamed the “Leverhulme Project” after
the UK grant-making foundation the Leverhulme Trust, which
supported it.[40] The team tracked five diverse groups of musically
active children whose musical engagement ranged widely from
“outstandingly able” to “tried an instrument but gave it up.”[41] While
the team learned that the similarities between the five disparate
groups of young people far outweighed their differences, one
significant difference stood out as a defining factor in the acquisition
of musical expertise: parents.[42] The top two groups of musicians
had been the beneficiaries of “early parent-initiated activity,” a fancy
euphemism for soccer moms, hockey dads, and helicopter parents.
Indeed, the parents of future elite performers in many domains
(sports, dance, music) devote considerable resources of money and
time for coaches’ fees, equipment, and ferrying their children
between lessons, masterclasses, clinics, and competitions. In some
cases, performers and their families even relocate to be closer to a
chosen teacher, training facility, or competitions.[43]
So it appears that the concern of parents who care deeply
enough about their children’s development to pay for lessons, drive
them to rehearsals, supervise their practice, and make instrument
repairs when necessary is so integral to their children’s success that
it virtually wipes out any essential benefit attributable to natural gifts
in all but perhaps the most gifted. Such children possess a “rage to
master,” a memorable characterization conceived by psychologist
Ellen Winner, an expert on gifted children.[44] Still, it is difficult to
imagine how that rage might find a musical outlet if there is no
instrument in the house (sing-alongs to the radio notwithstanding).
Environment matters quite a lot, since it functions as a petri dish for
talent development.
Canadian psychologist Françoys Gagné developed a theory to
describe this development process. His differentiating model of
giftedness and talent clearly separates gifts from talents by
describing the former as natural abilities with which we are born and
the latter as what develops “systematically.”[45] In other words,
giftedness is a biological potential that may or may not grow into full-
blown achievement—talent. How this happens depends on the gifted
one’s desire (and, Duckworth would add, grit) as well as his
environment. Does his environment feature opportunities for his gifts
to grow? Do his adult caregivers function as curators or blockers of
this child’s natural gifts?
Yet even in the face of such tangible and obvious gifts as body
(and body part) size, we must immediately account for the fact that
such gifts never bloom outside the fertile ground of opportunity. This
caveat adds weight to Gagné’s differentiation between giftedness
and talent, and because these two terms are often used
synonymously, Gagné’s construct becomes all the more valuable in
disentangling the effects of genetics from the effects of environment.
Still, while Gagné’s model establishes a clear and linear trajectory
from gift to ability, by taking giftedness as its starting point, his model
evades tackling Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda’s outright refutation of
talent.[46]
Indeed, people who regularly train gifted individuals agree with
Mama Rose’s frank assessment of talent, and, what is more, they
claim they can spot it instantly. Violinist Pinchas Zukerman recalls
hearing the violin prodigy Midori play when she was a ten-year-old
student at the Aspen Music Festival and School:

Out comes this tiny little thing, not even 10 at the time. I was
sitting on a chair, and I was as tall as she was standing. She
tuned, she bowed to the audience, she bowed to me, she
bowed to the pianist—and then she played the Bartok concerto,
and I went bananas. I sat there and tears started coming down
my cheeks. I said, “Do you play something else?” And through
an interpreter she said, “Yes, the Sauret cadenza of the
 Paganini concerto.” Ten years old, and she already played the
Sauret cadenza like only a few people in the entire universe can
do any time! I’m talking about forever. And she had a tiny little
half-size violin, but the sound that came out—it was ridiculous. I
was absolutely stunned. I turned to the audience and said,
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know about you, but I’ve just
witnessed a miracle.”[47]

Early starts and parental support feature prominently in the

biographies of musical prodigies, and when combined with deliberate
practice (which the parents of prodigies almost always seem to insist
upon), the results are predictable, as echoed in the title of Howe’s
book Genius Explained. Midori’s biography as it appeared in the
New York Times might therefore be renamed Miracle Explained:

Born in 1971 in Osaka, Midori grew up to the sound of her

mother’s violin. Setsu Goto, now in her early 40s, was active in
Japan as a teacher, chamber-music player and orchestral
concertmistress. . . . In a 1987 interview she recalled that when
Midori “was 2, she often slept by the front row of the auditorium
when I rehearsed. One day I heard her humming a Bach
concerto—the very piece I’d been practicing two days before.”
On Midori’s third birthday, she was presented with a one-
sixteenth-size violin, and her lessons began.[48]

Another parent-and-child duo from the annals of musicology

(and a more famous one) is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his
father, Leopold. By historic accounts, the toddler Wolfgang started
playing the clavier around the age of three—a very early start. That
there was music in the home is undisputed, since Leopold was a
master musician, composer, and violin pedagogue. He was also the
teacher of Mozart’s sister Nannerl, five years Wolfgang’s senior and
a piano prodigy to boot. According to Nannerl, little Wolfgang so
loved to sit in on his sister’s lessons that, by age four, Papa began
his son’s formal instruction. Despite the evocation of little Wolfgang’s
middle name (“Beloved by God”), by all accounts Leopold took no
chances on the development of his son’s reportedly God-given gifts.
 If Mozart practiced an average of three hours a day, by the time
Leopold Mozart packed off his children on the first of many
performance tours in June 1763, seven-year-old Wolfgang would
have already completed around 3,300 practice hours—a third of the
requisite 10,000.

Mozart and the 10,000-Hour Practice Rule

1760: Mozart (age 4) begins regular, deliberate practice. He

practices 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, which equals 21 hours
per week times 52 weeks, which equals approximately 1,100
hours per year times 3 years, which equals 3,300 practice hours
by age 7.
1763: The start of the Mozart family’s first European grand
tour, for a total of 6,600 practice hours by age 10 and 9,900
practice hours by age 13.

At this pace, by the time Wolfgang was thirteen, he would have

more or less reached the requisite 10,000-hour milestone—that is, if
he stuck to three hours per day, but there is every reason to surmise
that Leopold would have required more than three hours per day in
order to ready the children for their performances in the royal courts
of Europe, ventures upon which he had staked the family’s fortune.
That Leopold Mozart completely gave up his own career to
invest all of his resources in his children is not in dispute, but
historians disagree on whether Leopold was a demanding oppressor,
exploiting his children’s talents for his own gain, or whether he was
simply a committed parent trying to secure his childrens’ future.
Leopold remained deeply entwined in his adult children’s lives,
vexed by his impulsive son’s decisions and tasked with raising
Nannerl’s first-born child. We might say that Leopold was one of the
original helicopter parents, a demanding musical manager whose
own fame as a taskmaster far outshone the musical talents of his
daughters.

TIGER MOMS AND HELICOPTER PARENTS

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It’s
also about Mozart and Mendelssohn, the piano and the violin,
and how we made it to Carnegie Hall.[49]

So begins Amy Chua’s now-infamous 2011 memoir Battle Hymn

of the Tiger Mother, which was preceded by an excerpt released in
the Wall Street Journal under the provocative headline “Why
Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”[50] The barrage of Tiger Mother
responses on the Wall Street Journal blog took Chua to task for
resuscitating the cliché of the overachieving Asian American
“automaton,” stoking the fires of parental anxiety over the college
admissions process, and feeding Americans’ growing unease about
China’s emerging economy. And those were just about the article.
Her book’s opening gambit is now infamous:

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such

stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents
do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what
it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I
can tell them, because I’ve done it.[51]

The book rocketed to berths on best-seller lists around the

world, instantly igniting a media firestorm with Chua at its center,
where she just as quickly became a reviled target of condemnation.
Child psychologists, pediatricians, and parents assailed her harsh
child-rearing practices. Grown children of other tiger parents posted
heartbreaking testimonies of damaged lives and ruined parent-child
relationships. Sociologists cited high suicide rates among Asian
American women. Calls for her arrest on child abuse charges were
legitimized by law professor Chua’s weird confession in the book
itself that her tactics might seem “legally actionable to
Westerners.”[52] She received death threats and had to hire
bodyguards.
Whether Chua’s account is representative of a common
parenting style that shepherds all musical prodigies from childhood
to mastery is both debatable and unknowable. Nevertheless, as a
counterweight to the talent account, it offers a rare, firsthand
chronicle of what could be called a “deliberate practice account.”
Musicians—and their parents—should take a contemporary look at
the tiger mom (and her now-adult cubs), for, despite this newspaper
headline at the time, “Musicians Debate the Merit of Tiger Mother’s
Parenting Methods,” and its writer’s assertion that the book is “about
as controversial in the classical music world as it is in parenting
circles,” only two musicians were consulted for the article and were
interviewed separately, so there was no debate.[53] As for
controversy “in the classical music world,” no such controversy
erupted onto the national scene (unless you count the parents of
musical tots fuming on Suzuki parent blogs). Besides, no
controversy among musicians could ever equal the international
uproar among parents around the globe over Chua’s severe
parenting.
“Early parent-initiated activity,” Chua-style, was her insistence
that her two daughters play the instruments of Mother’s choice
(piano for Sophia, violin for Lulu) while renouncing a long list of
common modern American childhood pastimes (TV, video games,
and sleepovers). Even being in the school play was deemed a thief
of precious music practice time.
And how did the Chuas make it to Carnegie Hall? Yes, practice
was the ticket to a solo performance for her daughter, but Chua
wasn’t kidding when she used the we word. Despite the fact that it
was thirteen-year-old Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld who took the stage
alone in her charcoal-tinted, satin, floor-length gown, it was Tiger
Mother Chua who supervised practically every minute of the practice
hours required to get there. Why? Chua’s blunt explanation:
“Children on their own never want to work.”[54] Enter the helicopter–
tiger parent. Despite marketing her book as a general “parenting
memoir,” detailed descriptions of her daughters’ music training
formed its core, with entire pages devoted to the unedited daily
practice directives that Chua wrote up by the dozens. These were
measure-by-measure practice instructions, not the sticky love notes
of encouragement—You can do it!—so popular by today’s parenting
norms.
Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and, we may presume, a
pretty busy person on any given day, describes regularly dashing
from her office at mid-afternoon in order to retrieve her daughters
early from school for mega-practice sessions at home. Chua insists
that her kids practice more than the measly thirty minutes accepted
by soft, “Western” parents, bragging, “For a Chinese mother, the first
hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough,” an
account she vivifies by documenting the screaming and shaming that
occurred during practice sessions, particularly with the recalcitrant
Lulu, who did not share her older sister’s penchant for quiet
obedience.[55]
Indeed, much of Amy Chua’s public condemnation had to do
with her liberal use of such epithets as “garbage” slung at her kids,
though a few of Chua’s defenders cite her “brutal honesty” and
“willingness to share her struggles.”[56] But it was just this brutal
honesty that elicits accusations of child abuse, with exhibit A being
the tale “The Little White Donkey,” in which seven-year-old Lulu
explodes in frustration over a piano piece of the same name. Tiger
Mom orders a return to the bench and a threat to cease being “lazy,
cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic,” and she says she will haul the
child’s dollhouse to the Salvation Army if the piece is anything less
than “perfect” by the next day. Tiger Mom is briefly rebuked by Dad,
who is immediately batted away for his spinelessness. Tiger Mom
forces the seven-year-old to practice piano “right through dinner into
the night, and I wouldn’t let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go
to the bathroom.”[57] As one critic archly notes, “I know a lot of social
workers who would be very interested to learn of a 7-year-old forced,
as Lulu once was, to sit at the piano, apparently for hours, without
water or even a bathroom break.”[58]
Whether severe practice regimens like this one constituted child
abuse or not, one characteristic of the Chua-Rubenfeld household
comes through loud and clear in this memoir: this is one high-stakes,
high-stress family. Stress is as ubiquitous in Chua’s tale as are music
and yelling. Missing is any account of the musical desires and
motivations of her daughters, except when Lulu turns thirteen and
begins a concerted campaign of defiance.
With all due respect to the accomplishments of Sophia Chua-
Rubenfeld (who was tagged as a prodigy by—guess who!) and
despite Mother Chua’s demure protestations that she “can’t take any
credit” for Sophia’s college acceptance to both Harvard and Yale, her
claim “I don’t think my parenting had anything to do with it—I think
Sophia did it 100% herself” rings completely false when compared
with the evidence for “early parent-initiated activity.”[59] Behind every
prodigy, it seems, is a helicopter parent. And elite performers
themselves know this. One study found that they rated at least one
of their parents as “the most influential person in their career.”[60]
Whether that influence was overwhelmingly positive or negative
is an individual story in every case. The mother of Olympic swimmer
Michael Phelps believed in her son’s abilities even after frustrated
grade school teachers pronounced him incapable of focusing. In
consultation with her young son, they mutually agreed to replace his
ADHD medication with hours of stringent swimming practice.
However, Debbie Phelps was no tiger mother:

I’ve been there not to dictate or guide. I’m there to listen to what
he wants to do and try to help him problem solve and make a
wise decision, . . . Every time Michael gets on the blocks, he has
a goal for himself, and he knows what he wants to do. . . . I don’t
set those goals, and I’m a very strong advocate of [the idea that]
I’m the parent, not the coach or the agent or whatever there is to
be.[61]

Ms. Phelps’s hands-off creed is in stark contrast to the famously

pushy parents of such sports stars as Tiger Woods, Jennifer
Capriati, and Andre Agassi or the emotionally abusive father of
pianist Lang Lang.
And what of Amy Chua? Her comparison of herself to her
daughter’s eventual piano master, Wei-Yi Yang, gives the reader the
impression that the Tiger Mother was at last tamed to the backseat:
“All I could think was, This man is a genius. I am a barbarian.
Prokofiev is a genius. I am a cretin. Wei-Yi and Prokofiev are great. I
am a cannibal.”[62]
However, such humility dissolved on the eve of fourteen-year-
old Sophia’s Carnegie Hall debut. Like so many stage parents before
her, Chua’s own need to “make sure Sophia’s performance was
flawless” trumped Master Wei-Yi’s sage advice to allow the girl to
remain calm and focused and not tire her fingers: “Contrary to
everyone’s advice, we practiced until almost 1 a.m.”[63] Who was in
charge in this scenario? Certainly not the girl or by extension the
genius Wei-Yi Yang. Tiger Mom’s self-professed barbarian instincts
won out.
The negative consequences of overbearing parents are easy to
predict: anxiety disorders and repetitive strain injuries top the list. But
permissive parents who refuse to enforce practice rules create
problems of a different kind for their children. For those who fear that
deliberate practice takes all the fun out of music-making, consider
this maxim from expertise expert Ericsson:

The requirement for concentration sets deliberate practice apart

from both mindless, routine performance and playful
engagement, as the latter two types of activities would merely
strengthen the current mediating cognitive mechanisms, rather
than modify them to allow increases in the level of performance.
[64]

In other words, fun is play, but it is not deep practice. And

worse, if the child diddles on the fiddle or mindlessly “runs over” a
song, he actually fortifies his poor habits by stewing in his own
abilities. And when those abilities are weak to begin with, as they are
for young people at the beginning of training, a downward spiral of
failure is created. It is not for lack of fun that so many eager
elementary school musicians are barely playing their rental
instruments by their first year’s end; it is most likely for lack of
deliberate practice. For those who still insist that music should be
always about fun, Chua has a rejoinder:
 Nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To become good at
anything, you have to work, and children on their own never
want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their
preferences.[65]

This pronouncement is multifaceted, contradictory, and

fascinating to dissect. First, it appears repeatedly in negative opinion
pieces about Chua, as if the final clause is a gotcha moment, the
smoking gun behind Chua’s domineering proclivities. But the book is
full of much juicier evidence than this. More importantly, it implies
that there is some arrival point past which practicing becomes fun.
But honestly, deliberate practice is rarely fun at any stage of
development. Better descriptors for effortful practice are engaging,
enlightening, and challenging. Given that the vast majority of most
musicians’ time is spent practicing, chasing the chimera of fun is
wrongheaded if mastery is the endgame. And it is this attitude
toward fun that reveals a major difference between the parents of
Mozart or Midori and Amy Chua: the former were themselves
musicians. Ms. Chua is not. And besides, her statement is also
somewhat disingenuous given that fun as a goal for her children was
nowhere apparent in her account. Her aims for her children—in any
and every endeavor—were to simply be “the #1 in every subject.”[66]
Amid the perpetual quest for perfection, the lack of joy was just one
of the troubling deficiencies in Chua’s musical goals for her kids. The
others were expression, communal music-making, and sharing one’s
talents for the good of the whole, like the school plays in which her
kids were never allowed to participate.
Despite these contradictions, Chua nevertheless encapsulates a
basic, core truth: to become good at anything, you have to work. And
by the accounts of her now-adult daughters, she appears to have
bequeathed to them the invaluable gift of what social psychologist
Carol Dweck dubbed a growth mindset.

THE INVERSE POWER OF PRAISE

Carol Dweck has recast the nature-versus-nurture debate as it
applies to human self-regard with two catchy labels: fixed mindset
(my nature is due to heredity and the talent account) and growth
mindset (through nurture in my environment and my own effort, I can
grow and change).[67] These labels describe how these two
conflicting self-perceptions arise through childhood and influence
peoples’ life trajectories. They also illuminate the dark side of such
dogmatic fixtures in the parental toolkit as limitless praise.
Dweck has found that emphasizing a child’s innate abilities (the
talent account) promulgates a fixed mindset that virtually positions a
child for eventual failure. Children who have been stoked by tales of
their natural talent and fed big dollops of praise tend to clutch that
talent as a talisman, which wards off both effort (unnecessary
anyway, due to the magic of their natural gifts) as well as failure.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained—and neither pride nor face is lost.
This kind of behavior leads to a double whammy for the fixed-
mindset kid: unexposed to failure, he neither progresses very much
nor develops any strategies to respond to inevitable failures in the
future. And it seems that those who have been stroked the most
often fall the hardest, even to the point of complete psychological
collapse. This vicious cycle has been fittingly dubbed “the inverse
power of praise.”[68]
If a talented protégé enters a music teacher’s studio with
Dweck’s fixed mindset, then the reasons for his puzzlingly
unremarkable output are at least more clear: the inverse power of
praise doomed him from the outset and relegated him to the gallery
of those who woulda’/coulda’/shoulda’ been contenders. Dweck’s
mindset theory helps explain why, all too often, precocious children
labeled prodigy, genius, or wunderkind do not successfully transition
to adulthood. Adult life is filled with trial and failure—except for those
who are pathologically averse to effort. In that case, the path of least
resistance is truly no effort at all.
It appears that Tiger Mom conferred a growth mindset on at
least one of her cubs. According to the grownup Lulu,

people assume that tiger parenting would beget low self-esteem

because there isn’t that constant praise, but I think I’m exiting
with a lot more confidence than some others, because my
 confidence is earned. [My mom] gave me the tools to drive my
own confidence.[69]

BUILDING MOTIVATION
Chua’s tale of tough love leaves at least one question unanswered,
and that is one of motivation. We may well wonder what would cause
a six-year-old to want to sit still long enough to practice the piano. Is
there such a thing as inherent motivation, something one is simply
born with? Or is it egged on by an external force, like sibling rivalry?
Is it the product of incessant browbeating by an overbearing parent,
in which case the motivator is simply a desire to avoid punishment?
And in the latter case, do some children possess an inner strength to
absorb that negative energy (like Sophia, who states, “Early on, I
decided to be an easy child to raise”), while other children crumple
under the pressure, like Lulu?
There are many theories about motivation, including the arousal
levels that favor learning. It appears that an intermediate arousal
level is best, a sort of Goldilocks approach that falls midway between
“make music or die!” and “I think I might want to, maybe.” Teachers
and parents can stoke arousal levels by eliciting exactly what
students are capable of producing at any time along their learning
path. This teaching-learning philosophy is beautifully captured by
Robert Bjork’s doctrine of desirable difficulties. Bjork says that
learning difficulties are obstacles that slow down the rate at which
the learner absorbs information. This process has been shown to
enhance long-term retention—in other words, learning itself. But
Bjork also stresses the importance of the desirability factor, noting
that difficulties can quickly become undesirable if thrown in the path
of the learner too soon or too late. Too little arousal, and nothing is
accomplished. Boring. But too much arousal can make learners so
anxious that the so-called fight-or-flight defense response is stoked.
Panic ensues! Selecting the just-right amount of arousal and instilling
motivation itself constitute the art part of teaching.
But teachers should not delude themselves into thinking that
motivation can be instilled. Once kids progress past their natural
curiosity, the motivation to practice must be sustained by the child
himself as he progresses through adolescence to adulthood. There
is no standard formula for this, but Dweck’s research on the growth
mindset offers some intriguing considerations. Dweck posits that,
when teachers and parents instill the belief in a child that ability and
intelligence are flexible rather than fixed, this inculcates a sense of
control in the youngster, which in turn can seed a love of learning for
its own sake. This is neurogenesis in action. It is already known that
practice causes changes in the brain. Ericsson posits that a
reasonable research question for the future is whether the skill-
building effects of practice “may also produce changes in the brain
structures that regulate motivation and enjoyment.”[70] This adds heft
to Chua’s declaration that nothing is fun until you are good at it. And
what she has to say about the sustainability of motivation is also spot
on.
As a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s
self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there’s nothing
better for building confidence than learning you can do something
you thought you couldn’t.[71]
Ever the iconoclast, Chua’s take on the fundament of self-
esteem (more work!) is likely not shared by a majority of Americans,
who bought wholesale into a very different interpretation of it during
the self-esteem fad of the previous century.

SELF-ESTEEM THEORY
The rewards of self-love and its corollary, the harm of self-loathing,
began to circulate in the communal psyche in the freewheeling
1960s, until, two decades later, the benefits of instilling high self-
esteem were practically unquestioned. Self-esteem theory got a
huge public relations boost from the California state legislature when
in 1986 the legislature funded a Task Force on Self-Esteem and
Personal and Social Responsibility, convinced by a state
assemblyman (whose own psychological therapy had spurred him to
find a political outlet for his self-actualization) that boosting each
citizen’s self-esteem could significantly ameliorate chronic social ills
like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime.[72] Throughout the
remainder of that decade and into the 1990s, the mantras of self-
esteem theory (“Believe in yourself!” and “I am special because I am
me!”) seeped into the zeitgeist and were unquestioningly adopted in
school curricula and social policies across the United States.
Parenting books published in the last two decades of the twentieth
century stress self-esteem as the bedrock upon which all other
values are built, touting giant doses of praise as a psychological
vitamin pack for the developing child. These doses are to be
administered without any connection to output or accomplishment,
for it is enough to simply be.
The problem is there is little evidence and no science behind
self-esteem theory. In due time, cracks appeared in its facade for the
simple reason that it did not deliver on its promise. In 2003, a team
of four psychologists from the United States and Canada were
commissioned by the American Psychological Society to conduct a
meta-analysis of the extant self-esteem literature. The results were a
bombshell to self-esteem proponents, including some of the study’s
authors:

We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by

therapeutic interventions or school programs) causes benefits.
Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to
boost self-esteem in the hope that it will, by itself, foster
improved outcomes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-
esteem, indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote
narcissism, with its less desirable consequences.[73]

One of the study’s authors, Roy Baumeister, has gone beyond

puncturing the high-flying claims of self-esteem theory to
demonstrating that very high levels of it may be the underlying culprit
for such socially aberrant behavior as aggression, bullying, and
violence.[74] It turns out that the corollary view (bullies are just sad
folks with a soft core and low levels of self-worth) is therefore also
probably false. Baumeister’s research has shown that bullies are
tyrants with such preternaturally high self-regard that they become
enraged when they are not treated with the deference they feel they
are due.
 Even though research like Baumeister’s is slowly dismantling
self-esteem theory, it took root in the culture long enough to have
spawned what psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell
call a full-on societal narcissism epidemic, which is also the title of
their 2009 book. According to these authors, overdoses of self-
esteem administered to many Americans born after 1970 poisoned
them with narcissism, simply defined as an inflated view of the self.
Yet narcissism, Twenge and Campbell say, is neither healthy self-
worth nor confidence but the overweening sense that one is “special”
and therefore better than everyone else.
By Twenge and Campbell’s measures, one of the many pieces
of collateral damage of the narcissism epidemic are legions of
people who have been inoculated against criticism even when it is
proffered in two of its most benevolent packages: parenting and
teaching. Given that one of the most important components of
learning is feedback, the narcissism epidemic has damaged some
people’s ability to learn. And while musicians must nourish a healthy
sense of self-worth if they are to feel confident enough to take the
stage and command an audience’s attention, becoming an artist
entails going beyond the cult of self to speak to our common
humanity.
Twenge and Campbell end their book with a treatment plan for
slowing the epidemic enough to starve it out of the culture, aiming
high and wide by using a public health model to take on narcissism
in television, movies, and politics and aiming locally by encouraging
readers to examine their parenting and teaching styles. In both
cases, the message is clear: narcissism isn’t genetic. It is behavior
learned through the environment, and with enough mindfulness of
the problem, this behavior can be changed.

NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

The environmentalist stance within the classic nature-versus-nurture
debate holds that a person’s environment in which she is nurtured
largely determines her outcome. This nurture assumption is precisely
what author Judith Rich Harris assails in her notable book of the
same name[75] in which she argues that the complex mix of heritable
traits played out within the larger social world of peers has the
greatest effect on the way children turn out rather than the effects of
genes. Even though Harris updates the nature-versus-nurture
lexicon to the more accurate and less emotionally loaded terms
heredity and environment, her related thesis, captured in the book’s
subtitle, Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do: Parents Matter
Less than You Think and Peers Matter More, set off a firestorm of
indignation.[76]
Nevertheless, independent scholar Harris attracted the support
of Steven Pinker, who himself confronts the nature-versus-nurture
conundrum in one of the most erudite and provocative books on the
subject yet written, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature.[77] In his book, Pinker takes on three doctrines as both
fundamental and dogmatic within Western culture: “the blank slate”
(the belief that we are born pure, with no innate traits coded within
our DNA); “the ghost in the machine” (the notion that the mind is the
seat of the soul and is free from its biological moorings); and “the
noble savage” (the romantic belief in an Eden-like innocence and
goodness among primitives that was only corrupted by modern
culture). All of these precepts, Pinker argues, combine to impede the
benefits of modern science from reaching society. Of the three, the
blank-slate myth is of concern here for its contradiction of the talent
account most resonant in the staunchly environmentalist view
espoused by Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda.
As I have shown, current science tells us that human traits like
intelligence and music aptitude are somewhat heritable, but the rest
is up to the environment. This complex interplay is, at present,
impossible to tease apart, so an either-its-genes-or-its-nurture
proposition is a false dichotomy when applied to humans. As
psychologist Gary Marcus puts it, there is

a misconception people harbor about genetics: that it will be

possible one day to determine, once and for all, whether nature
or nurture is “more important.” Genes are useless without an
environment, and no organism could make any use of the
environment at all if it were not for its genes. Asking which one
 is more important is like asking which gender, male or female, is
more important.[78]

There is no recipe or blueprint for how genetic information is

realized in a living human being. Rather, the ways in which heritable
traits play out in one’s environment are as complex, unique, and
difficult to predict as individuals themselves. So why are the
conjoined theories of the blank slate and environmentalism so
compelling? Perhaps it is because we all wish to believe that our
potential is limitless. Most of us believe that our achievements are
the just results of our own honest toil and not a genetic gift we did
nothing to deserve. And these wishes and beliefs are not solely
confined to learners. Teachers and parents can be equally in thrall to
these theories in proportion to their sense of mission and power.
Because the environment is the one variable that is seemingly under
parental control (especially when children are young), it is tempting
to believe this control to be all-powerful. As in the case of Tiger Mom,
she wielded that power absolutely, but if Rich Harris’s theories are
accounted for, Chua was successful in part by largely quarantining
her cubs, ensuring little peer interaction and influence.
But what happens when a child or protégé does not fulfill the
promise of environmental ministrations? The blank slate, the nurture
assumption, and environmentalism are all of a piece, and if one
espouses them, whether as learner or teacher, then one assumes
full and equal responsibility for defeats as well as victories—the flip
side of pure environmentalism can resemble blaming the victim,
which can produce a tremendous amount of pressure on parent-
child, teacher-student, and coach-trainee relationships.
Nevertheless, belief in valiant effort as the only determiner of
success persists, instilled early in the young through inspirational
books like The Little Engine That Could. If you missed it as a child,
the story tells of a tiny, anthropomorphized engine that volunteers to
haul a string of stranded boxcars over a steep mountain pass.
Against all odds, it perseveres by incessantly chanting, “I think I can,
I think I can, I think I can,” a mantra that little children learn to intone
with motorized rhythm, gleefully increasing the tempo as the little
train gathers momentum.
 Stories like these pursue us into adulthood by way of
inspirational posters—“If you can dream it, you can do it!”—posted
ubiquitously on bulletin boards in breakrooms and cafeterias,
trumpeting the benefits of hard work and perseverance. Even the
peace of the office toilet no longer offers refuge from institutional
messaging, with this cluelessly plastered inside a bathroom stall: “If
you aren’t going all the way, why go at all?”
Adults understand that, in the real world of cause and effect,
effort is necessary for achievement, and the worth of that effort is
conjoined to its quality. The message of the iconic little blue train is
simpler: effort is rewarded by success. Yet no matter how that simple
idea is expanded as children mature and are capable of a more
nuanced understanding, adding riders (“If you really want it”) and
caveats (“But you have to work really hard”) has not inoculated this
simple maxim against mutation into its more virulent strain: Any and
all effort should be rewarded by success. When things don’t work out
the way the Little Engine script foretells they should, psychologists
like Jennifer Crocker note an alarming tendency for certain types of
learners to simply give up. Crocker has discovered a noxious kind of
perfectionism among students who, while believing they can work
harder and improve, harbor a deep connection between self-worth
and superior performance. In experiments, these students tended to
behave in ways disturbingly similar to those of Dweck’s fixed-
mindset people. When given the opportunity, they avoided practicing
or allowed distractions to interrupt them (both of which could later be
blamed for poor performance). Thus, just like fixed mindset students,
they were self-handicapped.[79] The researchers conclude that a
“growth mindset” may be fairly worthless to learners who cannot
divest themselves of the linkages between effort, perfection, and
worth. Crocker has some advice for how to break these harmful
snares:

A glib way of putting it is to say “Get over yourself.” . . . If you

want to stop acting in self-defeating ways, then think about how
your schoolwork will help people outside of yourself.[80]
 Crocker’s advice is notable as much for what it contains—
stepping outside oneself, thinking of others, the communal good—as
what it does not: believing in the self or, in the words of one of those
ubiquitous inspirational posters, working “on being in love with the
person in the mirror.”

THE TALENT ACCOUNT: SO WHAT?

The nagging question of talent persists. Some experts attempt to
settle it by outright dismissal of ardent environmentalists as earnest
but deluded zealots. Such is the aim of expertise researchers of an
op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Sorry, Strivers, Talent
Matters.”[81] So there.
Meanwhile, outside research labs, music teachers and coaches
weigh in with tales from the front, instances in which extreme effort,
excellent training, supportive benefactors, and generous financial
support were just not enough for significant achievement. Lack of
talent is usually proffered as an explanation for failure. If it is
proffered directly to the failed one, it is seen by some as a kind of
euthanasia, a mercy offered to end the striver’s exertions. But to a
musician on the receiving end of this verdict, it feels stingingly like
the popular insult “When the talent was passed out, you must have
been standing behind the door.” The damaging effects of such black
humor are what set Howe and colleagues on a mission to explode
the talent myth and are also what sparked the self-esteem
movement.
Yet even if talent as a construct is real, Carol Dweck’s research
has ably demonstrated the curse of the talent myth on those judged
to possess it most, while Baumeister, Twenge, and Campbell’s
research shows the damaging effects of overly inflated views of
talent. To growth-minded high achievers in the motor realm, the
intimation of talent as an explanation for their success is frankly
insulting, as described by golfer Sam Snead in chapter 4, and
echoed more stridently by NBA basketball star Ray Allen:

When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it

really pisses me off. I tell those people, “Don’t undermine the
 work I’ve put in every day.” Not some days. Every day.[82]

The critical question for musicians is not whether talent exists

per se but this: How damaging are the effects of the talent account
both to those who secretly fear they don’t have it and to those who
believe they possess it the most?

TOXIC TALENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

By the code of the talent account, “gifts,” including intellect, are
inherited. If the ministrations of a parent are added as fertilizer to the
stew of biological potential brewing within the child, this creates a
positive feedback loop: smart parents stand a 50-50 chance of
begetting intellectually gifted kids. These kids will probably get an
early start (due to the inclinations of their smart parents), thereby
increasing their ability to learn, thereby increasing their actual
abilities (talents). This loop is sometimes called the Matthew effect, a
term coined to describe a virtuous cycle of “cumulative advantage.”
Named after the biblical gospel of Matthew, it describes the
phenomenon of how the rich get richer.[83] But play this virtuous
cycle in reverse, and the outcome is the vicious cycle of poverty that
bankrupts opportunity and learning.[84] A similar impoverishment
occurs when decisions are made regarding the allocation of precious
resources.
The same studies that have revealed the strong connections
between parental support and expertise have also noted that even
the most supportive families must make choices along with their
sacrifices. Institutions behave in much the same way. What guides
these choices? There is a propensity for both parents and schools to
heap scarce resources on those deemed most talented, reasoning
that the truly gifted will benefit the most and therefore maximize the
investment. While this reasoning may make some superficial fiscal
sense, it also reveals the toxicity of the talent account. And if only a
tiny percentage of the population is deemed gifted, that means a
vast majority are marooned without the resources to unlock their
nascent abilities. In the absence of adult support, be it parental or
institutional, any inborn talent for music stands little chance of
growing. It is no wonder that so many educational researchers
conclude, as Bloom does, that there must be an enormous potential
pool of talent in the United States. It is likely that some combination
of home, teachers, schools, and society may in large part determine
what portions of this potential pool of talent become developed. It is
also likely that these same forces may, in part, be responsible for
much of the great waste of human potentiality.[85]

THE GOOD-ENOUGH MUSICIAN

Whether one believes outright in the talent account or not, the bald
truth for many in the teaching profession is that they simply do not
have the luxury to entertain the highfalutin notion of talent. With the
exception of an elite corps of teachers who maintain studios in
cosmopolitan cities or music conservatories, many music instructors
must teach those very folks Mama Rose claims “can’t even give it
away.” But even this raw state may not preclude the joy of the pursuit
(at least on the part of the learner). People study music for a myriad
of reasons, many of which are nonprofessional, and these reasons
should be valued for the intrinsic worth of the pursuit of beauty—
even if that pursuit never results in the full flower of flawless
performance. Memoirs of adults who have taken up music attest to
this value even if this noble pursuit is brought low by their own
ineptitude. Author Jennifer Weiner describes her own tussle with
Rachmaninoff, who was said to play the piece she was rehearsing
“as if all the hounds of hell were chasing him”:

Right now, I play it as if all the hounds of hell are dozing in the
sun as I stroll toward an idling bus that’s going to take me to get
a root canal. Instead of a delicate, rippling flow of notes, I
produce a muddy tumble, a kicked sack of potatoes thudding
discordantly down the stairs.[86]

Weiner recalls reading about how changing your brain can

change your life and follows Oliver Sacks’s advice to try a completely
new activity. So she embarks on her humiliating piano adventure in
order to conquer a noxious entanglement of competitiveness,
disappointment, and insomnia. It works:

I have come to believe in the value of doing something where I

know I will never be better than OK. . . . I will embrace the joy of
making music (loosely defined) only for myself. I will invite
failure into my life and play without the expectation of being the
best, or even mediocre, until failing isn’t a terrifying unknown but
just another possibility, and one I can survive.[87]

Gary Marcus, a renowned cognitive scientist, decided to

become his own guinea pig and learn the guitar at the age of forty.
His journey is documented in Guitar Zero, a hilarious and humbling
investigation of the nature-versus-nurture debate and a process he
boils down to this: “It’s not nature versus nurture; it’s nature working
together with nurture”:[88]

There is good scientific reason to believe that talent matters in a

wide variety domains, from sports to chess to writing to music.
Cognitive activities are a product of the mind, and the mind is a
product of genes working together with the environment. To
dismiss talent is to ignore all evidence from biology.[89]

So it seems clear that certain traits—or gifts or talents—do

separate eventual experts from wannabes. But—so what? In the
absence of the situation necessary to reveal it, the mentorship
necessary to nourish it, the expertise necessary to train it, and the
effort necessary to sustain it, talent as a construct within music is
virtually worthless—except for the critical exception of one arena:
social justice. Society will surely never be touched by the gifts of its
potential musical artists until and unless all children have equal
access to musical education and musical nourishment. But by the
measures of some scientists in the field of expertise science, even
that impossible scenario would still separate the talented from the
merely able. As expertise researchers Hambrick and Meinz conclude
in their article “Sorry, Strivers, Talent Matters,” “sometimes the story
that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.” The particular
science story to which they refer can indeed seem devastating—but
only if one wantss to become an expert and only if science is the
only voice we heed. If it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an
expert, it probably takes 7,000 to become pretty good, and 5,000 to
become passably okay—and that may be all we desire anyway.
Musicians striving for betterment anywhere along the continuum
of achievement have much to learn from the practice and
performance habits of experts, but no musician—beginner, novice, or
master—should sacrifice the pure pleasure of music-making on the
high altar of the talent account.

NOTES
1. Michael Howe, Jane Davidson, and John Sloboda, “Innate
Talents: Reality or Myth?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21, no. 3
(1998): 399.
2. Ibid., 437.
3. Ibid., 407 (emphasis mine).
4. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda, “Innate
Talents,” 411.
5. Robert J. Sternberg in Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda, “Innate
Talents,” 425.
6. Ibid., 425.
7. Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda, “Innate Talents,” 407.
8. Ibid., 414.
9. Ibid., 416–17.
10. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-
Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert
Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.
11. K. Anders Ericsson, ed., The Road to Excellence: The
Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports,
and Games (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996), 10–11.
12. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York:
Little, Brown, 2008), 41.
13. K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the
New Science of Expertise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016),
109.
14. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla,
2010, www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html.
15. See Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
16. Richard Schmidt and Timothy Lee, Motor Learning and
Performance: From Principles to Application, 5th ed. (Champaign, IL:
Human Kinetics, 2005), 229.
17. Ericsson and Pool, Peak, 98.
18. Ibid., 79–80.
19. Tânia Lisboa, Alexander P. Demos, and Roger Chaffin, “Training
Thought and Action for Virtuoso Performance,” Musicae Scientiae
22, no. 4 (2018): 535.
20. Quoted in Michelle Kung, “From Dracula to Nixon,” Wall Street
Journal, November 28, 2008,
www.wsj.com/articles/SB122780196170361765.
21. Julie Miller, “Anne Hathaway Remembers Meryl Streep Icing Her
Out on The Devil Wears Prada Set,” Vanity Fair, November 3, 2014,
www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/11/anne-hathaway-meryl-streep-
the-devil-wears-prada.
22. ArtisanNewsService, “Frank Langella Is Richard Nixon in Frost
Nixon,” November 25, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=nSzkUSsUscA.
23. A. L. Duckworth, C. Peterson, M. D. Matthews, and D. R. Kelly,
“Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007).
24. See Character.org, “Who We Are,” www.character.org/who-we-
are/.
25. David Denby, “The Limits of ‘Grit’,” New Yorker Magazine, June
21, 2016.
26. Alfie Kohn, “The Downside of ‘Grit,’” Washington Post, April 6,
2014.
27. Marcus Credé, Michael C. Tynan, and Peter D. Harms, “Much
Ado about Grit: A Meta-analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (2017):
492–511.
28. Kimberly G. Noble et al., “Family Income, Parental Education
and Brain Structure in Children and Adolescents,” Nature
Neuroscience 18, no. 5 (2015): 773–78.
29. Jeffrey R. Young, “Angela Duckworth Says Grit Is Not Enough:
She’s Building Tools to Boost Student Character,” EdSurge, April 20,
2018, www.edsurge.com/news/2018-04-20-angela-duckworth-says-
grit-is-not-enough-she-s-building-tools-to-boost-student-character.
30. Ibid.
31. Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, We’re Going on a Bear
Hunt (New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1989).
32. Young, “Angela Duckworth Says.”
33. Douglas K. Detterman, “Introduction,” in “Acquiring Expertise:
Ability, Practice, and Other Influences,” Intelligence 45 (July–August
2014): 1.
34. David Z. Hambrick, Frederick L. Oswald, Erik M. Altmann,
Elizabeth J. Meinz, Fernand Gobet, and Guillermo Campitelli,
“Deliberate Practice: Is That All It Takes to Become an Expert?”
Intelligence 45 (July–August 2014): 41.
35. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, “Is Intelligence
Determined by Genetics?” October 15, 2019,
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence.
36. David Z. Hambrick, Fredrik Ullén, and Miriam Mosing, “Is Innate
Talent a Myth?” Scientific American, September 20, 2016 (emphasis
mine).
37. Benjamin Bloom, ed., Developing Talent in Young People (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 3.
38. Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer, “Role of Deliberate
Practice,” 369.
39. Bloom, Developing Talent, 3.
40. John Sloboda, “Acquisition of Musical Performance Expertise,” in
The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in
the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games, ed. K. Anders Ericsson
(New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 109–10.
41. Ibid.
42. Jane Davidson, Michael J. A. Howe, Derek G. Moore, and John
A. Sloboda, “The Role of Parental Influences in the Development of
Musical Performance,” British Journal of Developmental
Psychology 14, no. 4 (1996), 399–412. See also John Sloboda,
Exploring the Musical Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005):
276–79.
43. See K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and
Robert R. Hoffman, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise
and Expert Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 693; and Robert Lipsyte and Lois B. Morris, “Teenagers
Playing Music, Not Tennis,” New York Times, June 27, 2002,
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/
20020628snapfriday.html.
44. Sam Whalen, “Sustaining ‘The Rage to Master’: A Conversation
with Ellen Winner,” Journal of Secondary Gifted Education 11, no. 3
(2000): 109–14.
45. Françoys Gagné, “Building Gifts into Talents: Brief Overview of
the DMGT 2.0,” 2012, http://gagnefrancoys.wixsite.com/dmgt-
mddt/dmgtenglish.
46. Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda, “Innate Talents.”
47. Quoted in K. Robert Schwarz, “Glissando,” New York Times,
March 24, 1991,
www.nytimes.com/1991/03/24/magazine/glissando.html.
48. Ibid.
49. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin
Press, 2011).
50. Amy Chua, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Wall Street
Journal, January 8, 2011,
www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528
698754.
51. Chua, Battle Hymn, 3.
52. Chua, “Chinese Mothers.”
53. Colin Eatock, “Musicians Debate the Merit of Tiger Mother’s
Parenting Methods,” Houston Chronicle, February 13, 2011,
www.chron.com/life/article/Musicians-debate-the-merit-of-Tiger-
Mother-s-1691798.php.
54. Chua, Battle Hymn, 29.
55. Ibid.
56. Sheryl Sandberg, “Amy Chua: Tough-Love Mother,” Time, April
21, 2011,
www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2066367_206
6369_2066449,00.html.
57. Chua, Battle Hymn, 62.
58. Caitlin Flanagan, “The Ivy Delusion: The Real Reason the Good
Mothers Are So Rattled by Amy Chua,” Atlantic, April 2011,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/the-ivy-
delusion/8397/.
59. Lauren Beckham Falcone, “Tiger Balm: Ivy League Coup for
Chua’s Cub,” Boston Herald, April 2, 2011,
www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1327779.
60. Ericsson et al., Cambridge Handbook of Expertise, 695.
61. David Muir and Jo Ling Kent, “No Vacation When You’re Michael
Phelps’s Mom,” ABC, August 11, 2008,
http://abcnews.go.com/International/China/story?id=5556243.
62. Chua, Battle Hymn, 124.
63. Ibid., 138.
64. Ericsson et al., Cambridge Handbook of Expertise, 694.
65. Chua, Battle Hymn, 29.
66. Ibid.
67. Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New
York: Ballantine Books, 2006).
68. Po Bronson, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of
Praise,” New York Magazine, February 11, 2007,
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/27840/.
69. Doree Lewak, “I Was Raised by Tiger Mom—And It Worked,”
New York Post, March 28, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/03/28/i-
was-raised-by-tiger-mom-and-it-worked/.
70. Ericsson and Poole, Peak, 192.
71. Chua, Battle Hymn, 62.
72. California State Department of Education, “Toward a State of
Self-Esteem: The Final Report of the California Task Force to
Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility,”
January 1990, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED321170.
73. Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger,
and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better
Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier
Lifestyles?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4, no. 1
(May 2003): 1.
74. Roy F. Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph M. Boden,
“Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The
Dark Side of High Self-Esteem,” Psychological Review 103, no. 1
(January 1996): 5–33; and Brad J. Bushman and Roy F. Baumeister,
“Threatened Egotism, Narcissism, Self-Esteem and Direct and
Displaced Aggression: Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Lead to
Violence?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 1
(July 1998): 219–29.
75. Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn
Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 2011).
76. Sharon Begley, “The Parent Trap,” Washington Post, 1998,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/newsweek/parent090798a.htm.
77. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
78. Gary Marcus, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of
Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (New York:
Basic Books, 2004), 7.
79. Y. Niiya, A. T. Brook, and J. Crocker, “Contingent Self-Worth and
Self-Handicapping: Do Contingent Incremental Theorists Protect
Self-Esteem?” Self and Identity 9 (2010): 276–97.
80. Quoted in David Glenn, “Carol Dweck’s Attitude,” Chronicle of
Higher Education Review, May 9, 2010,
http://chronicle.com/article/Carol-Dwecks-Attitude/65405/.
81. David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz, “Sorry, Strivers:
Talent Matters,” New York Times, November 19, 2011,
www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/sorry-strivers-talent-
matters.html.
82. Jackie MacMullan, “Preparation Is Key to Ray Allen’s 3s,” ESPN,
February 11, 2011, www.espn.com/boston/nba/columns/story?
columnist
=macmullan_jackie&id=6106450.
83. Robert K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science, II: Cumulative
Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property,” Isis 79, no. 4
(December 1988): 606–23, https://doi.org/10.1086/354848.
84. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Greg J. Duncan, “The Effects of
Poverty on Children: The Future of Children,” Children and Poverty
7, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1997): 55–71.
85. Bloom, Developing Talent, 5.
86. Jennifer Weiner, “I’ll Never Be Rachmaninoff,” New York Times,
December 29, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/opinion/sunday/piano-lessons-mind-
focus.html.
87. Ibid.
88. Gary Marcus, Guitar Zero (New York: Penguin, 2012), 102–3.
89. Ibid.
 Chapter 6
Mind Games
Musicians devote hours of effortful time and potentially
thousands of dollars in the pursuit of technique, that how-to manual
initially bequeathed by teachers. This bequest is proffered on the
premise that the student musician will actually absorb the teacher’s
lessons. In many ways this is an act of faith for both parties: learning
is a gamble, with no sure guarantees, only probabilities.
As I have shown in the preceding chapters, attention and
memory are the dual components that flank the act of learning, a
dynamic duo that must attend the early stages of knowledge
acquisition, whether in the physical realm (like keyboard fingering) or
the mental realm (like learning how to read musical notation).
Once technique is truly learned, it is then honed by practice.
And given that approximately ten thousand hours of practice or more
is required for true mastery, no musician should be so bewitched by
the talent myth as to believe that he can escape this requirement.
Remember: even Mozart put in his ten thousand hours (albeit by
around age thirteen). Further, this practice must be deliberately
effortful enough to produce results; just clocking into the practice
room will not suffice. Research from the cognitive and neurosciences
validates the age-old values of effort and hard work while revealing
that learning difficulties should not be avoided or simply endured but
actually embraced as desirable. In our so doing, the critical juncture
between exposure and learning is fused, the synapses strengthened,
the technique hardwired. At least, that is the hope and even the
expectation that undergirds adherence to practice.
A major premise of this book is that the musician’s
understanding of the cognitive substrates of learning and practice is
crucial since, over the course of a lifetime, training and practice
hours far outweigh the time a musician actually spends onstage
performing before a live audience. While, for avocational musicians,
public performance may not ever be an objective, for professional
musicians, polished performance is the ultimate goal. This chapter
will consider live public performance as the apogee of intense
musical training and practice.
 BREAK A LEG! AND OTHER MIND GAMES
Performing before a live audience affords many musicians the same
kind of exhilarating challenges and enticing rewards that motivate ski
jumpers and other thrill-seeking athletes to publicly display their
mettle, and thus it evokes a unique set of resources that are simply
not needed in the privacy of the practice room during a music lesson
or while jamming with friends. For musicians, the thrill of victory can
include nailing a tough scale passage, finding the acoustic sweet
spot on a high note, or bowing before a cheering audience
compelled to rise to its feet. Conversely, the agony of defeat is
equally visceral and can leave a negative memory trace so severe in
a musician’s brain that it cripples all future performance experiences.
You have seen the mental controls necessary for successful
public performance; now it is time to consider what goes awry in the
brain when those controls falter. And lest it seem like schadenfreude
to closely examine the inner workings of musicians’ performance
flubs, this inspection has both a higher purpose and a venerable
history. Regarding the former, cognitive science may offer new clues
to help ameliorate performance anxiety. Regarding the latter, an
inspection emulates a standard research method in neuroscience,
namely the study of damaged parts within hobbled systems, for it is
believed that, by closely examining what happens when things fall
apart, normal function can be conjectured, bringing brain
researchers one step closer to understanding optimal function.
I will begin with an overview of performance anxiety, then
consider some irksome subtypes, all the while keeping cognitive
science in mind in an attempt to both plumb the mysteries of self-
defeating behavior and offer hope for ways to mollify these
destructive demons of embodied cognition.

MUSIC PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Almost all musicians have experienced music performance anxiety
(MPA). Within this one, unifying experience, individual variations
abound, from the variety and severity of the symptoms to the
regularity and the conditions under which they appear. The
prevalence of MPA is hard to pin down, for the numbers range
widely: 15–25 percent of orchestral musicians (in a series of studies
that considered only “severe and persistent” MPA among orchestral
musicians) to as high as 59 percent in a Dutch study of orchestral
musicians. In the United States, several studies have documented a
similarly wide range of results among orchestral musicians (24–70
percent), while a Canadian study of professional orchestral
musicians found the number astonishingly high: 96 percent.[1]
Musicians who wield instruments with shaking limbs and
sweating palms are not the only performers who suffer the
deleterious effects of MPA. In one study, said by its authors to be
“the first of its kind,” professional opera choristers exhibited much
higher trait anxiety (a part of their personality that shows up in
multiple situations and not just in performance venues) when
compared to a normative sample (i.e., regular, nonsinger folks).[2]
The many coping mechanisms practiced by performers vary
widely as well, from the healthful (exercise, meditation) to the
destructive (slamming back multiple shots of alcohol backstage).
Dianna Kenny, professor of psychology and professor of music at the
University of Sydney, literally wrote the book on MPA. She notes that
MPA “is no respecter of musical genre, age, gender, years of
experience, or level of technical mastery of one’s art.”[3] MPA afflicts
children, students in training, and legions of professional musicians;
it has even struck such musical luminaries as pianists Frederic
Chopin and Arthur Rubenstein; cellist Pablo Casals; singers Maria
Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Barbra Streisand, and Tatiana Troyanos;
and pop icons George Harrison and Donny Osmond.
Yet despite MPA’s prevalence, the current knowledge base in
both academic and clinical psychology regarding MPA is still slim,
and much of the research is uneven. What is known about MPA—
both the disorder itself and the state of the field—is owed to Kenny’s
meticulous work, which traces the troublesome way in which
research on this disorder has been conducted as well as the ill-
considered conflation of MPA with social anxiety and social phobia.
Before Kenny took on the study of MPA, most MPA research
was based on studies of professional orchestral musicians, leaving
out other types of musicians, such as singers, solo instrumentalists,
and student musicians. Subsequent studies simply built on these
flawed studies, which was problematic enough but particularly so
due to psychology’s current “reproducibility crisis,” in which many
studies, especially landmark ones, have failed on a second go-
around.[4] Particularly flawed, in Kenny’s judgment, are these
studies’ assessment tools, which are also reused.[5] In response,
Kenny developed new measures, the Kenny Music Performance
Anxiety Inventory for Adult Musicians (or K-MPAI) and the Music
Performance Anxiety Inventory for Adolescents. The K-MPAI is in
wide use internationally and has been translated into several
languages.[6] It is hoped that the dissemination of Kenny’s
assessment tools will do much to advance the knowledge base of
this vexing disorder.
Despite this advance in MPA research, an impediment that
remains is the mash-up of terminology that surrounds it. General
performance anxiety, stage fright, social anxiety, social phobia, and
even simple shyness are interchangeable terms assigned to MPA,
which has not allowed it to claim its own distinctive set of traits.
Therefore, one of Kenny’s greatest contributions to MPA research
was to disaggregate MPA from these terms, particularly social
phobia, and contrast the significant differences between MPA
sufferers and social phobics.
These differences start with each cohort’s starkly diverse self-
expectations and self-evaluation. For example, professional
musicians generally hold very high expectations of themselves due
to the years of training, expense, and self-sacrifice that it takes to
achieve mastery, so they experience proportional levels of self-
castigation when things go wrong in performance. By contrast, social
phobics generally do not expect much from themselves at all in
settings they find challenging, and low expectations can be self-
fulfilling prophecies that cause social phobics to shrink ever further
from anxiety-producing situations. But musicians march toward the
fearful situation, resolute like the bear hunters in chapter 5, believing
that there is no way around a performance—they have got to go
through it. Consequently, when things go wrong, musicians are more
prone to a higher degree of postevent rumination than social
phobics, who probably exit a cocktail reception just relieved that it is
over, while MPA-prone musicians are likely to obsessively gnaw on
the memory of a performance blunder for weeks afterward.
These differences are crucial to eventually establishing effective
treatments and coping mechanisms, a process heretofore hindered
by MPA’s entanglement in the psychiatric literature with more general
social anxiety disorders and social phobia. This entanglement was
encoded in the fourth edition of the venerable Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), a reference work
published and periodically updated by the American Psychiatric
Association. The DSM is considered the definitive reference work for
current classifications of mental disorders, so one could argue that
the inclusion of performance anxiety as a separate and distinct
disorder is an improvement over previous editions: before 1994,
performance anxiety was not classified at all.
The most recent edition of the DSM (DSM-V) does not
distinguish performance anxiety from other social phobias.[7]
Nevertheless, this influential tome at least includes general
performance anxiety in its important diagnostic criteria, which are
those criteria required to be present in a patient in order to rate a
diagnosis. Still, as Kenny notes, there remains “a debate in the
literature as to whether music performance anxiety represents a form
of social phobia” or if it should, in future editions, be lifted from that
category and given a place of its own.[8] As if pointing toward that
future, DSM-V appended these “specifiers” below the diagnostic
criteria:

Individuals with the performance only type of social anxiety

disorder have performance fears that are typically most
impairing in their professional lives (e.g., musicians, dancers,
performers, athletes) or in roles that require regular public
speaking. Performance fears may also manifest in work, school,
or academic settings in which regular public presentations are
required. Individuals with performance only social anxiety
disorder do not fear or avoid nonperformance social situations.[9]

Importantly, clinicians are also directed to specify if the anxiety

occurs in performance situations only: does the person exhibit a trait
anxiety (a part of their personality that shows up in multiple
situations) or a state anxiety, in which MPA occurs only in very
specific performance situations? This distinction is key to untangling
the multiple threads that often (though not always) weave through an
individual’s experience of MPA. Therefore an MPA sufferer’s first
step should be to determine whether their MPA manifests itself only
around music performance or if it is tied to a deeper
psychopathology, such as excessive perfectionism. A strong working
theory is that people exhibiting certain other psychopathologies may
be more prone to MPA, leading to the observation that symptoms of
general anxiety can occur together with MPA. Unfortunately, this
comingling can also cloud accurate diagnoses of MPA.
A related distinction between state and trait anxieties involves
the fear of real versus imagined audiences, the latter being a
symptom of general social phobia. Imagined derision and illusory
social censure are fears that isolate social phobics in the first place
and keep them stuck at home. But for musicians, audiences are real
—and so are the judgments and negative, real-world consequences
that can accompany audience criticism. One bad review can send a
performer’s career spiraling southward, along with her confidence.
The importance of these distinguishing factors (trait versus state
and imagined versus real), while obvious to performers, has
apparently not occurred to researchers with no performing
experience who have not seen the need to separate MPA from
general social phobias. These and other variables are partly to
blame for the dearth of clear definitions of, diagnoses of, and
treatments for MPA, but thanks to the work of Kenny and others,
clarification of MPA as a separate and distinct disorder seems to be
coming into view. A decisive step in that direction was Kenny’s
authoritative definition of MPA:

Music performance anxiety is the experience of marked and

persistent anxious apprehension related to musical performance
that has arisen through underlying biological and/or
psychological vulnerabilities and/or specific anxiety conditioning
experiences. It is manifested through combinations of affective,
cognitive, somatic and behavioral symptoms. It may occur in a
 range of performance settings, but is usually more severe in
settings involving high ego investment and evaluative threat
(audience) and fear of failure. It may be focal (i.e. focused only
on music performance), or occur comorbidly with other anxiety
disorders, in particular social phobia. It affects musicians across
the lifespan and is at least partially independent of years of
training, practice and level of musical accomplishment. It may or
may not impair the quality of the musical performance.[10]

Consider each part of Kenny’s definition by first acknowledging

that, overall, it accounts for both nature and nurture—that is, genetic
contributions (“underlying biological and/or psychological
vulnerabilities”) plus a person’s early life experiences (“specific
anxiety conditioning experiences”). For example, a performance
trauma in adolescence can feed recurring MPA.
The second clause of the definition contains a laundry list of
symptoms through which MPA manifests itself. They are, in order,
affective disorders, roughly translated as “mood disorders,” such as
depression and anxiety itself. Mood disorders play out in MPA as the
sufferer’s uncanny ability to infect the present with worry about a
future performance. Many a musician can attest to days or even
weeks of panic-inducing worry leading up to an important
performance. Cognitive symptoms might include racing thoughts or
an inability to remember texts or scale passages. The term somatic
in Kenny’s definition refers to physical symptoms, such as queasy
stomach, sweaty hands, and faintness. Behavioral symptoms are
how the anxiety manifests itself in the musician’s actions; examples
include drug use, hostility toward coworkers, and self-harm.
That bona fide MPA is “usually more severe in settings involving
high ego investment and evaluative threat” also points to the
uniqueness of the disorder, in that the judgment of an audience is
real (not imagined) and ratchets up in direct relation to the
importance of the performance and the validity of its assessors (the
critics): professionals are much more likely to become anxious about
a career-making debut in a major venue (Carnegie Hall) with a large
audience and a music critic in attendance than they would be in their
hometown theater. Likewise, student musicians are understandably
more anxious about degree recitals required for graduation than they
are for weekly studio masterclasses.
Kenny’s definition importantly cites the timeline of MPA, which
must be present as an ongoing threat to qualify as a disorder.
Otherwise, if MPA appears like a party-crasher—it visits, flames out,
and then departs—it can be labeled situational and should be
analyzed in light of the circumstances that allow it to show up
uninvited.
Kenny’s last component (a bout of MPA “may or may not impair
the quality of the musical performance”) is a nod to a phenomenon
familiar to many performers, whereby their gaffes are keenly felt and
heard by themselves but go virtually unnoticed by the audience.

CAUSES OF MPA
Kenny conducted two studies on self-reported causes of MPA
among two different populations, the first being a group of university-
level music and dance students in New Zealand, and the second
being 357 Australian professional orchestral musicians (see table
6.1).[11] The participants were given a list of possible performance
anxiety triggers and asked to rank them. The list of triggers was long
(twenty-one in all), but a side-by-side comparison of the first five is
enlightening, insofar as it is possible to infer that performance
stressors may change as one progresses from novice to master and
may also change over a lifetime.

Performance Anxiety Triggers Ranked

Causes of MPA in Music and Causes of MPA in Professional
Dance Students Orchestral Musicians

1. Pressure from self. 1. Pressure from self.

2. Inadequate preparation for 2. Not knowing how to manage physical

performance. arousal.

3. General lack of self-confidence. 3. Inadequate preparation for

performance.

4. Attempting repertoire that is too 4. Tendency to be anxious in general

difficult. and not just in performance.
 5. Excessive physical arousal before 5. Health problems.
or during performance.

Source: Dianna Kenny, The Psychology of Music Performance

Anxiety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91–93.
As can be seen, “Pressure from self” was the number one
reason given by both students and professional players. It seems we
humans can truly be our own worst enemies. Interestingly,
“Inadequate preparation” was the number two cause among
students, while with professionals, it moved down to number three.
One possible takeaway from this is that we realize the importance of
deliberate practice as we age, and this wisdom strengthens on the
road to mastery.
One of the most intriguing differences between these two
populations is revealed on the question of physical arousal, such as
elevated heart rate, breathlessness, weak knees, and sweaty palms.
The adult professionals ranked “Not knowing how to manage
physical arousal” as the second most important cause of their
anxiety, while the student musicians did not choose this trigger at all.
However, students did note “Excessive physical arousal” as number
five, while the professionals ranked this lower, at number eight. What
might we make of this? Kenny only notes that more longitudinal
studies are needed to ascertain whether these triggers change over
time.[12] Yet one simple explanation may be that, while students are
alarmed by the primal nature of physical arousal symptoms
themselves (yucky sweat!), professionals are not unnerved by them
per se or particularly surprised at their manifestation, just aggravated
by their inability to control them. Pros may grudgingly anticipate the
symptoms’ arrival, seeing them as the party-crashers mentioned
earlier, while feeling simultaneous dismay at their failure to eject
them. This is actually an apt way to describe the two sides of our
human alerting network that alternately ignites and calms the
physiological fires of MPA.

THE PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF PERFORMANCE

ANXIETY
The alerting network is best understood as an attentional filtering
system, called the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which
incessantly sifts the information that bombards our senses every
second, parsing the important from the trivial. The ANS is essentially
distributed between two systems, the sympathetic nervous system
(SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). Stanford
neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky describes these two opposing
systems as the body’s gas pedal and the brakes, respectively.[13] (It
may be helpful here to refer to table 3.1 in chapter 3, bearing in mind
the differences between automatic and controlled processing.)
The SNS, operating from the bottom up as an automatic
response, is primed to alert us in the presence of danger (for
example, a vicious animal) or excitement, such as sexual arousal.
The actions of the SNS are abetted by a cocktail of hormones
(primarily epinephrine, norepinephrine, and the glucocorticoids),
which Sapolsky calls “the workhorses of the stress-response.”[14]
Somatic symptoms, in addition to those already noted (increased
heart rate and sweat), include muscle tension; dilation of the eyes;
constriction of the GI tract; and, in extremely horrifying situations,
sudden vomiting and diarrhea.
In the case of a clear and present danger, the SNS operates not
only outside our conscious awareness but so swiftly as to be actually
ahead of it. For example, if we are peacefully strolling down our
neighborhood sidewalk, we do not pause to muse over the source of
a sudden and tremendously loud crash that sets our SNS ablaze and
sends us fleeing in the opposite direction. This accounts for a
common experience of accident victims who state that the velocity of
the event left them “no time to think.”
As scientists like Sapolsky have taught us, we humans were
originally structured for living among the dangers in the wild. Our
fight-or-flight reaction is a deeply hardwired instinct responsible for
the critical choice between standing our ground to fight an oncoming
predator or fleeing the situation entirely. And while it is true that
giving a public violin recital is not perfectly analogous to being
chased by a lion (no savannah, no heaving, four-hundred-pound
animal hot on your heels), as far as our bodies are concerned, the
threat of a lion and the threat of an audience are similar. Thus the
SNS floors the gas pedal in times of purely psychological stress,
which leads to the disturbing experience of MPA.
In addition, we humans have an exasperatingly unique ability to
turn on our SNS purely through imagination: either through
anticipation of a future performance or while reliving the memory of a
cringeworthy performance flub—the postevent rumination that
distinguishes MPA from social phobia.
By contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS)
operates from the top down, beginning in the executive control
center of the brain, and it hits the brakes to calm our body after
arousal, fear, or flight and restore it to a resting state. Thus a large
amount of stress research is devoted not to the activation of the SNS
or even to stress itself but to how quickly we are able to recover from
the stress response. Indeed, much of Sapolsky’s celebrated
research is based on the observation that animals recover incredibly
rapidly after bursts of stress but humans, by comparison, do not
(hence the cheeky title of Sapolsky’s award-winning book Why
Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers).
Worse than our relatively slow recovery from stress is the
chronic malingering of elevated stress hormones in the human body,
which can cause a host of human afflictions including hypertension,
heart disease, diabetes, and memory loss. Worse still, because the
SNS and the PNS cannot operate at the same time, if our SNS is
chronically flooring the gas pedal (anxiety before, during, and after a
performance), the calming operation of the PNS is necessarily idled.
In a state of chronic anxiety, the PNS becomes so rusty with disuse
that, in Sapolsky’s words, it becomes “harder to slow things down,
even in those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about
something.”[15] Anxiety becomes an awful, normalized habit, and it
makes us sick. Therefore, remedying chronic stress is a worthy
aspiration for all of us, not just musicians. But before considering
remedies, let us consider what other variables besides MPA can
make hard-won technique go awry.

BEYOND MPA
If a musician goofs up in front of an audience, is it always and only
because of chronic MPA? The answer is probably not. Through its
multiple channels and interactions, an organism as complex as the
human brain is bound to trip-wire itself in a variety of equally
fascinating and aggravating ways. In fact, the performance failure
phenomenon you will learn about next is actually a product of
cognition, springing from precisely the way human beings process
information. It will be helpful here to recall several cognitive
processes from chapter 3. The first element to bear in mind is the
difference between automatic and controlled processing.
Controlled processing is what we do when inputting new
knowledge (following a recipe, for example), while automatic
processing is what we do when we’ve just brushed the hot stove
burner with our elbow on the way to pick up the salt shaker—ouch!
In the time that it would require the brain to control process that
stinging sensory information, the would-be chef would incur a
second-degree burn. Fortunately, our brains do not need to compute
the precise temperature at which flesh will burn in order to rescue us
from such blunders. Humans come equipped with an auto-control
button that sounds the alarm when danger is near, and this is
generally a very good thing, in both everyday life and in evolutionary
terms; we humans would not have survived without this built-in alarm
system.
It is also helpful to recall the fluid period that occurs within
working memory (which is learning itself), called maintenance plus
manipulation. In this phase of learning, the accumulated sticky notes
of practice and experience are tossed within the brain. Learning in
this phase is in flux until those sticky notes are pinned down in long-
term memory. With these essential brain processes now in mind, let
us consider the particularly vexing performance gremlin known in the
expertise literature by its full and proper name, choking under
pressure.

CHOKING UNDER PRESSURE

Choking under pressure (“choking” for short) is what happens when
well-trained performers in the physical realm (athletes, musicians,
dancers, etc.) inexplicably bungle their performances in public. There
are two main reasons that make choking “inexplicable”: (1) It
happens to motivated individuals who are masters of their craft; and
(2) These masters typically perform well or even perfectly in
practices and rehearsals. Choking, as noted by researchers who
study it, is not merely poor performance but a performance that goes
markedly poorer than expected given the performer’s abilities and
preparation. Thus a significant hallmark of choking is that it is the
province of experts and near-experts. This invites another question:
If experts choke, what do beginners do?
Beginners, through lack of training, simply panic and flounder,
and mistakes are made. The consequences range from the truly
mortal to the psychologically mortifying. A novice surgeon who
panics, maims; an inexperienced airplane pilot who panics, kills both
himself and his passengers; a beginning musician who panics may
lose it so badly mid-performance that there is no way out but to
crumple and start over. Bach is notorious for his M. C. Escher–like
musical mazes, for example. If the musician fails to strike the one
pivot note needed to vault the music into a new key, she hopelessly
spins around in the previous one, aware that she is lost yet without a
roadmap to guide her out of perdition—unless she practices her
roadmap along with all the other aspects of her upcoming
performance. Granted, mindful practice—practicing how to think, not
just what to do—is typically not the province of beginners. And this is
unfortunate, for a panic-driven performance gaffe is the perfect
seedbed for planting an MPA that, if unaddressed, can grow to
chronic and obsessive proportions as the learner matures. This is
one motivation behind the cultivation of performance cues (see
chapter 5), which serve as lamps to guide one’s way out of the abyss
of a memory lapse. Cellist Tânia Lisboa demonstrate that even
young student musicians can benefit from the kind of mindful
practice that includes the installation of performance cues.[16]
Other reactions to panic are fleeing—simply walking off the
stage in the middle of a performance—or even fainting, which is an
extreme version of panic and fits into the “fleeing” paradigm as a way
of taking the path of least resistance. Yet it is notable in the MPA
literature that these and other nightmares of the utter breakdowns
that distinguish panic are actually quite rare among professional
musicians. According to Kenny,

one of the puzzles about music performance anxiety is that

despite intense pre-performance distress, performance
breakdowns are relatively infrequent occurrences in professional
musicians.[17]

But note that Kenny is speaking of professional musicians. As

previously noted, most of the musical populations studied for MPA
have been adult professionals. Thus we might assume that one
reason full-on performance breakdowns are so rare is that childhood
experiences with performance panic simply culls those unfortunate
kids out of the herd of budding musicians. If so, a caution to music
teachers and parents is in order here, but not in the form of a total
ban on early performance experiences. Rather, we ought to
acknowledge MPA as a real phenomenon even among the very
young and provide developing musicians with tools similar to
Lisboa’s to cope with it. Some of the techniques listed in this chapter
can certainly be adapted for the young.
Even though full-on breakdowns are rare among professionals,
choking can and does happen. By definition, the special hell of
choking is reserved for moderately to very accomplished performers
who have pursued hours of training and practice time. Indeed, the
degree of mortification due to choking (mildly red-faced to full-on
horror) seems directly proportional to the choker’s prechoke ability.
This exposes a conundrum: Aren’t we supposed to improve with
more training? And isn’t the grand payoff for our investment in
training supposed to produce a graceful performance, unburdened
by technical thinking—in popular parlance, a performance on
autopilot?
In recent years, choking has been the subject of serious
scientific research due in part to the financial losses incurred by the
business of professional sports when star athletes mess up in front
of their fans and in part to the psychological terror that grips chokers
and keeps performance psychologists in business. While a choking
event may occur only occasionally or just once in isolation, it is more
commonly experienced as part of a chain of repeating events: a
nasty symptom of choking is its penchant for clinging to the choker
like a pall of doom, spawning a series of macabre command
performances that can endure for months or even years. One of the
most infamous cases of chronic choking was that of major league
baseball player Steve Blass. His two-year choking spell as a pitcher
for the Pittsburgh Pirates forced his early retirement in 1975 and
ignominiously attached his name to the phenomenon of choking in
baseball: Steve Blass disease is the curse that dare not be named
aloud in the dugout.[18]
As to what causes the mysterious ailment of choking, there are
essentially two competing theories: explicit monitoring theory and
distraction theory.[19] The stage has been set throughout the
preceding chapters of this book to understand both of them.
Explicit Monitoring Theory. Monitoring one’s physical
movements while in action is thought to spark choking. This is known
as “overthinking.” Exactly how this might happen is explored below.
The popular remedy? Stop thinking and just do it.
Distraction Theory. Being so distracted that one is unable to
attend to the task (the opposite of explicit monitoring) is another
hypothesized cause of choking. Top culprits that cause distraction in
performance are anxiety (about the performance), personal worries
(e.g., over finances or health), and recent devastating news (e.g., the
death of a loved one). The popular remedy? Stop thinking and just
do it.
Now we’ll consider both of these theories and then consider
whether Montero’s just-do-it principle is a viable strategy for battling
the dreaded choke.

Explicit Monitoring Theory

The theory of explicit monitoring springs from attentional focus

theories that (recall from chapter 4) currently favor an external focus
of attention (on a movement’s goal) rather than an internal focus of
attention (on the mechanics of the movement). The explicit
monitoring theory of choking is based on the premise that, since
automatic processing is fast and controlled processing is relatively
slow, motor performance is harmed when performers retard their
processing speed by overthinking procedural movements that ought
to run smoothly on their own by habit gained through practice. This
line of thinking celebrates automaticity by espousing the view that, in
a well-trained performer, technique must be left to autopilot because
once a physical feat is truly learned, it is housed deep within the
motor cortex of the brain. Within this pro-automaticity explanation of
choking, expert performers who suddenly shift from autopilot to
controlled processing leave the land of the learned and take
themselves on a time trip back to their raw beginnings, hence the
term from ML research: reinvestment. By this theory, reinvestment in
past training tenets is especially attractive if the way one first learned
was by way of mechanical directions, or “rule-based” directives.[20]
Continuing this line of reasoning, the more expert the performer,
the more spectacular the choke. Why? It is thought that the verbiage
from a beginner’s training manual will compute like a once-well-
known—but now hazy—former language. The critical resources
needed to attend to the task at hand (making music in front of an
audience) will be siphoned off to translate reinvestment commands.
(Note that this effect strongly resembles distraction theory as a
cause of choking. Indeed, some researchers are making the case for
this overlap.[21])
Other connections to the explicit monitoring theory are Wulf’s
constrained action hypothesis, which in turn supports the interrelated
theories of “freezing” and the limitations of language, all discussed in
chapter 4. Proponents of these interrelated theories believe that
directing attention to the mechanics of movement stifles its fluidity.
Here it is important to recall that fluid movement of limbs and fingers
is such a hallmark of expert performance in sport, dance, music, and
so forth that its opposite—sheer clumsiness—is a substantial
concern.
These interrelated theories—explicit monitoring theory, the
constrained action hypothesis, and distraction theory—are all based
on the belief that physical sensation is nearly impossible to
adequately capture in words, so language itself is deemed rigid and
inflexible. The concept of a cognitive argument between brain
regions illuminates these entwined beliefs. It is thought that verbal
directions, primarily processed in the brain region known as Broca’s
area, and sensory commands, primarily processed in the motor
cortex, involve such incongruent brain regions that verbal directions
are destined for the no-man’s-land of the choke. The most dominant
explanation as to why this might occur is, again, one of processing
speed. Verbal commands are slow to translate into bodily action;
they simply take too much time to make their way through our
controlled processing system (recall the hot burner analogy), and by
the time they have run their course, the action we were attempting
has been compromised, even wrecked. If this sounds familiar, I
described the phenomenon in which mechanical directions issued
during motor learning can become “lost in translation” in chapter 4.
These theories regarding language processing highlight the
limitations of language in the re-creation of high-degree motor skill
and support the popular belief that choking is the result of thinking
too much during a performance rather than thinking too little. Arthur
Koestler in his 1964 book The Act of Creation (described as “a
massive attempt . . . to examine the psychological process
underlying both artistic and scientific creation”) captures this
cognitive argument perfectly by first acknowledging the necessity of
words as “essential tools for formulating and communicating
thoughts, and also for putting them into the storage of memory,” then
immediately cautioning that “words can also become snares, decoys,
or strait-jackets.”[22] As Koestler admonishes his readers,

words are a blessing which can turn into a curse. They

crystallize thought; they give articulation and precision to vague
images and hazy intuitions. But a crystal is no longer a fluid.[23]

Distraction Theory

Distraction theory is the second most prominent explanation for

choking. Early proponents of distraction theory situated this
explanation diametrically opposite explicit monitoring theory. Explicit
monitoring theory says that we are bewitched toward the task to our
choking doom; distraction theory says that we are pulled
devastatingly away from the task.
 To understand the cognitive substrates of distraction theory, you
must first understand the nexus of working memory, attention, and
the upside of automaticity. Recall from chapter 3 that there is an
especially fluid period within working memory called maintenance
plus manipulation, in which the mixed salad of sticky notes
(accumulated while one is paying attention to just about anything) is
tossed and recombined in the bowl of the brain. As such, attention in
this phase is porous and highly labile. Anything can happen.
Also recall from chapter 3 that one argument in favor of
automaticity is its ability to reduce cognitive load, leaving more
mental real estate available for other cognitive tasks—this is
presumed to be a major bonus of automatic actions. Yet can it be
guaranteed that this bonus room in the brain will be filled with
positive forces? For if automaticity can create an advantageous
opening for creativity, could it not also make room for agitation and
worry to take root? This dichotomy is probably the number one
reason why cultivating a blank mind is not a viable strategy for
warding off MPA or choking. An argument against automaticity might
therefore resemble a clever twist on the old proverb “Idle hands are
the devil’s playground”: A performer’s idle mind is the choking
gremlins’ playground. Montero makes a sensible suggestion on this
point: “When acting automatically, at any moment, it seems, the mind
might jump back into the picture and thus . . . [i]t may be best to have
the mind present all along.”[24] If a blank mind in performance is not
a realistic possibility, why would we not want to be in charge of what
is installed there?

The White Bear Problem and the Ironic Effect

A third theory adds another layer to the phenomenon of choking

by illuminating why humans sometimes will perversely “think, say, or
do precisely the worst thing for any occasion.”[25] The propensity for
humans to do the opposite of what they intend has been observed
for well-nigh two centuries, but it was the late Harvard psychologist
Daniel Wegner who named it ironic processing theory. It is also
known colloquially as “the white bear problem” after a passage by
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Try to pose for yourself this
task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed
thing will come to mind every minute.”[26] The perversity of this
challenge inspired Wegner’s research into not only thought
suppression but behavior. Why, for example, is it not only difficult for
a dieter to eschew fantasy thoughts about cheesecake but also for a
performer not to physically trip when walking onstage or for an
instrumentalist’s fingers not to flub a chord progression? Wegner
found that, in certain situations, the very action that we intend to do
is thwarted by its exact and humiliating opposite—that our intentions
for an excellent performance can sometimes be accompanied by an
“ironic monitoring process” that attracts failure.[27]
By the tenets of ironic processing theory, the attempt to control
one’s actions in performance is not beleaguered by explicit
monitoring or constrained action or the sensory system’s mutinous
reaction to verbal commands but by the imps of doubt and failure
that routinely accompany the pursuit of success.
Wegner observed that people are most at risk for ironic
processing when depressed, stressed, sleep-deprived, or otherwise
operating under undue mental load. Considering that public
performances are accompanied by heaps of both stress and mental
load, it is somewhat remarkable, seen through the lens of the ironic
processing theory, that musicians are able to succeed in
performance at all.
But succeed we do, in spite of the notorious bogies of
performance jitters. While a lucky few have never experienced
performance anxiety, research reveals that MPA, choking, and other
ironic processes are experienced by most musicians at one time or
another. Indeed, these phenomena have likely been around for as
long as performing artists have been plying their trade before critical
audiences. What else is the traditional admonition “Break a leg!” (or,
in the opera world, In bocca al lupo, “Into the mouth of the wolf”) but
a reverse charm to ward off the well-known specter of choking?
These and other backstage talismans are examples wherein human
experience predates scientific exploration. Now that science has
acknowledged the phenomenon of ironic processing as truth
experienced (and not just “all in the mind”), it is a subject deemed
worthy of scientific study. Such research may offer performers some
insight into and even some antidotes for age-old phenomena that
have bedeviled performers for centuries. As a prelude to such hope,
let us first consider whether there is any advantage at all to
performance anxiety.

THE UPSIDE OF ANXIETY

It may be difficult at this juncture to believe there is anything
remotely positive about anxiety’s effect on music performance. But
the fact that most musicians seek a performance experience that is
both compelling to the audience and joyful for the doer implies that
performers care enough to make it so—that they have (as is said in
sports) some skin in the game. This emotional investment, even
among the most grounded and experienced performers, is often
tinged with a tiny frisson of worry over the quality of the outcome—
otherwise, we would not be able to summon enough care to make
good music. This symbiosis between arousal and performance is
known in psychology as the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that
performance quality generally increases with arousal; that is, our
skills get better the more we care about them—but only up to an
optimal point. When desire exceeds its tipping point, excitement
becomes infected with anxiety, and performance crumbles.
Seasoned musicians know that to feel zero anxiety is either
abnormal or a perilous sign that a flat performance is in the offing.
Therefore many successful performers have learned that, instead of
aiming to extinguish anxiety altogether, a more fruitful strategy is to
tame it and bring it under control in order to ride the wave of
exhilaration that only a public performance can offer. This strategy
comes about through deliberate practice, which is only potent if
practiced onstage and in public, and it strengthens with experience.
Therefore a practical treatment for MPA is to play music under
performance conditions—that is, play and sing in front of people—as
often as possible. Practice feeling nervous.
This commonsense strategy is referred to in the psychology
literature as exposure therapy. Indeed, gathering up some friends
(and a few strangers) to make up an audience seems both simple
and a real no-brainer. Ask each friend to bring two or four others,
and add enticements: Free coffee! Cookies! Another simple way to
generate an audience is to perform in local retirement communities,
which often house a community gathering hall with a decent piano.
Even hospitals are now potential places in which to both give and
receive the gift of music.[28]
When performing for an audience is not possible, simulating the
effects of anxiety can be an equally powerful tool. Self-described
“peak performance psychologist” Don Greene uses just such
simulations with his clients. For example, he has musicians run or
climb stairs to the point of breathlessness then immediately play their
instrument or sing to habituate them to performing under the weight
of such classic somatic symptoms as elevated heart rate, lack of
oxygen, sweaty hands, and tight abdominal muscles.[29] It is thought
that in this way the somatic symptoms of performance anxiety can
be deliberately triggered and experienced ahead of time, defanging
them a little in the process. These are some commonsense
approaches to defying MPA. Let us now turn to the current state of
psychological and neuroscientific research on bona fide treatments
for MPA.

RESEARCHED TREATMENTS FOR MPA

MPA has been studied for over four decades, yet due to the
problems and challenges in the research already mentioned, many
questions about MPA remain unanswered, none more so than the
question of effective treatments for MPA. The few treatments that
have shown some benefit in one study or another still require
verification through repeated trials. As Kenny notes, “there has been
an almost alarming proliferation of treatment approaches to the
problem of living, and these are developing ahead of the capacity of
the research community to empirically validate their
effectiveness.”[30] This is surely all the more true for a disorder that is
still not entirely understood.
The most important systematic reviews of MPA treatments
include Kenny’s as well as those of the team of psychologists Anne
McGinnis and Leonard Milling (2005); a meta-analysis of
nonpharmacologic psychotherapies (Laurie Goren in 2014); and a
book-length review of the relevant literature by physician, violinist,
and author Ariadna Ortiz Brugués.[31] Findings culled from these
varied sources are briefly summarized here, although the efficacy of
pharmacologic interventions are not, due to the fact that these drugs
must be prescribed by a physician after he has first thoroughly
analyzed the performer’s MPA situation and considering the possible
side effects. Some side effects reported in the literature are worth
noting, however: excess salivation with beta blockers and disruption
of fine motor control with antianxiety medications. While the former
might not trouble a string or percussion player, wind players and
singers could experience deleterious effects when dealing with
excess saliva, and the disruption of fine motor coordination would be
a concern to all instrumentalists.

Standard Psychotherapies for MPA

Psychodynamic or Psychoanalytic Therapy: This is the

oldest form of psychotherapy (think Freud). The patient is led to
consider their past history (for example, childhood relationships and
experiences) in order to understand how their past might influence
present behavior. As such, this therapy may be relatively more time-
consuming than other types, playing out over months or years. This
approach may be most fruitful for musicians who have a long,
complicated, or fraught history in music—for example, those
groomed as child prodigies. However, there have been no controlled
studies on the efficacy of this approach for MPA, so Kenny, Goren,
and others suggest that future research is needed in this area.
Behavioral Therapy: Behavioral therapy aims to alter the
client’s behavior when they feel anxious or to ameliorate distressing
somatic symptoms such as muscle tension. Goren considers such
strategies as relaxation training, exposure therapy, and
desensitization therapy “classic” behavioral techniques. Participants
in one study in this category showed some improvement when using
behavior rehearsal, which involves practicing the desired responses
to a future performance situation via play-acting and role-playing.
The effect of this particular therapy was stronger when combined
with cognitive therapy.[32]
 Cognitive Therapy: The essence of cognitive therapy lies
within its name; if cognition means “thinking,” then the aim of
cognitive therapy is to alter the way that patients think. A more
nuanced explanation is that cognitive therapy helps patients interpret
their emotional response to situations and, presumably, flip from self-
defeating or so-called catastrophizing thoughts to more self-
supportive ones. How this might play out in the management of MPA
is explored by Kenny, who notes that there are three main focuses in
music performance: the self, the audience, and the music. Using
cognitive therapy to address MPA would involve directing one’s
limited human attentional resources to one aim—the music—and
away from the self and the audience. This is achieved through
directed thinking.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: As its name implies, this type
of therapy is a combination of cognitive therapy and behavioral
therapy. The aim is to change both the way the patient thinks and the
way they enact that thinking. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has
been a remarkably robust therapy and has recently gotten a boost
from cognitive neuroscience—that is, we now know that the reason
CBT can be so effective is that it can actually change the brain via
the doctrine of neural plasticity. As such, CBT has been shown to be
one of the most effective psychotherapies for MPA.[33] As in cognitive
therapy, CBT typically trains a person to rethink a situation by
reframing it in a more positive or efficient light then actually
practicing that thought while simultaneously engaging in changed
behavior around the thought, even if the behavior is not exactly the
one that feels instinctive in the moment. Here is an example of a
CBT technique for a performer: Backstage just before your
performance, you note how nervous you feel via typical somatic
symptoms (increased heart rate, sweaty palms, shallow breathing).
Instead of allowing negative interpretations of those feelings to enter
your mind, you consciously and assertively practice a word or a
sentence that translates the word nervous to the word excited.
Similarly, you transform physical sensations to positive signs that
you cannot wait to bound onto the stage. This is the cognitive
component of CBT. For the behavioral component of CBT, you stride
strongly out on the stage, head held high with a glowing smile pasted
on your face, even if this is not an accurate portrayal of how you
really feel on the inside. (Note: The behavioral component of this
technique resembles a recent fad called power posing, which will be
reviewed later in this chapter.)

ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES FOR MPA

There are other treatments for MPA, both non-Western and
alternative therapies, that are promising. Still the following comment
by Brugués reflects the caution in the medical and scientific literature
about such strategies: “There are too few studies performed to fully
support the evidence reported by them.”[34] Nevertheless, an
overview of two of the most popular modalities among performing
artists is offered here. And while Brugués’ assessment may be
correct about the first one, the second alternative method now offers
compelling bona fide research on the question of its effectiveness.

Alexander Technique

Alexander Technique (AT) is

a method of kinaesthetic re-education, in which a new postural

model is associated with verbal instructions; bad habits are
inhibited and replaced by consciously directed action.
Movements in accordance with the technique are characterised
by economy of effort and a balanced and appropriate
distribution of tension (not an absence of tension, but no more
than is necessary).[35]

AT is taught through a series of lessons by a certified AT

teacher. According to the American Society for the Alexander
Technique, “people study the Technique for a variety of reasons. The
most common is to relieve pain through learning better coordination
of the musculoskeletal system,” but the society also notes that AT is
an especially popular method “to enhance performance. Athletes,
singers, dancers, and musicians use the Technique to improve
breathing, vocal production, and speed and accuracy of
movement.”[36]
According to singer, AT teacher, and independent researcher
Marisa De Silva, “the current literature on the question of whether
Alexander Technique may mitigate MPA is scarce, but the most
notable study was conducted by Valentine et al. in 1995.”[37]
In this study, a sample of twenty-one music students enrolled in
a performance class in a UK university (both vocalists and
instrumentalists) were divided into two groups: an experimental
group and a control group. The experimental group was given a
course of fifteen AT lessons (the AT group).
The two groups first completed three questionnaires (on
personality, performance anxiety, and interest in AT lessons) and
were then subjected to a variety of measures (height, peak air flow,
and heart rate) that were administered on four different occasions:
(1) at the required audition to get into the class, (2) at an in-class
performance, (3) at a second in-class performance, and (4) at the
final class recital. Measurements on the first two occasions were
taken prior to students’ commencing AT lessons, while
measurements on the final two occasions were taken after students
had completed the full round of AT lessons.
Results showed that the AT group improved significantly relative
to the control group in “overall music and technical quality” as judged
by independent music experts. These judges did not know if the
subjects they were assessing were in the AT group or in the control
group. The AT group improved also on measures of “heart rate
variance, self-rated anxiety and positive attitude to performance.”[38]
Although this study (which included both quantitative and
qualitative data) is the most comprehensive study to date on AT and
MPA, Kenny considers it to be of “weak design” and concludes that
“we cannot be confident in the findings.”[39] The authors themselves
acknowledge as much, admitting that their sample size was small,
the subjects were predominantly female, and the fact that the
experimental group knew that the goal of the study was to prove the
efficacy of AT for MPA may have primed them to be more positive in
their qualitative assessments of mood and anxiety. The authors state
unequivocally that
 with regard to the main hypothesis under test, there were no
significant effects of the experimental treatment on height, peak
flow or mean heart rate. Thus, there was no support for lessons
in AT increasing height or peak flow, or modulating the increase
in mean heart rate under stress.[40]

Regarding height and peak (air) flow, the authors had initially
hypothesized that these parameters might improve given AT’s
emphasis on posture and spinal alignment. In addition, “misuse” was
added to the list of parameters that saw no improvement. Misuse,
however, is an oddly subjective term for a scientific paper, although
the authors explained that by AT standards, “optimal functioning
constitutes ‘good use’ and deviation from it is termed ‘misuse’ (a
technical term in AT).”[41] For this study, the degree of misuse was
judged by two independent AT teachers who specialized in teaching
musicians.
Yet what remains somewhat peculiar is the authors’ disavowal of
heart rate variance (as stated in the previous quote) because heart
rate is exactly the parameter that showed a clear difference between
the control group and the AT group during the two most stress-
inducing performance events for the class: the entrance audition and
the last event, the public recital. According to the study, the control
group’s mean heart rate was significantly lower than the AT group’s
to start with (at audition), but for the final recital, it shot up well
beyond that of the AT group. What is more, even though the AT
group’s heart rate was raised for the final recital, it was only a little bit
higher than their first-audition heart rate—and still significantly lower
than the control group’s recital heart rate. The authors, at another
point in the paper, report that,

in sum, the results suggest that AT may have beneficial effects

on the quality of performance, the mental state of the performer,
and may help to modulate increased variability of heart rate
under stress.[42]

In addition to these oddities, another weakness of the study was

the mystery of the parameter of time. Readers do not know over how
many weeks the fifteen lessons were administered and can only infer
that they took place over an academic semester. If this is the case,
then it is equally easy to infer that the AT group actually experienced
a significant benefit from their AT lessons in lowering one of the
somatic effects of MPA excitement—increased heart rate—when
judged against their peers who did not take AT lessons. In De Silva’s
opinion, because of these and other factors, the study “should not be
totally dismissed”:

First, so as not to be labeled biased, the researchers used the

grant to hire two groups of experts: 1) independent AT
instructors to teach the AT lessons, and 2) expert musicians
who used a video analysis to judge the overall musical quality of
the participants from pre-class to post-class. The judges
concluded that the experimental group’s musical quality in
performance improved from pre-class to post-class, whereas the
control group’s musical quality in performance actually declined.
Mood and heart rate variance (the only data collected from the
final recital), also showed clear differences: anxiety in the
control group rose over time, while the AT group’s declined; and
while the control group showed a drastic increase in heart rate
variance from audition to recital, the AT group did not.
With quantitative data such as heart rate variance, this study at
least shows that AT classes had some quantifiable impact and
should not be negated. Further research with replicated results
would be necessary to strengthen its case.[43]

One final note about this study should be made: in poststudy

interviews, while the AT subjects self-rated general benefits from
their lessons rather modestly and musical benefits somewhat higher,
all the AT subjects mentioned that they felt an increased awareness
of tension and noted improvement in their ability to relax.[44] This
latter result would be a significant counter to the natural tendency of
the SNS to floor the gas pedal of performance anxiety and a hopeful
sign that AT training could help musicians consciously apply the
brakes of the PNS in times of stress to bring arousal down to
acceptable levels of excitement.
Yoga

Yoga is a holistic mind-body practice because it combines both

cognitive elements (via meditation, focused attention and
concentration) and somatic elements, through the physical postures
most people associate with yoga (called asanas), breathing, and
deep stretching exercises. Because of yoga’s all-inclusive nature,
both control systems of the body are operating at once: the “bottom-
up” system, via yoga’s intense physicality, and the “top-down”
system via its requirement for focus, attention, and patience. Indeed,
one style of yoga (Kripalu) is known as “meditation in motion.”[45]
There are four published studies on the effectiveness of yoga as
a treatment for MPA.[46] These connected studies are significant for
several reasons, not least of which is the biography of the lead
author of three of them, Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, who, along with being
a practicing yogi himself over many decades, is also an assistant
professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a research
director for the Kundalini Research Institute and the Kripalu Center
for Yoga and Health. As editor-in-chief of the International Journal of
Yoga Therapy and chief editor of the book The Principles and
Practice of Yoga in Health Care, he is a leader in the yoga-as-
therapy movement.
These four research studies were implemented over a timeline
of seven years at the Tanglewood Music Center, an annual summer
music academy in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.
Because of the collective ages of the research subjects who were
studied (young adult professionals, college-age conservatory
students, and adolescents), they represented musicians’ most
crucial training and testing periods. The results of all four studies
indicate that yoga is quite promising as an intervention for MPA.
The first one, a pilot study, took a group of nine young
professional musicians (average age twenty-five) who had all won
prestigious Tanglewood fellowships and offered them regular yoga
and meditation classes over eight weeks (a control group of fellows
who did not take yoga classes was also assembled). The fellows
were allowed to choose their own schedules, so as might be
expected, attendance was high at the beginning of the program (four
or five classes per week), dwindled somewhat as the intense
Tanglewood rehearsal and performance schedule amplified, and
then picked up again as the program drew to a close. Measures of
“anxiety, mood and flow” were higher in the yoga group than the
control group. Flow was defined in this study, following
Csikszentmihalyi, as “an optimal psychological state associated with
high levels of performance and is a positive, rewarding experience.”
Even better, performance anxiety scores showed “statistically
significant improvements in comparison” to the control group.[47] The
authors of this study write that they were not surprised at the
outcome regarding performance anxiety, given that yoga practice
uses a number of components that are “particularly known to be
useful for anxiety, including meditation, breathing, and counseling
directed at specific and individual music performance problems.”[48]
The second study, built on the previous summer’s pilot study,
took place in the same location and again involved young adult
professional musicians (music fellows at Tanglewood). Yet this study
differs from the first one in several ways: it involved a larger number
of musicians, and the groups were divided into three cohorts, not
two. Groups 1 and 2 both practiced yoga and meditation three times
a week (as in 2005), but group 1 volunteered for an additional full-on
“yoga lifestyle intervention.” The yoga-lifestyle musicians kicked off
the study with a two-day intensive retreat, where they learned about
breathing and mediation techniques as well as what the researchers
called “conscious eating.” As the summer progressed, along with
regular yoga classes, they added weekly, facilitated group
discussions that wove together the challenges musicians face in
both practice and performance with how a yogic lifestyle might
ameliorate performance-related physical pain and psychological
suffering. A third group engaged in none of these practices and
functioned as the control. The results of the second study?

Consistent with the results of our previous study . . . A period of

yoga and meditation practice of just over 6-weeks duration
tended to reduce performance anxiety and improved mood in a
sample of young professional musicians. Participants responded
positively to the yoga program and found that yoga and
 meditation techniques were beneficial to their music
performance and daily lives over both the short and long term.
The yoga program showed a statistical tendency to reduce the
cognitive and somatic symptoms of musical performance
anxiety. The yoga program incorporated several components
that were targeted to alleviate anxiety including meditation,
breath control, and counseling directed at specific music
performance problems and career stressors . . . Participants
found that yogic breath control techniques helped them more
effectively manage performance anxiety, especially immediately
prior to a concert.[49]

The third yoga study, administered during academic year 2007–

2008, built on the two previous Tanglewood studies but the subjects
were twenty-four college-age student musicians culled from the
Boston Conservatory rather than young adult professionals.
Students were offered two yoga classes per week over an
approximately nine-week period; were asked to practice on their own
an additional four days a week using a prerecorded, sixteen-minute
lesson; and were to log the results in a home practice log.
Again, results were positive: “participants showed large
decreases in MPA” and their “trait anxiety decreased significantly.”[50]
Nevertheless, the study was somewhat weakened by sample size;
gender imbalance; and, most important, attrition: students’
attendance and adherence to the program began to erode as the
weeks went on. At program’s end, only seventeen of the original
twenty-four attended a “post-intervention assessment,” and of these,
only nine returned a follow-up questionnaire.
Still the participants who did stick with yoga practice until the
end of the study reported having a positive experience, and some of
them continued to practice both yoga and meditation even after the
study had ended. The authors therefore make a bid for yoga as “an
efficacious and cost-effective addition to the curricula of music
schools that can supplement existing methods of coping with
performance anxiety.”[51] The first clause of this sentence is a sincere
call to action. The second clause presupposes that there are, in fact,
“existing methods of coping with performance anxiety” already in
place in music schools. Given that interest in MPA as a separate
disorder arose only in the 1990s and that shame and secrecy still
surround MPA, the idea that a majority of music schools provide
adequate supports for students suffering with MPA is questionable.
This makes it all the more important that musicians with MPA take it
upon themselves to find a modality that works for them to ameliorate
it—and, perhaps even more importantly, for parents of young
musicians to help guide their kids toward practices like yoga and
meditation. A suggestion here is the use of what the authors of the
third study nicknamed “minis”: very brief yoga stretches and poses
coupled with deep-breathing exercises to quiet the mind. As already
noted, early negative performance experiences as a young musician
in training can plant a noxious seed of anxiety that may perennially
bloom throughout a lifetime of music performance. Therefore one of
the most exciting prospects for yoga as an intervention is that yoga
could be woven into the training of young musicians as a virtual
inoculation against the most virulent strains of MPA.
Indeed, this is one of the conclusions reached by the authors of
a fourth study. Their purpose was to apply similar yoga intervention
methods as were used in the previous studies but this time to an
adolescent population procured from the Boston University
Tanglewood Institute (BUTI), a prestigious, six-week summer
program for advanced teen musicians. The goal was to investigate
whether both MPA and performance-related musculoskeletal
disorders (PRMDs) might be alleviated through yoga, specifically to
“prevent the early disruption and termination of musical careers.”[52]
The protocol for this study was much the same as for the
previous Tanglewood studies, just adapted for BUTI’s shorter
duration. And like the previous studies, participants evinced lower
MPA symptoms (both cognitive and somatic) than the control group.
Another finding was that teen participants seemed to genuinely enjoy
the yoga practice.
The authors of this final study are to be especially commended
for understanding the anguish that attends a musician’s struggle with
MPA—the pain that the very thing you love can flip to the dark side
and become a bringer of psychic torment—and that teen musicians
may be especially vulnerable hosts for early-onset MPA, robbing
them of the joy of music-making throughout their lives. Thus the
authors offer these hopeful concluding remarks: “starting a yoga
practice early and continuing to practice may help musicians prolong
their musical careers and take increased pleasure in their craft
throughout their lives.”[53]

EXPERIMENTAL STRATEGIES FOR MPA

In addition to the researched methods to alleviate MPA covered
here, there are a variety of other tactics that musicians may wish to
try. In order to wring the most benefit from them, it is helpful to bear
in mind two fundamental things we now know about anxiety
generally: (1) anxiety is a learned response, and (2) the order in
which we experience our physical and emotional reactions to
stressful situations occurs in reverse order of what most people
assume to be the case. Let us consider these characteristics more
closely.
Anxiety is a learned response to past trauma. We must have
first experienced trauma and have interpreted this experience as a
catastrophe in order to anticipate a repeat experience with dread—
which goes to the core of what anxiety really is (another reason why
zebras don’t get ulcers). As Sapolsky describes it, anxiety is not the
same thing as fear:

Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something

real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your
imagination running away with you. Much as with depression,
anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. . . . People prone
toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad
outcome.[54]

The second thing to know about anxiety (which should now be

apparent from reading this chapter) is that people respond to it in two
fundamental ways: emotionally and physically (subjectively and
objectively). It may seem that we experience these two basic
responses in a predictable, linear trajectory that goes something like
this: I feel nervous (cause) so my heart starts to pound (effect). But a
mind-blowing finding from scientists like Sapolsky is that this
trajectory actually plays out the other way around: we do not
experience increased heart rates because we feel nervous—we feel
nervous because our heartbeat increases. How can this be?
The boundaries of the emotional and the physical are porous,
their intersection bound up in a tangle of cause and effect, fooling us
into believing that they occur in reverse order. We now know that in
moments of fear, panic, or anxiety, the objective stress response of
the sympathetic nervous system first activates and then causes us to
experience the subjective emotion of nervousness. How might this
work? One answer involves timing. Recall that our bottom-up
response is primed to alert us instantaneously: in a race, automatic
(bottom-up) processing beats controlled (top-down) processing every
time.
In MPA, a trigger stimulates a response that is first physical and
then is interpreted as the feeling we call “nervousness.” In repeat
bouts of MPA, any number of triggers can stimulate the stress
response (the smell of bow rosin or the sound of applause, for
example) if those triggers were learned through connection to a past
traumatic performance experience. Once this learned response
becomes practiced, just the mere thought of an upcoming
performance can unleash the disturbing physical responses of
anxiety.
But if musicians can flip their understanding of cause and effect,
they might leverage to their advantage the time gap between the
physical responses and the emotional ones. One classic suggestion
in this regard comes from cognitive therapy, a self-intervention that
involves reframing a negative interpretation with a positive one. As I
described above, a musician might substitute excited as an alternate
term for nervous. The catch is to do this quickly before the demons
of doubt get there. And if you wonder how you might accomplish that
feat, well, we have the well-worn answer by now: practice. Just as
movement can be practiced, so can thoughts. This is CBT in action.
Regarding the other fundamental characteristic of anxiety (the
fact that it is learned), the answer is maddeningly simple: anxiety can
be unlearned. Yet while the answer is simple, the doing of it,
admittedly, is not. Nevertheless, unlearning does not appear
impossible. The following two interrelated strategies work by
targeting the intersection of the physical and emotional responses to
anxiety and by exploiting anxiety’s fundamental characteristics—its
acquisition and its timing—to instigate the sequence of unlearning.

Exposure Therapy and Stress Conditioning

Exposure therapy and stress conditioning are based on the

premise that people can unlearn their dual stress response through
habituation. The theory behind exposure therapy is that frequent
interaction with anxiety-producing events will lower the physical and
emotional responses to manageable levels. Similarly, there is some
evidence for the beneficial potential of what Sapolsky calls stress
conditioning as a therapy for anxiety. This involves intentionally and
regularly scheduling high-arousal situations so (as in exposure
therapy) the body eventually habituates itself to the release of those
stress hormones that cause the unsettling physical responses so
familiar to performers.
But an important component of this stress conditioning
hypothesis involves what happens after, not necessarily during, the
stressful event. Recall that much stress research is focused on the
time it takes to return to equilibrium, or homeostasis, after trauma.
Performers who schedule a stress-conditioning event will still
experience the hormonal jolt and the cascade of physical symptoms,
but how soon they return to a state of calm is key. Some studies of
parachute jumpers have shown that, with each successive
experience, over time the calming effect of the parasympathetic
nervous system immediately following the jump moves from hours to
minutes to seconds.[55]
One such study measured both the physical (objective) and the
emotional (subjective) responses of skydivers (divided into two
groups, “experienced” and “first-timers”) via three methods: cortisol
measures in saliva, self-ratings for the emotions of prejump anxiety,
and self-measures of postjump happiness. These were administered
at five different time stamps: two at prejump and three at postjump,
all at successive time intervals.[56]
 One aim of the study is to determine what the investigators call
“the shape of the hormonal response” at three key moments: ninety
minutes before the jump, at the jump, and after the jump. Another
aim was to investigate coordinated responsivity—that is, to see
whether subjects’ emotions about the activity had an effect on their
stress-response hormone levels. Among the findings, one was
expected: “First-time skydivers demonstrated increased cortisol
reactivity leading up to the jump, and slower recovery after landing
than experienced jumpers.”[57]
More interesting are the findings regarding the experienced
skydivers. Unlike previous studies that show marked decreases in
prejump anxiety among experienced jumpers (a vote in favor of
habituation, or why exposure therapy works), this team uncovered
the opposite: “Intriguingly, even after hundreds of jumps [the
experienced skydivers ] still showed increased subjective anxiety
and elevated cortisol leading up to the jump.” The investigators
therefore surmised that “habituation to a naturalistic stressor is
complex” because, while “experience alters emotional and
physiological arousal, [it] does not extinguish reactivity to an extreme
challenge such as skydiving.”[58]
For musicians who suffer from MPA, these findings are
enlightening. For one thing, they underscore that, while a goal of
amelioration is feasible, complete eradication of pre-performance
anxiety is unrealistic. After all, strategies to deal with anxiety
generally do not involve the word cure.
A second finding from this study is equally inspiring for
performers: jumpers who were most elated after completing the thrill
of skydiving also demonstrated a faster decrease in cortisol after the
jump; the higher the happiness quotient, the faster the return to
homeostasis. One lesson we might draw from this is that musicians
who pursue therapy for MPA might want to focus just as much
attention on mitigating what Kenny calls “post-event rumination” as
on pre-performance dread. For a musician who suffers from MPA, it
is just as acceptable to celebrate a performance as simply over as it
is to celebrate its success. For MPA sufferers, these two parameters
could be one and the same.
 And lest it seem as if skydiving and public performance have
little in common, researchers note that the “extreme” activity of
skydiving produces a “natural high” that is so pleasurable, it “shows
similarities with addictive behaviors.”[59] Might it be a helpful mind
game for MPA sufferers to channel John Cougar Mellencamp
(“Sometimes love don’t feel like it should . . . Make it hurt so good”),
reframing public performance as a sweet addiction? Who knows. But
given that the jury is still out on definitive therapies for MPA, even
this thought experiment might be worth a try.

Resilience Training

What exposure therapy and stress conditioning aim to build is

resilience. This trait caught the attention of psychology researchers
in the 1970s who were studying children growing up in extremely
impoverished circumstances. Researchers were surprised to learn
that, although the majority of these disadvantaged kids grew into
adults with crushing social and mental health problems, about one-
third did not; this durable cohort not only survived their difficult
childhood but grew into competent, caring adults.
Research into the causes and characteristics of resilience
continued, greatly nourished by the positive psychology movement in
the 1990s, which inverted psychology’s focus to what causes people
to thrive rather than what causes them to fail.[60] And perennially
circling the findings of positive psychology are questions of
inculcation and implementation: how might we instill the skills of
reframing a problem or the qualities of grit? And once installed, will
they take root on their own and become techniques that people can
deploy to better their lives?
With the advent of neuroscience and the twin phenomena of
neurogenesis and neural plasticity, these questions have taken on
greater urgency while simultaneously vindicating the claims of CBT.
Rather than accepting resilience as a fixed trait, researchers are
beginning to find that resilience, like Dweck’s growth mindset, can be
taught, learned, and nurtured through practice. And even though
researchers acknowledge that “the psychobiology of building
resilience is complicated” because it “likely involves multiple
behavioral, social, physical-health, and cognitive strategies that work
synergistically or additively with one another,” the evidence is that it
can be done.[61]
For musicians, exposure therapy, stress conditioning, and
resilience training all hold the potential to calm the dread of future
performances, shorten anxiety’s duration, and hasten the return to a
state of equilibrium following a performance. If this is true, then
resilience training and its ilk are strategies that the mindful musician
should consider not only as an antidote to MPA but more broadly as
a defense against the rigors of the performing life.

Power Posing

What is power posing? Is it the scientific finding that using

strong body positions inculcates feelings of power? Or is it a pop-
psychology fad? The tale of power posing follows a strikingly similar
plotline to that of the Mozart effect. In the tale of power posing, a
seemingly credible scientific study got a massive boost from Oprah,
a TED Talk, and a best-selling book because its lead researcher
spoke in messianic terms about delivering this news for the
empowerment of the people.[62] But the study’s high profile (and,
some say, the female gender and success of its promoter, Amy
Cuddy) fatally intersected with psychology’s reproducibility crisis and
was outed in the academic press for shoddy research protocols and
discredited as pseudoscience—but not before Cuddy became rich
and famous by it. Unlike the saga of the Mozart effect, whose
authors disavowed the hype from the get-go (yet did not have the
megaphone of digital media with which to deny it), Cuddy
promulgated her theories using the most visible, popular, powerful,
and financially rewarding platforms of the day. For all this, she was
pilloried in the digital court of online science blogs.[63]
But just as the Mozart effect retained its core finding (listening to
music makes you happy so you perform better), after time passed
and the dust had settled, power posing (if not Cuddy herself) rose
from the ashes as a more somber version of its former self and
sporting a new name, postural feedback effect, while retaining the
essential elements of its original hypothesis.[64] Strong and assertive
stances make people feel not only strong and autonomous but, even
more importantly, happy.
What performing musicians need to know about power posing
are two things. First, a key criticism of Cuddy’s original study
involves a fundamental debate in science over quantitative versus
qualitative data, or that which can be measured versus what people
report they feel. Ardent materialists in science will never accept
qualitative data as “real” because, they say, it cannot be measured
(and this is the attitude undergirding the equally inflexible opinion
that psychology as a whole is not a real science).[65]
Second, while Cuddy’s initial and unilateral claims that power
posing can rock your life may have been hyperbolic, there are many
studies on the postural feedback effect (which Cuddy maintains in an
online database) that display an array of results: some weak, some
average, and some quite promising.[66]
So what does it all mean for the performing artist? The veracity
of the postural feedback effect probably depends mightily upon the
context. If you lead the life of an introverted knowledge worker with
little human interaction and almost no call to publicly present your
work, the benefits of power posing are likely nil. If, however, you are
a performance artist whose livelihood depends upon delivering
reliably self-assured music-making, power posing may indeed be a
life-changer.

Meditation

One study known to date to test meditation alone as a strategy

for MPA found some positive effects among a group of student
musicians who pursued an eight-week course of meditation classes,
as opposed to a control group who did not. In addition, the
meditation group reported “moments of relaxed pleasure” even in the
period immediately before public performances.[67]

Holistic Word Cues

 Some research shows that one-word, or “holistic,” cues may act
as condensed reminders to help prevent choking in trained
practitioners.[68] It is important to note that a one-word cue (as
distinguished from an entire sentence of technical instructions)
seems to be regarded by the brain as a picture, and therefore the
cue does not get tracked into the left prefrontal cortex, the brain
region responsible for processing verbal information. Imagine, as a
preventative for choking, a cue word such as loose scrawled on a
card in a nonthreatening ink of inspirational blue and posted on your
dressing-room door. But beware of posting explicit directions, for
example, “Keep your jaw loose, your palate raised, and your throat
open.” According to explicit monitoring theory and the constrained
action hypothesis, these admonitions are processed so slowly by the
brain that they could end up choking off the best-laid plans.

“Avoid Avoiding”

Two succinct admonitions from Daniel Wegner may be helpful:

“Avoid avoiding” and “Orchestrate your circumstances for
success.”[69] In other words, respect the medium (performance) by
not avoiding pre-performance jitters; rather, embrace the fear! To
orchestrate your circumstances for success means to allot the
necessary time for mental preparation. This may sound simple
enough for experienced performers, but it must be taught to young
students and their parents. Here is my illustration of that point.
In my early years of teaching, I noticed that my inexperienced
recitalists would do exactly the opposite of avoiding avoiding in just
about any way one could imagine, from last-minute shopping to a
boisterous lunch with friends to a late-afternoon visit to the nail salon
on the day of their recital. And it was not just my students who did
not orchestrate their circumstances well. Their relatives arrived on
the day of the big event, often expecting to spend preconcert social
time with their son or daughter. At worst, they treated it like a beauty
pageant, bar mitzvah, or wedding party.
One parent hauled my soprano student off to the beauty parlor
for an “updo” of her hair, a procedure that took over three hours to
complete (and two cans of hairspray to cement). The resultant
contraption, though beautiful, rode like a five-pound turban atop her
head, with every movement a source of terror that the thing would
unravel and tumble out into a mess of tresses. Bowing was out of the
question.
I recall a couple who arrived the afternoon of my student’s
recital with two younger siblings in tow, depositing them with my
student for some quality one-on-one time while they decamped to
the golf club for an afternoon of adult play. I only learned of the
babysitting gig after the performance, during which I had observed
my student acting uncharacteristically flustered and making
inexplicable mistakes.
In an effort to help everyone orchestrate their circumstances for
success, I wrote a generic “Letter to Friends and Family,” posted it
on my studio’s website, and now require all first-time recitalists to
keep the basic template but rewrite it in their own words and share it
their friends and family.

Orchestrating Circumstances for Success:

Letter to Family and Friends

Note: Italicized elements are changeable.

Dear Loved One,

Thank you for your support on this very important day! (Add a lot
more thanks here, such as “Thank you for paying for my tuition!”) I
am excited/nervous about my performance, so I’d like to pass on
some information about how you can help me be successful. First,
please remember that this performance is a requirement for my
degree/my studio and I must pass it in order to earn my
credentials/grade/credit/admittance to graduation.
Second, a solo performance is both a mental and physical effort.
It requires my complete concentration. Therefore, I must do
everything possible to clear my mind of unnecessary distractions and
activities and must spend much of the time on the day before and all
of the time on the day of my performance in quiet, by myself. I will be
happy to greet you briefly when you arrive, but I cannot do any of the
following: (edit as necessary; however, do not take for granted what
your people know or don’t know. All examples are stories from real
life!)

talk/chat/visit/catch up
go on an extensive shopping trip with you
make restaurant reservations for my family
get my hair done
get my nails done
take my younger siblings off your hands for some one-on-
one time
other items can be added here

I know you will be proud of me on this day and will want to

record it for history. However, please understand that if you
photograph or video-record me as I am performing, it may destroy
my concentration, and the project for which I have worked so hard
may suffer. Therefore I ask you, please do not

videotape me. Knowing you would want me to, I have

arranged to have that done by a professional.
take any photos of me during my performance, whether
flash or nonflash. If you wish to photograph me, you may do so
at the very end, while I take my final bow. I will also happily pose
for you after my concert/recital/performance is over.

STORIES OF MPA
Finally, a commonsense and rather obvious treatment for MPA is the
sharing of stories by seasoned musicians and teachers. Kenny
devotes an entire book chapter to the voices of professional
orchestral musicians, wisely noting that, beyond the research studies
and statistical analyses, the collective wisdom of experienced
musicians offers its own, unique insight into coping with MPA. What
follows here are yet more accounts of coping with the stress of
performance from experienced musicians, loosely organized under
common themes that attend MPA.

Importance of Venue and Evaluative Threat

As Kenny notes, MPA “is usually more severe in settings

involving high ego investment and evaluative threat (audience) and
fear of failure.”[70] The following three quotes reflect these common
anxieties:

“My level of performance anxiety is usually in direct proportion to

the importance I place on the event. If I believe it really doesn’t
matter, I will likely be pretty relaxed. But if I believe it’s a ‘do or
die’ event, the probability for anxiety is much higher.”—Rod
Gilfry, baritone[71]

“I had a teacher who once said that only stupid people never get
nervous. In other words, ignorance is bliss. I believe there is
some truth to that. I think that most of us suffer from
performance anxiety because we are overly concerned about
what others will think of us and our ability.”—Stephen Pierce,
pianist[72]

“I decided to pursue music because I loved it, but for introverted

‘little me’ the idea of performing was not in the bargain. A month
before my junior recital, I was so jaundiced from anxiety and
lack of sleep that my piano professor sent me to the doctor for
tranquilizers. The turning point came during my recital when I
distinctly realized that no one was going to shoot me!—I can’t
believe that those thoughts actually formed in my head, that on
some level, I was anticipating a life-and-death situation! I
eventually enjoyed a rich and fulfilling performing career. If I
could do it, anyone can.”—Antoinette Perry, pianist[73]

An Antidote to Perfectionism
 Dianna Kenny also devotes a considerable amount of her book
to perusing the etiology of performance anxiety as rooted in
traumatic childhood performance or training experiences. She
cautions both parents and teachers of musically gifted children to be
especially aware of planting the toxic seeds of MPA by enforcing
unrealistic standards of perfection. Percussionist Peter Erskine
recounts this story in his autobiography, which illustrates the point:

Professor George Gaber would prove to be a lifelong friend, a

man whose wisdom, advice and love for music has
accompanied me every day, and in most every circumstance,
musical or otherwise. . . . He also showed me perspective, and
this during our first lesson at band camp in Kentucky, my
parents in attendance.
Professor Gaber, intuiting and clearly sensing my post–jazz
camp trauma and inherent insecurity, instructed me to play a
snare drum étude on the practice pad, and to be sure not to play
any of it correctly—to do otherwise would result in his walking
over to the pad and hitting me with a drumstick. “Excuse me?” I
asked. “You heard me,” he answered, “I want you to play that
piece of music, but if you play any of it correctly, or as written,
you’re going to get hit with a drumstick. Hard. Now play it.” I
glanced over at my mother, and she had a puzzled (if not
horrified) look on her face, as if to say, “Who is this madman?”
But I did as instructed, and played the snare drum étude on the
practice pad, playing the notes upside down and completely out
of rhythm, rendering that piece of music unrecognizable. When I
felt that I had done this long enough, I stopped, and Gaber then
took a satisfied puff on his cigar, said, “Good,” and continued,
“Now, I want you to go over to that window, look outside, and tell
me what you see.” I followed these instructions, and he
prompted me while I was at the window: “Is the sun still shining?
Are there clouds up in the sky? The trees are still there, and it
seems like the earth is still spinning, right?”
My mother was smiling now, getting the point of where
Professor Gaber was going. “Now, come back to the practice
pad.” I did as he instructed. “You just played that snare drum
 piece as badly as it will ever be played. In fact, it could not be
played any worse than how you played it. And yet, what
happened? Absolutely nothing. Now, let’s begin.”
Now, if THAT’S not a life lesson then I don’t know what is. In
other words: it’s okay to make mistakes. And by knowing this
and acknowledging this, we remove the bogeyman who is
always lurking around the corner of any difficult musical
passage. That and practicing.[74]

Embody the Fear

Guitarist William Kanengiser says he has learned to “let the fear

flow!” from the work of body mapping pioneer Barbara Conable.
According to Conable, performers should

embody the fear. . . . Any attempt to not feel the fear splits the
performer psychically into two persons, the feeler and the
repressor. It is the splitting, not the fear, that limits capability.
Worse, performers will reduce their body awareness in an
attempt to reduce their fear. . . . It is the attempt not to feel
rather than the feeling that impairs performance.[75]

Kanengiser adds,

One of my favorite approaches to the onset of performance

anxiety comes from Spanish guitar virtuoso Pepe Romero, my
long-time teacher and friend. Pepe once commented in his
heavily perfumed Andalusian accent: “Do you know the feeling
you get backstage, right before you go out? The feeling that you
have butterflies in your stomach, that your knees shake so much
that you can hardly stand, and that you feel like you’re about to
throw up?? I LOVE that!! It’s because we’re like a rechargeable
battery: those sensations tell us that energy is flowing into our
bodies, energy that we need to give to the music and to the
audience. So, I don’t fight those feelings, I let them flow right
into me, and when I step on stage, I let them flow out to the
public so that they become energized too!”[76]
Deliberate Practice Redux

Coping strategies noted throughout the expertise studies

literature include the importance of being prepared. Recall that the
number one anxiety producer among students in Kenny’s study was
inadequate preparation, but it was the number three ranked stressor
among adult musicians. We may deduce several lessons from these
results. First, the gap between rankings suggests that students (at
least the ones in this study) had not yet developed sturdy practice
habits. This gap further suggests that, as musicians progress from
student to professional, they eventually learn the critical importance
of practice. In fact, without practice, becoming a full-fledged
professional probably will not happen:

“In reviewing the times in my career that performance anxiety

has compromised my performances—even to the point of
crashing and burning onstage—I finally concluded that every
failure was caused, in one way or another, by lack of
preparation, in a perfect storm of procrastination and
perfectionism. When these two personality traits conspired, they
kept me from even starting some projects, with the
rationalization ‘I want to prepare perfectly, but I don’t have
enough time today, so I will start when I have more time.’ With
gathering success, I also believed more and more that I could
rely on my ‘talent’ instead of hard work. These experiences have
shown me that thorough preparation is my best protection
against performance anxiety. When I am thoroughly prepared, I
know that even if I make a musical or vocal mistake, I can find
my way back to an optimal performance.”[77]

The simple truth and power of deliberate practice also helps

explain why young musicians’ initial zeal can peter out when faced
with the work of practice. Enthusiasm can power this work, but on its
own, enthusiasm is probably only enough to sustain music-making
as a hobby. And just in case a reminder is needed, as already noted
throughout the preceding chapters, not just any practice will do:
practice that is organized, regular, and designed to be effortful—
Anderson’s deliberate practice—has proven to be the most effective
type of practice.

Routines and Rituals

Many performers find peace in so-called ritualized behaviors,

such as wearing special jewelry, saying prayers, or reciting mantras
—ditto certain pre-performance rituals or routines, such as the
commonsense practice of rehearsing in or even just visiting the
performance space:

“For me, the use of reinforcing mantras (e.g., ‘I can do this!’),

performance scripts, visualization techniques, and performance
simulation (recording myself frequently and playing for others
regularly), have been the most helpful to me.”—Stephen Pierce,
pianist[78]

“Regardless of the event, it helps me to repeat the mantra: ‘I will

do the best I can with what I’ve got, in the situation I’m in. And
that’s enough.’”—Rod Gilfry, baritone[79]

Developing positive self-talk in order to remove one’s self as the

center of attention and judgment and placing the shared experience
of the music at the center of everyone’s attention can be very
liberating:

“I have learned that anxiety can be diminished by imagining a

movement outwards from me to the audience (giving, loving
them, and the music) rather than inwards from the audience to
me (them judging me).”—Antoinette Perry, pianist[80]

A technique similar to Perry’s is to cultivate a sense of

appreciation for the venue. After all, we musicians request—nay,
expect—every person in the audience to give us their undivided
attention. In popular music, the audience may be invited to join in by
dancing, for example, but at a classical music concert, the audience
is expected to remain seated, mute, and rapt throughout the entire
performance. A chant of gratitude, whispered to oneself while taking
the initial bow, can work to ward off the curse of performance anxiety.
But more importantly, it serves as both a reminder and an invocation
of what a live performance is: a shared space where audience and
performer agree to intersect and fix all of their attention on the work
of the omnipresent third party in this collective: the composer.

“Deliberate Calm”

Even though, as noted earlier, MPA can afflict anyone

regardless of musical genre, age, gender, years of experience, or
level of technical mastery, the type of performance anxiety, or
“flavor”—panic or choking—is directly proportional to the degree of
training. Total inexperience results in outright panic, so as already
noted, the simple answer to curing panic is training. Airline pilots
train to such an extent that they practice what they call “deliberate
calm.” The story of Captain C. B. “Sully” Sullenberger’s management
of deliberate calm is a case in point.
On January 15, 2009, just two minutes after US Airways flight
1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport, it hit a flock of Canadian
geese. Many of these big birds were sucked up into the engines,
immediately blowing the engines out (and killing the unfortunate
birds). After alerting the control tower, Sullenberger and copilot
Skiles first attempted to return to LaGuardia, then decided to try a
nearby airport in New Jersey. However, Sullenberger quickly
determined that was not possible and announced his intention to
ditch the plane in the Hudson River. The flight ended there, only six
minutes after takeoff, and the lives of all 155 people onboard were
saved. In the many interviews following the incident, Captain
Sullenberger repeatedly named education and training as the reason
he did not succumb to panic:

One way of looking at this might be that, for 42 years, I’ve been
making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience:
education and training. And on January 15th, the balance was
sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.[81]
 Did Captain Sullenberger log his ten thousand hours? Yes, and
then some: at the time of the birdstrike, he had logged 19,663 hours
of pilot experience to destinations across North America, Europe,
and South America.[82]

The Upside of Quitting

The topic of this chapter—performance and performance

anxiety—brings us to the nexus of music-making and mental health,
which requires confronting the downside of trying too hard, or what
psychologists call nonproductive persistence.[83]
Since the advent of the positive psychology movement, the
goals of happiness and well-being—that is, thriving at life and not
merely surviving it—have been at the forefront of much
psychological research, reviving several perennial and ultimately
unremarkable assumptions: the more happiness in one’s life, the
more well-being, so identifying the source of one’s happiness is a
worthwhile pursuit. Continuing this line of reasoning, an assumed
source of happiness is the development of one’s strengths (or, in
college-application speak, “passions”). But according to
psychologists Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz,

positive psychologists have recognized that the deficiency of a

strength or virtue can harm well-being and performance, but
they have paid little attention to understanding when, why, and
how the excess of a strength or virtue can harm well-being and
performance.[84]

Let us suppose that all accomplished musicians believe that

their musical skill is one of their greatest strengths. Can they all
therefore state that their musical skill is one of their greatest joys?
The answer may not necessarily depend upon the intrinsic worth of
one’s skill but upon the heights one attempts with it.
Grant and Schwartz observe that “all positive traits, states, and
experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh
their benefits” and calculate those costs by applying previous
research to the following luminaries in the pantheon of human
virtues: wisdom, knowledge, courage, humanity, love, justice,
temperance, and transcendence. They report the discovery of “clear
evidence” for the high cost to human well-being of overweening
strengths in a category that concerns us here: wisdom and
knowledge, taken together.[85] People who value these twin virtues,
they observe, “tend to seek out complex jobs, which provide
opportunities for learning, challenges, skill development, and
growth.” But contrary to the popular notion that rigorous challenges
always nourish health and vigor, jobs that feature high complexity
can also generate high stress, disillusionment, and burnout. They
surmise that, for a majority of people, well-being is highest in jobs
that feature only moderate, not high, levels of complexity: a just-right
Goldilocks ratio of challenge to contentment.
Similarly, by the foundational assertions of positive psychology,
the perfect ratio of persistence to attainability begets a fulfilled life of
purpose—provided that the seeker is capable of reaching his goals.
But what happens when he is not, for various reasons, capable?
What should such a person do when pressing on exceeds his
capacity for inspiration and meaning and morphs instead into a soul-
crushing marathon? A burgeoning line of research thus parries the
assumptions of positive psychology by investigating the high cost to
human health and well-being of maladaptive persistence, that is,
persevering despite clear evidence that doing so is causing harm.
One study not only shows harm to psychological health but also
demonstrates an alarming rise in biological “systemic inflammation”
in chronic “persisters” that, if untreated, could heighten the risk for
diseases such as diabetes, osteoporosis, and atherosclerosis.[86]
One sensible solution to the problem of maladaptive persistence
is starkly simple: just quit. Research on the upside of quitting has
shown that

people who can disengage from unattainable goals enjoy better

well-being, have more normative patterns of cortisol secretion,
and experience fewer symptoms of everyday illness than do
people who have difficulty disengaging from unattainable goals.
[87]
 Other benefits to quitting include freed-up resources, like time
and money, that can be reinvested in other pursuits. Quitting is
probably not ever easy or simple; it appears especially difficult for
people who are highly invested in their vocation. Yet one study
(which uses the gentle euphemism withdrawal instead of quitting)
finds that quitting is especially beneficial to those who have the
hardest time doing so. The heavier the chains, the greater the sense
of relief once they are removed.[88]
If the effects of extreme MPA are ruinous enough make musical
goals unattainable, musicians should give themselves permission to
at least explore the option of disengaging from those goals. The
upside of quitting professional music performance in favor of the joy
of avocational music-making may mean the difference between
overall health and well-being versus a life filled with dread and
vulnerabilities to the plethora of physical symptoms that Sapolsky’s
zebras distinctly do not get.

GOOD LUCK—AND BREAK A LEG!

Research in cognitive science will continue to illuminate the peculiar
darkness of music performance anxiety, hopefully replacing such
talismans as garlic and the reversed good-luck wishes of “Break a
leg!” with proven strategies to ameliorate it. The good news is that
what we can look forward to on this front comes in the twin
phenomena of neurogenesis and neural plasticity. It is not a fantasy
to claim that healthy brains can learn new habits of mind, retraining
negative responses to music performance from a torrent of anxiety to
at least a shot at a manageable onrush of happy excitement.

NOTES
1. Dianna Kenny, The Psychology of Music Performance Anxiety
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85–107.
2. Ibid., 87.
3. Ibid., 12.
4. Open Science Collaboration, “Estimating the Reproducibility of
Psychological Science,” Science 349, no. 6251 (2015): aac4716.
5. Kenny, Psychology, 86–87.
6. Dianna Kenny, “Identifying Cut-Off Scores for Clinical Purposes for
the Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory (K-MPAI) in a
Population of Professional Orchestral Musicians in Australia,” Polish
Psychological Bulletin (2015): 3.
7. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-V (Arlington, VA: American
Psychiatric Publishing, 2013),
8. Kenny, Psychology, 60.
9. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual, section 300.23 (F40.10).
10. Kenny, Psychology, 61.
11. Ibid., 91–93.
12. Ibid., 91.
13. Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (New York: W. H.
Freeman, 1994), 20–23.
14. Ibid., 30–32. Sapolsky notes that the terms noradrenaline and
adrenaline (with which many Americans may be familiar) are actually
the British terms for epinephrine and norepinephrine (22).
15. Ibid., 48.
16. Tânia Lisboa, Alexander P. Demos, and Roger Chaffin, “Training
Thought and Action for Virtuoso Performance,” Musicae Scientiae
22, no. 4 (2018): 519–38.
17. Kenny, Psychology, 9.
18. Stephen M. Weiss and Arthur S. Reber, “Curing the Dreaded
“Steve Blass Disease,” Journal of Sport Psychology in Action 3, no.
3 (2012): 171–81.
19. M. S. DeCaro, R. D. Thomas, N. B. Albert, and S. L. Beilock,
“Choking under Pressure: Multiple Routes to Skill Failure,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology 140, no. 3 (2011): 390–406,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023466.
20. R. S. W. Masters, “Theoretical Aspects of Implicit Learning in
Sport,” International Journal of Sport Psychology 31 (2000): 530–41.
21. Peter Gröpel and Christopher Mesagno, “Choking Interventions
in Sports: A Systematic Review,” International Review of Sport and
Exercise Psychology 22 (2017),
doi:10.1080/1750984X.2017.1408134.
22. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan,
1964), 176.
23. Ibid., 173.
24. Barbara Gail Montero, “Is Monitoring One’s Actions Causally
Relevant to Choking under Pressure?” Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 2 (2015): 393.
25. Daniel M. Wegner, “How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst
Thing for Any Occasion,” Science Magazine 325, no. 5936 (2009):
48–50.
26. Daniel M. Wegner and David J. Schneider, “The White Bear
Story,” Psychological Inquiry 14, nos. 3–4 (2003): 326–29,
doi:10.1207/s15327965pli1403&4_24.
27. Daniel M. Wegner, “Ironic Processes of Mental Control,”
Psychological Review 101, no. 1 (1994): 34–52.
28. See, for example, Hearts Need Art, www.heartsneedart.org/.
29. From Don Greene, presentation on performance anxiety, USC
Thornton School of Music, February 2016. See also Don Greene and
Melinda Marshall, Fight Your Fear and Win: Seven Skills for
Performing Your Best under Pressure (New York: Broadway Books,
2001).
30. Kenny, Psychology, 167.
31. See Dianna Kenny, “Systematic Review of Treatments for Music
Performance Anxiety,” Anxiety Stress & Coping 18, no. 3 (2005):
183–208; Kenny, Psychology, 167–231; and Ariadna Ortiz Brugués,
Music Performance Anxiety: A Comprehensive Update of the
Literature (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2019).
32. See Kenny, Psychology, 181.
33. Ariadna Ortiz Brugués, “Music Performance Anxiety—Part 2: A
Review of Treatment Options,” Medical Problems of Performing
Artists 26, no. 3 (2011): 164–71.
34. Ibid., 168.
35. Elizabeth R. Valentine, David F. P. Fitzgerald, Tessa L. Gorton,
Jennifer A. Hudson, and Elizabeth R. C. Symonds, “The Effect of
Lessons in the Alexander Technique on Music Performance in High
and Low Stress Situations,” Psychology of Music 23, no. 2 (1995):
129.
36. American Society for the Alexander Technique, “The Alexander
Technique,” 2019, www.amsatonline.org/aws/AMSAT/pt/sp/what_is.
37. Marisa De Silva, “How Alexander Technique May Mitigate Music
Performance Anxiety,” unpublished research paper, December 2018,
www.marisadesilva.com.
38. Valentine et al., “Effect of Lessons,” 129.
39. Kenny, Psychology, 198.
40. Valentine et al., “Effect of Lessons,” 138.
41. Ibid., 129.
42. Ibid., 139.
43. De Silva, “How Alexander Technique May Mitigate.”
44. Valentine et al., “Effect of Lessons,” 138.
45. Janna Delgado, “Meditation in Motion,” Kripalu, 2019,
https://kripalu.org/resources/meditation-motion.
46. Sat Bir S. Khalsa and Stephen Cope, “Effects of a Yoga Lifestyle
Intervention on Performance-Related Characteristics of Musicians: A
Preliminary Study,” Medical Science Monitor 12, no. 8 (2006):
CR325–31; Sat Bir S. Khalsa, Stephanie M. Shorter, Stephen Cope,
Grace Wyshak, and Elyse Sklar, “Yoga Ameliorates Performance
Anxiety and Mood Disturbance in Young Professional
Musicians,” Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 34, no. 4
(2009): 279; Judith R. S. Stern, Sat Bir S. Khalsa, and Stefan G.
Hofmann, “A Yoga Intervention for Music Performance Anxiety in
Conservatory Students,” Medical Problems of Performing Artists 27,
no. 3 (2012): 123; and S. B. Khalsa, Bethany Butzer, Stephanie M.
Shorter, Kristen M. Reinhardt, and Stephen Cope, “Yoga Reduces
Performance Anxiety in Adolescent Musicians,” Alternative
Therapies in Health and Medicine 19, no. 2 (2013): 34–45.
47. Khalsa and Cope, “Effects of a Yoga Lifestyle,” CR329.
48. Ibid., CR328.
49. Khalsa et al., “Yoga Ameliorates Performance Anxiety and
Mood,” 286.
50. Stern, Khalsa, and Hofmann, “A Yoga Intervention,” 127.
51. Ibid., 127–28.
52. Khalsa, Butzer, Shorter, Reinhardt, and Cope, “Yoga Reduces
Performance Anxiety,” 36.
53. Ibid., 44.
54. Sapolsky, Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, 319.
55. Ibid., 413.
56. Vanessa J. Meyer, Yoojin Lee, Christian Böttger, Uwe
Leonbacher, Amber L. Allison, and Elizabeth A. Shirtcliff,
“Experience, Cortisol Reactivity, and the Coordination of Emotional
Responses to Skydiving,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, art.
138 (2015): 1–8.
57. Ibid., 5.
58. Ibid., 5–6.
59. Ibid., 6.
60. Maria Konnikova, “How People Learn to Become Resilient,” New
Yorker, February 11, 2016.
61. Golnaz Tabibnia and Dan Radecki, “Resilience Training That Can
Change the Brain,” Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and
Research 70, no. 1 (2018): 77–78.
62. Dana R. Carney, Amy J. C. Cuddy, and Andy J. Yap, “Power
Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and
Risk Tolerance,” Psychological Science 21, no. 10 (2010): 1363–68.
63. Susan Dominus, “When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy,”
New York Times, October 18, 2017,
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolution-came-
for-amy-cuddy.html. See also Daniel Engber, “The Trials of Amy
Cuddy: A Feminist Psychologist Was Dragged through the Mud for
Her Mistakes, Did She Deserve It?” Slate, October 19, 2017,
https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/did-power-posing-guru-amy-
cuddy-deserve-her-public-shaming.html.
64. A. J. Cuddy, S. J. Schultz, and N. E. Fosse, “P-Curving a More
Comprehensive Body of Research on Postural Feedback Reveals
Clear Evidential Value for Power-Posing Effects: Reply to Simmons
and Simonsohn (2017),” Psychological Science 29, no. 4 (2018):
656–66.
65. See Timothy D. Wilson, “Stop Bullying the ‘Soft’ Sciences,” Los
Angeles Times, July 12, 2012, www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-
2012-jul-12-la-oe-wilson-social-sciences-20120712-story.html.
66. David Biello, “Inside the Debate about Power Posing: A Q & A
with Amy Cuddy,” Ted.Com, February 22, 2017,
https://ideas.ted.com/inside-the-debate-about-power-posing-a-q-a-
with-amy-cuddy/.
67. Joanne C. Chang, Elizabeth Midlarsky, and Peter Lin, “Effects of
Meditation on Musical Performance Anxiety,” Medical Problems of
Performing Artists 18, no. 3 (2003): 126–30.
68. Daniel F. Gucciardi and James A. Dimmock, “Choking under
Pressure in Sensorimotor Skills: Conscious Processing or Depleted
Attentional Resources?” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 9, no. 1
(2008): 45–59.
69. Wegner, “How to Think,” 50.
70. Kenny, Psychology, 61.
71. Thornton Musicians’ Wellness Committee, “Overcoming
Performance Anxiety,” University of Southern California Thornton
School of Music, March 30, 2016.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Peter Erskine, No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of
Weather Report (Fuzzy Music, 2013), 36–37.
75. Barbara Conable and William Conable, How to Learn the
Alexander Technique: A Manual for Students (Portland, OR: Andover
Press, 1995), 115.
76. Thornton Musicians’ Wellness Committee, “Overcoming
Performance Anxiety.”
77. Rod Gilfrey, personal e-mail correspondence.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Katie Couric, “Capt. Sully Worried about Airline Industry,” CBS,
February 10, 2009, www.cbsnews.com/news/capt-sully-worried-
about-airline-industry/.
82. Alex Altman, “Chesley B. Sullenberger III,” Time, January 16,
2009, www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1872247,00.html.
83. Dean B. McFarlin, Roy F. Baumeister, and Jim Blascovich, “On
Knowing When to Quit: Task Failure, Self-Esteem, Advice, and
Nonproductive Persistence,” Journal of Personality 52, no. 2 (1984):
138–55.
84. Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz, “Too Much of a Good Thing:
The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U,” Perspectives on
Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (2011): 62 (emphasis mine).
85. Ibid., 63.
86. Gregory E. Miller and Carsten Wrosch, “You’ve Gotta Know
When to Fold ’Em: Goal Disengagement and Systemic Inflammation
in Adolescence,” Psychological Science 18, no. 9 (2007): 776.
87. Ibid., 773.
88. Ibid., 774.
 Chapter 7
The Digital Brain
By many measures, the effects of the aptly named digital
revolution and the information age have been not merely analogous
to the effects of such breakthrough inventions as the printing press,
the microscope, the automobile, the television, and the birth control
pill but have delivered a cultural wallop possibly equal in force to all
of those innovations combined. The magnitude of this effect begins
with the sheer reach of digital media via the World Wide Web,
reflected in such mind-numbing statistics as international Internet
use (currently more than 3.7 billion humans regularly access it) and
the number of daily Internet searches (Google alone processes 3.5
billion searches per day).[1] Figure 7.1 is a fascinating snapshot of
“what happens in an Internet minute.”[2]
Digital Activities in an “Internet Minute.”

What might this glut of information be doing to our brains? That

is exactly the question that author Nicholas Carr set out to
investigate, first in his provocative landmark essay “Is Google
Making Us Stupid?” and then in his bestselling book (a finalist for the
2011 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction), The Shallows: What the Internet Is
Doing to Our Brains. Implicit in both of Carr’s titles is one of the
central conclusions he reached: the way we gather information from
the Web has not just changed the way we read; it has changed the
way we think.
The cornucopia of information now available on the Internet at
the click of a mouse is unprecedented in human history, its
embedded treasures unquestionably rich. But this bounty comes at a
price, for when information exceeds the brain’s cognitive load
capacity (the limit of our short-term memory), our ability to draw
critical connections between new information and the things we
already know—the dynamic core of learning called constructive
memory—disintegrates. Instead of diving deep into our brains, in
Carr’s description, we “zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet
Ski.”[3]
The brain’s amazing ability to remodel its operating systems in
response to a stimulus is due to its incredibly plastic nature. But the
brain has never before encountered the vast and relentless stimuli of
digital media; hence there is growing concern that the remodeling of
the human mind is proceeding at a scale and pace unique in human
experience, regardless if one is a so-called digital native (born into
the digital age) or a digital immigrant (a migrant to the digital age).[4]
Understanding the cognitive implications of technology use is
essential for both natives and immigrants, for when it comes to the
digital revolution, all perspectives are needed. In the words of Sherry
Turkle, psychologist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Initiative on Technology and Self, “because we grew up
with the Net, we assume that the Net is grown up. We tend to see
what we have now as the technology in its maturity. But in fact, we
are in early days.”[5]
While there are many differing opinions on technology’s merits
and pitfalls, there is broad agreement on one key point: the
technological revolution (often referred to in catastrophic
meteorological terms as a “flood” or “hurricane”) is over. Although
some might yearn for a return to a former, less digitally
interconnected era, this desire is simply not realistic: we live in a
digital age, and technology is here to stay. Nevertheless, just
because the floodwaters of this particular revolution have subsided,
we need not be complacent about what has washed up on our
collective shores. At the same time, while we are yet in the relatively
early days of the digital age, we are also, as Turkle advises, “well
past the time to take the measure of what the costs are.”[6] Let us
begin taking those measures for musicians with the good news.

DIGITAL HEAVEN
On the upside, human endeavors as disparate as medicine,
marketing, and music have all been enhanced by the ability of their
practitioners to harness the riches of the information age.
For musicians, the once-cumbersome and expensive aspects of
self-management have all been utterly transformed by digital media.
Tasks like producing recordings, printing letterhead and business
cards, distributing publicity photos, and networking with other
professionals can all be accomplished in record time and with
polished results on the slimmest of budgets. For the international
musician, smartphone applications provide instant access to online
dictionaries, translations, currency converters, and GPS navigation
systems. On any continent, we can stay connected with agents,
colleagues, and coaches around the clock if we want, and indeed
such connection is now practically expected.
For music teachers, the benefits experienced through the use of
new technology are many, translating as they do into increases in
those two most basic of resources, time and money. Social media
group pages make it possible to stay in touch with both parents and
clients, advertising upcoming concerts, touting accomplishments,
and tagging events of interest. Online scheduling apps have taken
the tedium out of booking appointments, while mobile payment and
budgeting systems streamline financial record keeping.
For music students, recording lessons is not only simpler than in
the old cassette and VHS tape days, but like photos, these data files
can be posted and shared immediately. Recorded lessons and
rehearsals grant instant access to the augmented feedback they
provide, offering heretofore unparalleled opportunities for speeding
up the acquisition of the motor skills we call technique. The plethora
of apps for music practice, education, and just pure music enjoyment
are seemingly boundless, since new apps pop up at an estimated
rate of over six thousand per day, and old apps are either updated or
abandoned by the wisdom of their user crowd. And it is here that the
list of digital media marvels shall stop, for, like the apps, these
wonders will continue to breed at a rate impossible to tally. Now to
exit digital heaven, with the observation that whatever else one
believes, the fact that digital media is a potent force is undeniable.
Whether that force be turned to good or ill, harnessed for human
benefit or revealed to be a cyborg slave master of dystopian fiction,
is a central question of the digital age.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE: THE “SCREEN INVASION”

At the start of the new millennium and especially after the release of
the first iPhone in 2007, scientists, mental health experts, and
investigative journalists began to sound alarms about the effects of
digital media on human attention, productivity, safety, relationships,
health, and happiness. Countering ecstatic reports from the digital
front came unsettling tales, such as New York Times reporter Matt
Richtel’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize–winning series “Driven to Distraction,”
which was credited by the Pulitzer committee for “stimulating
widespread efforts to curb distracted driving.”[7] In his series of ten
articles, Richtel introduces the evocative term screen invasion to
describe how ubiquitous our devices had become even then:

At one time, a screen meant maybe something in your living

room. But now it’s something in your pocket. So it goes
everywhere. And I guess we’ve all experienced it. It can be
behind the wheel. It can be at the dinner table. It can be—(I
guess we’ll get this interview started off on the right, and slightly
off-color note): It can be in the bathroom.[8]

Richtel’s work finally got the attention of the insurance industry,

which had to take note when a study revealed that texting drivers
risked a 23 percent increase in the possibility for collisions.[9]
Around the same time, an alarming uptick in sprained ankles at
emergency rooms around the country was sleuthed out as due to
texting while walking, eventually spurring the American Academy of
Orthopaedic Surgeons to launch its distracted-walking campaign
Digital Deadwalkers.[10]
Other experts were more interested in the human brain as the
foundational source of these crashes and twisted joints—and more
to the point, what was hijacking it? Gary Small, professor of
psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), was one of the first to study the effects of
digital media on the brain by taking MRI scans of two distinct types
of brains—those of digital natives and those of naive subjects
(people over the age of fifty who were “new to computer technology,
but willing to give it a try”)—while carrying out two different activities:
reading a book and conducting a Google search. While the scans
showed that the two groups did not evince any differences when
reading a book, the brains of computer-savvy users showed a
twofold increase in activity in their front portions (known as the
decision-making center of the brain) when on the Internet as
opposed to when they read a book. This finding made sense, in
Small’s words, “because we know we’re making lots of decisions
when we’re searching online.”[11] However, Small’s research
revealed something else: the brains of the naive subjects showed
“little to no activation” in this region when on Google. Why was this?
At the time of Small’s study (2008), it was still possible to find
enough naive subjects to participate in the project.[12] The brains of
these naive subjects were simply not habituated to Web-browsing,
so they had not developed the neural pathways needed to surf the
Internet. As such, they did not qualify as digital immigrants. So Small
and his team had their naive subjects train their brains by searching
the Web just one hour a day for five days. After this training interval,
they all returned to the lab, where they were retested while
performing a Google search. The results were rather astonishing: the
exact same neural circuitry in the front part of the brain that in the
computer-savvy group had activated during Internet use now had
become active in the naive subjects, within only a few days’ time.
The naive subjects had morphed into digital immigrants. The
researchers had captured, in effect, the observable evolution of the
human brain. This finding caused Small and his colleagues to
wonder,

If our brains are so sensitive to just an hour a day of computer

exposure, what happens when we spend more time? What
about the brains of young people, whose neural circuitry is even
more malleable and plastic? What happens to their brains when
they spend their average eight hours daily with their high tech
toys and devices?[13]

The “eight hours daily” figure referenced by Small comes from a

2004 Kaiser Family Foundation study showing that, due to the
alchemy of multitasking, eight- to eighteen-year-olds managed to
cram eight hours of media content into just six and a half hours of
actual time by the clock—a nuanced point not quite accurately
captured by Small’s description but still a rather stunning statistic.
Nevertheless, five years later, the Kaiser researchers reported that
those levels of exposure had been “shattered.” By 2009, young
people were able to stuff a whopping ten hours and forty-five
minutes of content into a seven-and-a-half-hour time frame.[14]
Six years after that, a study released in 2015 by the nonprofit
organization Common Sense Media found that teenagers between
the ages of thirteen and eighteen used an average of nine actual
hours of entertainment media per day, and “tweens” (ages eight to
twelve) used an average of six actual hours a day of entertainment
media. This figure does not include time spent using digital media
while at school or for homework.[15]
And herein lies one of the most distinguishing characteristics of
the digital age: its ability to perpetually outdistance its own
outrageous statistics. And as each new study reveals statistics more
disturbing than the last, digital immigrants’ concern ratchets up from
a creeping sense of unease to full-blown anxiety that the digital
natives in their care obsess over their gadgets and, like Tolkien’s
Gollum who clutches his “Precious,” refuse to release their grip on
the tiny keyboard beneath their fingertips. Psychotherapist and writer
Gary Greenberg relates the following story of what happened when
he asked a teen client to relinquish her cell phone:
 Before she could sit down, I asked Kate to hand me her phone.
Her parents, already seated, froze as she swung her head
around and trained her eyes on me. It was, I realized, the first
time weʼd made eye contact, and what I saw was a mixture of
fear and anger not unlike that of a raccoon cornered in a
vegetable patch by an irate gardener wielding a shovel.
“Why?” she demanded. “Because I have a really hard time
concentrating when you’re distracted,” I said. “I keep wondering
what’s going on your phone, and I figure that whatever it is must
be more interesting than what’s going on in here.”
“Well, that’s for sure.”
“I’m certain that’s true,” I said. “Nothing here can compete with
what’s on your phone. But sometimes we have to pay attention
to less interesting things.” I reached out my hand, and she put
the phone in it. It was warm and moist. I thought I could feel the
indentation of her fingers on its rounded edges. “It seems almost
like this phone is part of you,” I said as I put it on my desk. “Like
another limb or something.”
“No duh,” she said. “It is.” She held my eyes. There was no
shame or defensiveness in them now, let alone fear. Just
contempt.[16]

But these obsessive tendencies are no longer the province of

the young; they also occur among their parents and educators, many
of whom are as yet digital immigrants. Who says you can’t teach an
old dog new tricks? As Small’s experiment proves, even that old saw
has been overturned through the doctrine of neural plasticity, which,
as you saw in chapter 3, is a double-edged sword. Although new
tricks can certainly be learned at almost any advanced age, they
cannot be guaranteed to be healthy tricks. Digital natives and
immigrants alike have acquired the new trick of multitasking that, in
the information age, has morphed far from its original meaning of
managing several manual tasks (minding the children while foraging
for food) to juggling two or more cognitive tasks, abetted by
technology.

MULTITASKING: “DUMBING DOWN THE WORLD”

The term multitask first appeared in the nascent computer-
technology field of the 1960s, but after the advent of the World Wide
Web in the 1990s, the word was absorbed into the popular lexicon.
While pursuing many tasks at the same time has been a part of
human activity for millennia, the current manifestation of the term
multitasking refers to the mingling of two or more technology-based
tasks: reading e-mail while listening to music, texting while watching
television, or driving a car while following a GPS and talking on a
smartphone. Research on human multitasking in the digital
environment has zeroed in on the following parameters:

Multitasking Parameters

Attentional Filtering: The ability to successfully filter relevant

from irrelevant information while multitasking.
Organization of Thoughts: Keeping the cognitive results of
multitasking organized in the brain for later retrieval.
Task Switching: Shifting from task to task and returning to an
important task after distraction or interruption.
Task-Switch Cost: The time lapse when changing from task to
task and associated costs in cognition, productivity, health, and
human happiness.

Multiple studies show that the vast majority of people manage

all these parameters extremely poorly when pelted with digital
distractions due to our limited attentional capacity—that is, the
number of thoughts we can keep in play at one time. That number,
famously posited by cognitive science pioneer George Miller as “the
magical number seven, plus or minus two,” is currently estimated to
be about four. The take-home message is it is very difficult for people
to pay deep attention to more than one thing at a time. Nevertheless,
most of us vastly overrate our ability to do so.
 Communications professor Clifford Nass conducted some of the
very first studies of multitaskers at Stanford University, and the
results were (to quote an adjective that Nass uttered seven times in
just one interview) “scary.”[17] Nass’s team set up two related
experiments, choosing as their subjects so-called high multitaskers,
that is, students who do “five, six or more things at once, all the
time.”[18] The first experiment attempted to discover whether
multitaskers can focus and not become distracted, and the second
considered the efficacy with which multitaskers shifted from one task
to another. A significant note at the outset of these experiments is
what the three members of the Stanford research team believed they
would find. Their hypothesis was that the subjects would be “stars at
something,” be it filtering (the ability to disregard irrelevant
information), task switching, or keeping the bounty of their
multitasking searches organized in their brains. Their findings?

We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out

multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re
terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at
keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized;
and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.[19]

Contrast Nass’s “terrible” rating with the self-assessments of

habitual multitasking digital natives, like this MIT student interviewed
for a PBS documentary:

I feel like the professors here [at MIT] do have to accept that we
can multitask very well, and that we do at all times. And so if
they try and, you know, restrict us from doing it, it’s almost unfair
because we are completely capable, moving in between lecture
and other things and just keeping track of the many things that
are going on in our lives.[20]

In Nass’s estimation—before his untimely death in 2013—

members of the tribe of digital natives, who constitute the
demographic that is most engaged in multitasking, are most certain
of its efficiency and are most blinded by überconfidence in their
ability to flit between tasks with no detriment to learning. He
observed that, while “virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant
at multitasking”—especially digital natives—his findings revealed
“one of the big new items here, and one of the big discoveries is, you
know what? You’re really lousy at it.”[21] But Nass also stressed that
an impetus for his research was the burgeoning habit of multitasking
among people of all ages and abilities around the globe, digital
natives and immigrants alike, or what Nass called “made
multitaskers.” He noted with concern that,

in a world where multitasking is being pushed on more and

more people, we could be essentially undermining the thinking
ability of our society. . . . And frankly, we’re seeing this across
the world, from the least developed countries to the most
developed countries. Multitasking is one of the most dominant
trends in the use of media, so we could be essentially dumbing
down the world.[22]

Because multitasking is toxic to attention, by extension it

necessarily degrades learning itself, thus Nass’s chilling assessment
does not seem far-fetched. Echoing Nass, researchers at UCLA
declare bluntly that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn.”[23]
Not only did their study subjects demonstrate significant decrements
in their ability to recall the facts that they had attempted to learn
while pelted with distractions, but they were also unable to predict
what might happen during subsequent trials based on their
experiences in the first trial. The latter result is no small finding for
our ability to predict cause and effect based on past experiences is
the essence of learning (recall Gary Marcus’s admonition that “the
ability to learn starts with the ability to remember”[24]). These learning
decrements were due, in part, to where the learned items were
stored by the multitaskers. It seems that multitasking creates a kind
of filing error. How might this occur?
Recall that, as we progress through our day (and indeed, our
lives), our accumulated sticky notes of experience pile up in short-
term memory, where they are parsed as declarative or procedural,
then sent on their way to long-term storage. The UCLA researchers
found that the information the test subjects gathered while
multitasking (information that should have been stored as declarative
learning, or facts) was instead shunted to parts of the brain that
encode procedural learning, which is the province of motor skills.
This storage error made the learned facts, in the words of the lead
researcher, “less flexible”—that is, more elusive for retrieval. And
facts that are misfiled in this way are not merely clerical errors.
Retrieval is proof that learning happened—a thing cannot be said to
have been learned if it cannot be retrieved and successfully
repeated. In this light, Nass’s catastrophic forecast about the
regression of human learning due to the pall of multitasking seems
entirely plausible.
What might this information mean for musicians? Given that
music teaching, learning, and performance all rely on both
declarative and procedural learning, it seems rather obvious that we
should, at the very least, be concerned with where our acquired
music information is stored and whether we really need
neuroscientists to admonish us, as the UCLA researchers did. To
“concentrate while [we’re] studying” might depend upon the degree
to which we allow interruptions from digital media to intrude on our
practice time.

INTERRUPTION SCIENCE AND ACQUIRED

ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER
In the workplace, the twin specters of interruption and stress
currently haunting the modern office environment have spawned a
specialty niche in personnel circles: attention management and
interruption science are now bona fide subjects and are hot topics in
business news and on the lecture circuit. Gloria Mark, a leading
researcher in these new fields, has conducted multiple studies on
information workers (also called knowledge workers), that is, those
who wield ideas rather than jackhammers for a living. In several
seminal studies, Mark and her fellow researchers found that
information workers (labeled “informants”) switched tasks frequently:
on average, every three minutes.[25] Even when these tasks were
linked or “thematically connected,” the informants spent only eleven
minutes focused within what Mark called “working spheres” before
switching themselves to a different sphere (an internal disruption) or
being interrupted by an external force, like a phone call or a request
from a manager. Interestingly, the informants were just as likely to
interrupt themselves as to be interrupted externally.
A more alarming component of Mark’s research is her finding
that, once interrupted, her informants took an average of twenty-five
minutes to reconnect to their first, or central, task.[26] This lost time is
task-switch cost, and according to multiple researchers who have
studied it, the cost is steep. Think of it: if nearly a half hour of
productivity is lost each time a worker switches tasks and he
changes between working spheres every eleven minutes, is it any
wonder that the task-switch cost spent in a cognitive fog of “Where
was I?” is estimated to be in the 40 percent range?[27]
If we apply this calculation to a musician’s practice hour, the
results are an appalling loss of twenty-four minutes of practice time
per hour. This lost work time is alarming enough, but with the
addition of the UCLA research, we you can see that the quality of the
remaining thirty-six minutes of practice time will be degraded as well.
Imagine how this might play out. If a musician’s paltry, leftover thirty-
six minutes of practice attention is divided between figuring out her
fingering, answering texts from her partner who left for work and
forgot to crate the puppy, and checking her home webcam to make
sure that Fluffy isn’t ripping up the carpet, there is a good chance her
work will be cognitively misfiled, degrading the paltry amount of
leftover practice time even further.
There is one obvious solution to both the steep task-switch cost
and filing error problems: turn the cell phone off and stow it out of
sight during practice and rehearsal stints. There is compelling
research to show that the familiar buzz, chime, or chirp of an
incoming message, even the silent physical presence of a cell
phone, offers temptations to connect that can negatively impact
cognition. It also appears that, the more challenging the task, the
more likely we are to self-distract, and a smartphone dotted with
candy-colored apps provides an enticing escape pod:
 Once attention has been shifted to the smartphone for one
purpose (e.g., by virtue of a specific notification source), users
often then engage in a chain of subsequent task-unrelated acts
on the smartphone, thereby extending the period of disruption. .
. . And, some evidence suggests that the more “rich” (e.g.,
including a visual image rather than just text) the information
encountered during an interruption, the more detrimental the
distraction is likely to be with respect to primary task completion.
[28]

Multitasking results in high task-switch cost, filing errors, and

procrastination. If these symptoms are not enough motivation to
relinquish our digital devices during practice, perhaps the high cost
to human health posed by constant interruptions is.

ZEBRAS DON’T MULTITASK, EITHER

By the tenets of the information age, multitasking seems to be a
veritable job requirement for information workers, who may watch a
video clip, surf the Web, type a document, and answer a question
from the boss all at the same time. In the effort to manage the gush
of information coming at them, Mark shows that knowledge workers
tend to work faster and thus under greater pressure than if they were
to concentrate on just one task alone. So multitasking’s signature
feature—high-density, high-pressure work—can also beget great
gobs of stress.[29]
To test this, Mark and her team measured the effect of e-mail
use on information workers by dividing their subjects into two groups:
those who gave up e-mail completely for five days (but continued to
use computers) and those who continued to use e-mail, unfettered,
while at work. All were attached to heart monitors for the duration of
the study. The e-mailing subjects switched screen windows, on
average, thirty-seven times an hour, while the e-mail-deprived
subjects switched eighteen times an hour on average. For the e-
mailers, all that screen switching and message processing kept them
in a “steady ‘high alert’ state” (as measured by their heart-rate
monitors). As you learned from Sapolsky’s zebras, stress that is
unabated rather than doled out in spurts only as needed releases
stress hormones that, among other evils visited on our vital organs,
have recently been linked to the death of brain cells.[30]
By contrast, the e-mail dieters suffered less task-switch cost and
also displayed normal heart rates. Thus Mark and colleagues
conclude that taking breaks from e-mail is beneficial for both
productivity and health—as long as people give up their digital habits
of their own volition. However, it appears that being unconnected
may generate adult information workers’ own version of adolescent
FOMO (fear of missing out). An interesting twist in the details of this
particular study is that the researchers had trouble finding enough
volunteers willing to voluntarily digitally disconnect for five days.[31]
So what are today’s knowledge workers to do with this
information? In order for them to succeed in the digital environment,
they must, by necessity, multitask. A journalist who interviewed Mark
conjures Carr’s jet-skiing multitasker when he observes that, for
knowledge workers like himself, “it seems your attention must skip
like a stone across water all day long, touching down only
periodically.”[32] Indeed, Carr was propelled to study the effects of the
information age when he noted with alarm that, as a knowledge
worker himself, he was no longer able to maintain sustained
attention on his target while fishing in the endless stream of Internet
information:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that
someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,
remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My
mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not
thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when
I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article
used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative
or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling
through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.
Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three
pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something
else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain
 back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally
has become a struggle.[33]

Something had changed for Carr, something he initially labeled

“troubles with reading” but that he eventually came to recognize as
far more worrying: “my inability to pay attention to more than one
thing for a couple of minutes.”[34] “What the Net seems to be doing,”
observed Carr, “is chipping away my capacity for concentration and
contemplation.”[35] Carr informally polled friends (mostly knowledge
workers like himself) and found that others were experiencing the
same symptoms.
At around the same time, two psychiatrists independently
introduced new terms that describe Carr’s and his friends’
experiences. Acquired attention deficit disorder and attention deficit
trait, put forward by John Ratey and Edward M. Hallowell,
respectively, posit that heavy technology use and multitasking may
be actually creating attention deficit disorders (ADDs) in people not
otherwise susceptible to them.[36] Indeed, Nass’s early research
reveals that, the more chronic his subjects’ multitasking habits, the
less they can ignore the irrelevant distractions that Nass’s team
embed in experiments designed to measure distractibility, spurring
Nass to theorize that habitual multitasking degrades attentional
abilities over time. As you’ve already learned, brains can be
remodeled both for good and for ill.

INTERNET ADDICTION
As if acquired ADD were not enough cause for concern, a growing
cohort of experts note the potential for outright addiction to the
Internet and other digital media. This view is lent credence by what
the late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp named SEEKING, our
hardwired behavior bequeathed by evolution that is motivated, in
part, by the dopamine rush that rewards our brain once we crack
open what we are seeking—be it a tasty morsel of food contained
inside a shell (a nut, an oyster) or an e-message locked inside a link.
(Panksepp preferred to capitalize these “genetically ingrained brain
emotional operating systems” to underscore the magnitude of their
importance.[37])
Panksepp, a founder of the field of affective neuroscience,
theorized that there are seven foundational instincts that propel
human behavior: RAGE, FEAR, PANIC, LUST, CARE, PLAY, and
SEEKING, with the latter being the common thread that links them
all. Panksepp described SEEKING as

a general-purpose neuronal system that helps coax animals and

humans to move energetically from where they are presently
situated to the places where they can find and consume the
fruits of this world.[38]

Panksepp believed that this SEEKING system is fueled in part

by our body’s “dopamine circuits,” which

tend to energize and coordinate the functions of many higher

brain areas that mediate planning and foresight (such as the
amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and frontal cortex) and promote
states of eagerness and directed purpose in both humans and
animals. It is no wonder that animals are eager to self-stimulate
this system via indwelling electrodes. It now seems clear that
many psychostimulant drugs commonly abused by humans,
especially the amphetamines and cocaine, produce their
psychic appeal by temporarily overarousing this emotional
system. To some extent, other drugs such as opiates, nicotine,
and alcohol also derive their hedonic appeal by interacting with
this system.[39]

But the complexities of our dopamine circuits proved to be just

as inconvenient to the news media in the brain-obsessed 1990s as
the nuances behind the Mozart effect. Like a teen influencer in the
age of social media, dopamine broke free of the fusty confines of
science and burst on the scene as “the pleasure hormone,” justifying
everything from cupcake cravings to sex addiction to Americans’
mania for firearms. If the devil made me do it, the devil now sported
a biological cloak that excused our naughty behavior, spawning
dopamine’s kitschy reputation as “the Kim Kardashian of
neurotransmitters.”[40] Yet as smartly explained by British
psychologist Vaughan Bell, by rejecting the complex nature of this
neurotransmitter as too complicated, tabloid journalism missed out
on “how weird dopamine really is.”[41] For while dopamine is indeed
one chemical, it has many different functions in the brain depending
on which system it is operating within and which of its various
receptors receives it.
Scientists who suspected that dopamine was overemphasized
in the pleasure-reward cycle expanded their research to a network of
other neurochemicals, including naturally occurring opiates and
cannabinoids (yes, the human body produces endogenous versions
of both). One of those researchers was neuropsychologist Kent
Berridge, who began to suspect in the late 1980s that dopamine was
not the only player in the SEEKING system and eventually came to
the conclusion that wanting and liking are not, neurobiologically
speaking, the same thing.
Berridge believes that dopamine does fuel desire but that our
actual pleasure center is a much smaller and “more fragile” neural
system than our wanting system. He and colleague Terry Robinson
have produced substantial evidence from both human and animal
studies to show distinctly different brain mechanisms for wanting and
liking the same reward to the extent that often the thrill of the chase
proves more satisfying than the actual catch. These insights
advanced their incentive-sensitization theory of addiction to explain
how wanting can metastasize from Panksepp’s SEEKING to
pathological wanting—the well-known phenomenon of chasing a
bigger and bigger high.[42] As Berridge explains it,

if dopamine provided us with happiness, it would make [drug]

addicts happier than nonaddicts, or let them get more pleasure
from a smaller dose of drugs. That’s clearly not the case. When
we looked deeper into this, we found that dopamine provided
the wanting mechanism in the brain, rather than the pleasure
mechanism. That’s why addicts want more and more, whether it
be in the form of binge-eating, gambling, or drugs. And when
 there’s an imbalance between wanting and pleasure, such as for
addicts, it actually leads to unhappiness.[43]

Of course, not all wanting is excessive or inherently destructive

or even sensory. There is, for example, the pleasure of intellectual
stimulation and discovery, and it is this that leads many people
(particularly knowledge workers) to deny that the hours they spend
on their screens transcend the boundaries of ordinary stimulation
and descend into full-on addiction. This loaded term attached itself to
heavy Internet use in the heady decade of the 1990s, and by the
2000s, the idea that digital media could spawn genuine addiction
had gained significant traction among experts and ordinary folk alike.
In 2008, Small had this to say about it:

I think [digital media] is addictive. There’s controversy among

experts whether it is or not. In Asia, there’s a recognition that
teenagers, many teenagers, are addicted to video games. I think
we’re behind the Asians in terms of focusing on the problem. . . .
We’re immersed in it. And it’s changing so rapidly, we’re just
beginning to grasp what’s happening. So, think of how long it
took us to understand that smoking was bad for our health. I
think it takes people a while for reality to hit them in the face. It’s
hard to get people to stop texting while they’re driving, although
it’s a twenty-three times greater risk of having an accident. How
do you get people to stop these behaviors? It’s very difficult.[44]

A decade later, while more experts agree with Small’s

assessment, Internet addiction disorder has yet to be officially
recognized as a bona fide mental disorder in the most recent edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.[45]
The main sticking point is whether “excessive behavioral
patterns” (like excessive Internet or smartphone use) can be
addictive in the same way that substances like alcohol and opioids
are.[46] While the DSM-V authors take a step in that direction with the
recognition of gambling disorder, citing neuroscience evidence that
“gambling behaviors activate reward systems similar to those
activated by drugs of abuse” (channeling Berridge’s incentive-
sensitization theory of addiction), they conclude that there is
insufficient peer-reviewed evidence to label compulsive sex,
excessive Internet use, or video gaming as outright “addictions” and
instead choose the safer path of including them in a list of conditions
for further study.[47] This caution is somewhat remarkable given the
considerable criticism lobbed at the secretive DSM-V revision
committee for its willingness to treat many other problematic human
behaviors as true illnesses and addictions.[48] The World Health
Organization, on the other hand, has showed no such restraint and
has added gaming disorder to gambling disorder in the eleventh
revision of its own manual, the International Statistical Classification
of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11).[49]
Meanwhile, a growing number of people, both experts and
ordinary folks, have simply declared the outright existence of Internet
addiction disorder and Internet gaming disorder based on direct and
often personal experience. And Internet aficionados continue to
deride the idea of addiction, citing the paucity of scientific evidence.
This schism seems about right for a disorder that began as a farce.
In 1995, a New York psychiatrist named Ivan K. Goldberg
posted a sham disorder as a joke on a website that he had founded
for fellow psychiatrists, dubbed it “Internet addiction disorder,” and
dressed it up in DSM language for good measure. To his surprise
(and apparently everlasting chagrin), several of his colleagues
responded by fessing up to their own struggles with “IAD,” prompting
Goldberg to cry uncle and set up an online IAD support group, which
was soon flooded with hundreds of people seeking help. He later
refined his original invention to “pathological Internet-use disorder”
but never seemed to own his invention outright, disavowing the term
addiction—“to medicalize every behavior by putting it into psychiatric
nomenclature is ridiculous,” he said—recommending instead that
people who overuse the Internet should “get themselves into
psychotherapy and work out why they hide behind a keyboard.”[50]
Neither Goldberg’s mockery nor his disavowal of Internet
addiction stopped the late psychologist Kimberly Young from officially
proposing the existence of it in a formal setting in 1996.[51] Young
went on to write several popular books on the topic, founded a
center for the treatment of Internet addiction, and in 2013 partnered
with a Pennsylvania hospital to cofound the first inpatient treatment
center for the supposed disorder—“supposed” because, as news
releases at the time noted, the $14,000 price tag for treatment was
not covered by insurance due to the malady’s nonrecognition by the
DSM-V.[52]
So where do things currently stand? Is IAD a real malady or
not? This is the question that a largely British group of researchers
set out to answer by first sidestepping the addiction question and
bestowing the more easily digestible name problematic Internet use
(PIU) on the affliction. They conducted a meta-analysis of
approximately three thousand participants across forty studies to see
what might turn up regarding cognitive impairment due to
problematic Internet use, reasoning that “confirmation of cognitive
deficits in PIU would support the neurobiological plausibility of this
disorder.” Their conclusion is that the aggregated meta-analysis

provides firm evidence that PIU (defined broadly and

operationally) is associated with cognitive impairments in motor
inhibitory control, working memory, Stroop attentional inhibition
[a type of executive function test] and decision-making.[53]

While the authors are clearly pleased to be able to claim a “vital

first step towards a better understanding of PIU, supporting its
existence as a biological plausible entity associated with dysfunction
of frontostriatal brain circuitry,” they also concede that it is not
possible to determine, in this type of cross-sectional analysis,
whether the list of cognitive deficits are present in the people
represented in these studies before the onset of PIU.[54] After all, this
particular list of cognitive impairments mirrors those of attention-
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), creating a chicken-or-egg
conundrum that plagues much psychological research: to wit, does
PIU actually cause ADHD (as Ratey’s theory of acquired attention
deficit disorder suggests), or are ADHD folks just more prone to
digital media overload due to their poor impulse control and decision-
making?
 More to the point: where do we go from here—or, as another
recent meta-analysis on Internet addiction was (in part) titled, “Quo
Vadis?” This study reveals a significant acceleration in the rate of
publication on the topic of Internet addiction, from three articles in
1996, to over fifteen hundred articles cited in PubMed on Internet
addiction in 2015.[55] And at the time of this writing, a simple search
for articles using the phrase “Internet addiction” on PubMed returns
just under three thousand results. Clearly something is up and
troubling our collective psyche. While experts debate the parameters
of addiction, an urgent and relevant question for the rest of us is
“Who benefits from heavy technology use?”

WHO IS MINDING THE STORE?

Determined information workers and fervent technology geeks note
that there is still, at present, little research that demonstrably proves
the negative effects of digital technology on our brains. Even the
British meta-analysis team acknowledge the “paucity of rigorous
meta-analyses from which to draw firm conclusions and examine
potential moderators.”[56] But an absence of evidence does not equal
proof positive that there is none to be found. A larger question
looms: Why isn’t anyone studying the effects of the screen invasion
on our brains?
One answer lies in the rapid growth of technology itself, which
makes the subject matter a moving target and nearly impossible to
pin down. Researchers who attempt to study it face a Sisyphean
task:

By the time you design a research study, apply for funding,

implement the study, and you publish the results about the
technology, what has happened? The technology’s obsolete. We
moved beyond it. And so the technology and the practices that
go with the new technologies, they keep outdistancing the
research. The research can’t catch up with it.[57]

A second but perhaps more fundamental consideration is

funding, which introduces another vexing question: In whose interest
would it be to fund research on the cognitive effects of digital
technology? And if that research should vindicate the late Dr. Young
and others, who warned that, even worse than “dumbing [us] down,”
digital technology has the addictive power to enslave us, in whose
interest would it be for consumers and companies to break the digital
chains and unplug?
Surely not in the interest of Facebook, the titan of social media
sites, said by Forbes in 2018 to be number four of the “World’s Most
Valuable Brands” and valued at a total net worth of $94.8 billion in
2018, with 2.3 billion active users monthly.[58] Facebook has
estimated that every day, two billion people use at least one of the
Facebook “family of services” (WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook
Messenger).[59] Indeed, the entire business model of social media
sites like Facebook and Instagram is built on free access for users in
return for the opportunity to bombard those users’ eyeballs with
advertising.
Yet in 2018 Facebook was revealed not only to be generating
the lion’s share of its revenue from advertising profits (89 percent in
2017) but also to have granted several high-profile, multinational
companies (including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Sony, and
Spotify) access to the personal information of Facebook users
without the users’ knowledge or consent.[60] This information likely
included users’ friends, contact information, “likes,” and browsing
habits. While Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has
repeatedly denied that his company blatantly sells users’ data,
ongoing investigations are revealing that, at the very least, Facebook
has leveraged user data as a valuable bargaining chip and has also
privately considered “ways to require third-party applications to
compensate Facebook for access to its users’ data, including direct
payment, advertising spending and data-sharing arrangements.”[61]
Likewise, the smartphone industry is surely not interested in
funding brain research on digital technology when global revenue
from smartphone sales in 2018 came to $522 billion.[62] When 77
percent of Americans over age eighteen and 94 percent of
Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine own a smartphone of some
brand, the wireless industry has everything to gain by keeping
people connected.[63]
The video game industry is equally disinclined to fund brain
research when total consumer spending on video games totaled $36
billion in 2017, a number that by the first half of 2018 had already
surpassed the 2017 figure by 40 percent.[64]
So given the lucrative rewards that are risked by funding
illuminating research, a looming question remains: Who is minding
the store? Inundated as we are by what Turkle calls “these techno-
enthusiastic times,” it is challenging to find research on the cognitive
effects of digital media. But in response to this dearth of information,
Turkle points out that

saying that we know too little to make a judgment about

technology has, as its starting point, that we know nothing about
human development, or that somehow the game has completely
changed now that we have a technology to put in its place.[65]

As Turkle implies, we collectively know enough about human

development to make, at the very least, reasoned guesses about the
negative effects of technology and equally astute observations about
how we think, behave, and interact when we are preoccupied with it.
These sentiments have spurred a number of high-profile defections
from the tech industry, including former Google engineer Tristan
Harris, who became disenchanted with the fundamental business
model of practically all digital media, which means usurping users’
attention as deeply and as often as possible. Harris left Google in
2016 to found a non-profit organization called Time Well Spent in
order to battle the effects of “the extractive attention economy.”[66] In
2018, others joined him in a union of tech experts to create the
Center for Humane Technology, whose mission includes the lofty
goal of reversing “human downgrading by inspiring a new race to the
top and realigning technology with humanity.”[67]
As to Turkle’s second point—has the “game” of human
development changed because of the screen invasion? Many
experts in the brain and behavioral sciences believe that it has.
Recall from chapters 2 and 3 that, when the brain is concerned, the
word change is synonymous with neural plasticity.

THE PLASTIC PARADOX AND DIGITAL

TECHNOLOGY
An emphasis on teaching and learning in music assumes the
positive side of neural plasticity, but the downside of that same
plasticity, Doidge’s plastic paradox, must be taken into account. As
musicians, we become what we practice, yet on which side of
plasticity’s double-edged sword we practice is up to us. Without a
doubt, music-making, whether in practice or in live performance,
requires sustained focus and concentration. But due to the
temptations of digital media, these fundamental requirements are
under attack like never before by a mammoth industry that traffics in
human attention within what writer Cory Doctorow has called “an
ecosystem of interruption technologies.”[68] And while diversionary
tactics—such as roadblocking, as discussed in chapters 3 and 4—
can partly address the plastic paradox, musicians who operate in the
digital age face stiff resistance when they attempt to roadblock digital
habits mainly via internal switches activated by their own human
tendencies. Distraction by pretty, shiny objects and dulcet ringtones
is not a moral failing; it is our inheritance from evolution.
Therefore, the introduction of digital media into practice and
rehearsal spaces is likely to produce a chain of interruptions, task-
switch costs, and stress responses similar to those of any knowledge
worker. If our constant need to be connected becomes an obsessive
cycle, it seems beyond question that this will interfere with all our
relationships, including our relationship to our own instrument.
Perhaps the only unknown at this point is the degree of that
interference—from a slight shade to a total eclipse.
If you are convinced that it is time to exert some control over
your digital media habit, you can, of course, go no-tech and simply
silence all gadgets for hours or stash them out of sight for days.
Some people find creating “no phone zones” in specific locations like
at the dinner table and in the bedroom to be very effective. The
efficacy of this approach (known as digital detox) may rival cold
turkey as a treatment for substance abuse: difficult but not altogether
impossible. On his website (www.virtual-addiction.com), Dr. David
Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology
Addiction, offers some simple but effective tips for digital detox
based on his contention that digital gadgets (and even the Internet)
operate as “the world’s smallest and largest slot machines,”
entrapping us with their lure of “intermittent rewards”—a view that
echoes Berridge’s finding that the thrill of the chase keeps us coming
back for more.[69]
Ironically, there is also a high-tech route to digital detox
delivered by apps that are now available to help us manage our
habits. Some are free, and some, like organic produce, charge extra
for what you are not getting (ad content or spyware, for example).
Some of the most popular digital detox apps include monitors that
track screentime, timers that kick you off social media sites when
you should be working, and switches that turn those alluring app
colors to a boring shade of gray.
Books like Digital Minimalism, by computer-science professor
Cal Newport, espouse a values-based approach to digital media use
(keep high-quality tools and eliminate mindless Web surfing). Artist
Jenny Odell offers advice in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting
the Attention Economy and is praised for her “knack for evoking the
malaise that comes from feeling surrounded by online things.”[70]
That malaise hovers at the nexus of wanting and having, a place of
permanent, unfulfilled desire, where obsessive seeking begets a
hollow reward.

WHO CARES IF YOU LISTEN? THE PROBLEM OF

AUDIENCE ATTENTION
The doctrine of neural plasticity shows that the construction of new
neural pathways in the brain is not only possible but surprisingly
rapid and powerfully effective. But the plastic paradox shows that we
become what we practice—even if what we are practicing is what
former software executive Linda Stone calls “continuous partial
attention.”[71] And while individual musicians may be able to win the
battle for their own attention, all those focused practice and
rehearsal hours are built on the touchingly simple assumption that
audiences will pay us in kind with their own undivided attention when
we open our souls and perform for them.
Historically, this favor has never been guaranteed. The seated,
quiet reverence that most modern audiences of Western classical
music now deem as expected behavior is a phenomenon that took
decades to inculcate. Up through the late eighteenth century,
listening to Western art music, as performed in European opera
houses and concert halls, was largely a social pastime indulged in by
the upper classes, whose members viewed music events as arenas
for social posturing; political intrigue; and, of course, amore. Tales of
audience shenanigans culled from the seventeenth through early
nineteenth centuries reveal that inattentive audience behavior
surpassed mere talking during performances and included playing
card games, eating and drinking, and arriving late and leaving early.
In the dark upper reaches of some European opera houses,
prostitutes even displayed themselves for sale.[72] Besides,
musicians were, by and large, of a distinctly lower class than their
audiences, so the chatting, drinking, gambling, and strolling about in
the theater by the beau monde of the day was not considered
unmannerly (at least not by the upper classes; there are few
accounts of what musicians themselves actually felt about this
behavior).[73]
As the French Revolution ended at the dawn of the nineteenth
century, the nobility retreated to their mansions, and a burgeoning
middle class grew ever more affluent and able to afford the tastes,
activities, and accoutrements that had previously been out of reach.
At the same time, romanticism took root within Western culture, and
with its focus on the emotional inner life of the individual, it nurtured,
in the words of the late cultural historian Peter Gay, “the modern art
of listening as the most privileged form of introspection.” Eventually
“worshipful silence, little known in the eighteenth century, gradually
established itself as the standard in the nineteenth,” a standard that
holds today, for any behavior that punctures the hush of the theater
is now considered déclassé at classical music events.[74]
Yet a new and powerful scourge that could not have been
imagined only a few years ago has now infected theaters and
concert halls around the world. Audiences were trained for more
than two hundred years to quit yakking, sit down, and be quiet
please and have obliged by silently retreating into their smartphones
—those ubiquitous mobile minicomputers that beam us up and out of
wherever we find ourselves bored to be and link us to anyone,
anywhere, at any time. When people attending a concert text, swipe,
and scroll, they are yanked into an alternate reality (any place other
than the venue at hand qualifies), a reality that kidnaps their ears,
eyes, attention spans, and indeed their very souls. We have to
wonder, if live music or a live performance of any kind is so tedious
and uninteresting as to drive an audience member to her phone, why
doesn’t she just save the ticket price and listen to a recording at
home alone? Otherwise, put down the phone already and be in the
moment. This sentiment seems to be growing among the concert-
going public as well as among some star performers.
Yet in the early, heady days of the smartphone era, some music
organizations sought to capitalize on the smartphone craze.
Classical music organizations, desperate to develop new audiences
among younger generations, actually welcomed phone behavior
instead of banning it. In separate and unabashed bids to engage
younger customers by appearing hip, both the Indianapolis
Symphony and the New York Philharmonic invited audience
members to choose the encore they most wanted to hear by text-
messaging their votes during the concert, and a small opera
company allowed audience members to determine the ending of
Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte by texting their votes to decide who should
marry whom in the final scene.[75]
What the marketing directors of these organizations may not
have accounted for was the backlash from stalwart patrons, who
generally find the glow from a smartphone screen an annoying
detraction from the mood of the experience. As a result, later
iterations of these innovations have included the creation of “tweet
seats”: cordoned-off sections where tweeters can tweet away without
disturbing their neighbors. Still, not everyone agrees that this is an
improvement.[76]
Whether coupling old art forms with new technology is a clever
marketing tool or a tacky gimmick, we must also take the measure of
the costs implied because yet another genie has been unleashed
from this bottle: audience participation. What happens when
audiences express opinions about the quality of their experience on
social media? How should artists and management respond when
audiences post their displeasure in real time?
Just ask Steve Martin how his 2010 public interview at New York
City’s 92nd Street Y went down when, unbeknownst to him, viewers
who watched the telecast were simultaneously encouraged to e-mail
their responses. Reporter Deborah Solomon was in midinterview
with Martin about his recently published novel An Object of Beauty
when the Y’s management dispatched a staff member to walk
onstage with a note—which Solomon read aloud—asking that
Solomon cease her line of questioning and switch to interviewing
Martin about his “interesting career.” Martin’s reaction, as penned in
his New York Times op-ed about the incident, read in part,

This was as jarring and disheartening as a cellphone jangle

during an Act V soliloquy. I did not know who had sent this note
nor that it was in response to those e-mails. Regardless, it was
hard to get on track, any track, after the note’s arrival, and,
finally, when I answered submitted questions that had been
selected by the people in charge, I knew I would have rather
died onstage with art talk than with the predictable questions
that had been chosen for me. . . . I have no doubt that, in time,
and with some cooperation from the audience, we would have
achieved ignition. I have been performing a long time, and I can
tell when the audience’s attention is straying. I do not need a
note.[77]

After the event concluded, the Y’s manager offered the

audience a full refund, prompting Martin to tweet, “So the 92nd St. Y
has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in
real time by its audience’s e-mails. Artists beware.”[78] A columnist
for Salon piled on: “Audience whines about an interview being too
highfalutin’, so refunds are offered. Is all art up to a vote now?”[79]
This is an excellent question, as the fallout from this event made
clear. After Martin’s op-ed appeared, at least two high-profile news
organizations weighed in on the encounter (one of the responses
written by someone who did not actually attend the event and the
other by a colleague of Solomon’s), decrying the Y and its audience
as Philistines, its management as craven, and Solomon and Martin
as the defenders of high art.
In the aftermath, Martin Schneider, a blogger who in fact was in
attendance at the Y, offered a completely different account of what
transpired, briefly summarized here: Solomon conducted a
spectacularly poor interview from the outset. Martin grew visibly
uncomfortable, no doubt because (as he himself noted) he is a
professional and gets it when the audience senses a dud. Therefore,
some twenty minutes in, when management tried to save the sinking
ship by sending Solomon a note to change the course of the
interview, the audience burst into applause—not as a slam against
Martin but in relief that someone had finally thrown the poor guy a
rope (although Martin apparently felt he needed a rope as much as
he needed a note).[80]
In retrospect, the even bigger story here was that Solomon (a
New York Times employee) and Martin (a superstar) both had the
bully pulpit available to them via the Times editorial pages, which
they used to salve their understandably bruised egos. In a predigital,
presocial media world, their accounts would have been the only and
definitive ones. But the Wild West of the Internet has given us a
global stage open to all voices, including that of blogger Schneider. It
so happens that Schneider is a reputable writer whose account of
the Solomon-Martin interview is balanced and nuanced, not to
mention witnessed firsthand. But the open-mic of digital media is
also its weak spot—like a stage door with no bouncer to guard it. Not
only can thousands of articulate, independent writers like Schneider
make a space for themselves for whoever cares to read their
creations, but the grumps and curmudgeons of society can also post
their opinions, along with racists, xenophobes, sociopaths,
professional trolls, and bona fide enemies of the state. At the top of
this food chain are the corporate executives and autocrats who can
harvest all of it—data, opinions, and personal information—for
questionable, lucrative, and even nefarious ends.
 Performers and management alike must take the measure of
the costs. What is the ultimate harm to their organization, their
artists, and their audiences of not merely tolerating but actually
inviting gadgets into the sanctity of performance space? New
technology, like a locking cell-phone pouch developed by Yondr
(whose motto is “Be here now”) may offer a promising alternative.[81]
Still this technology depends on our willingness to relinquish the
beloved item for a few hours. For those unwilling (or unable, if one
hews to the addiction narrative), a few artists have begun to plead,
shame, and insist upon phone-free zones during their live concerts.
[82] And when asking doesn’t work, there is only one thing left to do:

take matters literally in hand, which is exactly what Broadway star

Patti LuPone did at a performance in the summer of 2015.
As LuPone tells it, a woman seated near the edge of the stage
incessantly texted throughout the show until LuPone (and,
reportedly, others in the cast) had had enough. As LuPone took her
usual exit, in which she would habitually shake the hand of a random
audience member, she reached out for the shake, snatched the
woman’s phone instead, and handed it to the stage manager for
safekeeping.[83] LuPone later issued a statement through her
manager:

We work hard on stage to create a world that is being totally

destroyed by a few, rude, self-absorbed, and inconsiderate
audience members who are controlled by their phones. They
cannot put them down. When a phone goes off or when an LED
screen can be seen in the dark, it ruins the experience for
everyone else—the majority of the audience at that performance
and the actors on stage. I am so defeated by this issue that I
seriously question whether I want to work on stage anymore.
Now I’m putting battle gear on over my costume to marshal the
audience as well as perform.[84]

In this digital age, audience attention—just like general human

attention to any task or experience—is under assault as never
before. Investigative writers like Richtel have warned of the dangers
of inattention, while Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted:
Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, suggests that the
same kind of ambitious public health campaign that went after
pollution and smoking as major risks to human health must be
applied to society’s addiction to its gadgets in order to bring about a
“renaissance of attention.”[85]

DIALING DOWN EMPATHY

The effect of the digital age on both the creation and the
consumption of music has been literally overwhelming. Intoxicated
by digital treasures, in our never-ending quest to gain audience and
fans and attention, many of us rushed to adapt these treasures as
tools of our trade, giddy with their exponential powers to connect and
delight, to persuade and win over.
Yet digital media overuse seems to be infecting our culture with
epidemic proportions of inattention, which is besetting personal
relationships, creating health and safety hazards, cutting into
productivity, and retarding the critical socialization skills needed by
teens and young adults. Clifford Nass, along with worrying that
digital media overuse was dumbing down the world, worried that the
inattention incubated by it also interfered with the development of
empathy, the ability to feel another’s emotions.[86] Empathy is so
central to the human condition that it is one of the defining
differences that sets us apart from all other mammals. Lack of it is
linked to a suppression of the brain’s mirror neuron system and a
host of behavioral disorders, including psychiatric problems and
sociopathologies.
A public health campaign in defense of attention will be effective
only in direct proportion to society’s recognition of the problem. A
force as potent as digital media warrants constraint in direct
proportion to its power. Musicians and all performance artists must
take a stand in defense of attention by taming these powerful tools
themselves and pleading with audiences to stand with them.

NOTES
1. Bernard Marr, “How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The
Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read,” Forbes, May 21, 2018,
www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-
we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-
read/#3c1e50060ba9.
2. Lori Lewis, “2019: This Is What Happens in an Internet Minute,” All
Access Music Group, March 5, 2019,
www.allaccess.com/merge/archive/29580/2019-this-is-what-
happens-in-an-Internet-minute.
3. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our
Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 7.
4. The source for these terms is Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives,
Digital Immigrants: Part 1,” On the Horizon 9, no. 5 (2001): 1–6.
5. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from
Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books,
2011), 294.
6. Sherry Turkle, “Interview: Sherry Turkle,” PBS, September 22,
2009,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/turkle.html
#4 .
7. The Pulitzer Prizes, “Matt Richtel and Members of the Staff of the
New York Times,” 2019, www.pulitzer.org/winners/matt-richtel-and-
members-staff.
8. NPR, “Digital Overload: Your Brain on Gadgets,” August 24, 2010,
www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=129384107.
9. Matt Richtel, “In Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Large Margin,”
New York Times, July 27, 2009.
10. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, “Distracted
Walking,” December 2015, https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/staying-
healthy/distracted-walking/.
11. Douglas Rushkoff and Rachel Dretzin, “Digital Nation,” PBS,
2010, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/etc/script.html.
12. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, iBrain: Surviving the Technological
Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 15.
13. Ibid., 17.
14. Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts,
“Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” January
20, 2010, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation,
www.kff.org/other/report/generation-m2-media-in-the-lives-of-8-to-
18-year-olds/.
15. Common Sense Media, “Landmark Report: U.S. Teens Use an
Average of Nine Hours of Media Per Day, Tweens Use Six Hours,”
November 3, 2015, www.commonsensemedia.org/about-
us/news/press-releases/landmark-report-us-teens-use-an-average-
of-nine-hours-of-media-per-day.
16. Gary Greenberg, “My Monster, My Self: On Nicholas Carr and
William Powers,” Nation, March 16, 2011,
www.thenation.com/print/article/159279/my-monster-my-self.
17. Clifford Nass, “Interview: Clifford Nass,” PBS, December 1, 2009,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/nass.html.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Rushkoff and Dretzin, “Digital Nation.”
21. Nass, “Interview.”
22. Ibid.
23. American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Multi-
tasking Adversely Affects Brain’s Learning, UCLA Psychologists
Report,” EurekAlert! July 26, 2006,
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uoc--maa072506.php.
24. Gary Marcus, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of
Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (New York:
Basic Books, 2004), 99.
25. Victor M. González and Gloria Mark, “Constant, Constant, Multi-
Tasking Craziness: Managing Multiple Working Spheres,”
in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems, 113–20 (ACM Digital Library, 2004); and Gloria
Mark, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind?
Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” in Proceedings of the
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 321–
30 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2005).
26. Ibid. See also Clive Thompson, “Meet the Life Hackers,” New
York Times, October 16, 2005,
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/meet-the-life-hackers.html.
27. American Psychological Association, “Multitasking: Switching
Costs,” March 20, 2006, www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.
28. Henry H. Wilmer, Lauren E. Sherman, and Jason M. Chein,
“Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the
Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive
Functioning,” Frontiers in Psychology 8, art. 605 (April 2017): 4.
29. Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke, “The Cost of
Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” in Proceedings of the
SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107–
10 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2008).
30. Robert M. Sapolsky, Stress, the Aging Brain, and the
Mechanisms of Neuron Death (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
31. UCI News, “Jettisoning Work Email Reduces Stress,” May 3,
2012, https://news.uci.edu/2012/05/03/jettisoning-work-email-
reduces-stress/.
32. Thompson, “Meet the Life Hackers.”
33. Carr, Shallows, 5–6.
34. Ibid., 16.
35. Ibid., 6.
36. Ratey, quoted in Matt Richtel, “Drivers and Legislators Dismiss
Cellphone Risks,” New York Times, July 18, 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/19distracted.html; and
Hallowell, quoted in Alina Tugend “Multitasking Can Make You Lose .
. . um . . . Focus,” New York Times, October 24, 2008,
www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/business/yourmoney/25shortcuts.html
.
37. 37 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of
Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 51.
38. Ibid., 54.
39. Ibid.
40. Vaughan Bell, “The Unsexy Truth about Dopamine,” Guardian,
February 2, 2013,
www.theguardian.com/science/2013/feb/03/dopamine-the-unsexy-
truth .
41. Ibid.
42. Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “Liking, Wanting and the
Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction,” American Psychologist
71, no. 8 (November 2016): 670–79, doi:10.1037/amp0000059.
43. Franziska Green, “Pleasing Your Brain: An Interview with Dr.
Kent Berridge,” Brain World, December 28, 2018;
https://brainworldmagazine.com/pleasing-your-brain-an-interview-
with-dr-kent-berridge/.
44. Gary Small, interview on PBS Frontline’s “Digital Nation,”
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/etc/script.html
.
45. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-V (Arlington, VA: American
Psychiatric Publishing, 2013).
46. Ronald Pies, “Should DSM-V Designate “Internet Addiction” a
Mental Disorder?” Psychiatry 6, no. 2 (2009): 31.
47. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-V.
48. See Allen Frances, “A Warning Sign on the Road to DSM-V:
Beware of Its Unintended Consequences,” Psychiatric Times 26, no.
8 (2009); and Christopher Lane, “Bitterness, Compulsive Shopping,
and Internet Addiction: The Diagnostic Madness of DSM-V,” Slate,
July 24, 2009, https://slate.com/technology/2009/07/the-diagnostic-
madness-of-dsm-v.html.
49. World Health Organization, “Gaming Disorder,” September 2018,
www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/.
50. Quoted in David Wallis, “Just Click No,” New Yorker, January 13,
1997, 28.
51. Kimberly S. Young, “Internet Addiction: The Emergence of a New
Clinical Disorder,” paper presented at the 104th Annual Meeting of
the American Psychological Association, August 11, 1996, Toronto,
Canada.
52. CBS News, “Hospital First in US to Treat Internet Addiction,”
September 4, 2013, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hospital-opens-
Internet-addiction-treatment-program/story?id=20146923.
53. Konstantinos Ioannidis, Roxanne Hook, Anna E. Goudriaan,
Simon Vlies, Naomi A. Fineberg, Jon E. Grant, and Samuel R.
Chamberlain, “Cognitive Deficits in Problematic Internet Use: Meta-
Analysis of 40 Studies,” British Journal of Psychiatry (2019): 1–8,
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-
psychiatry/article/cognitive-deficits-in-problematic-internet-use-
metaanalysis-of-40-
studies/486B3C4B1C7B6045161045BCB48D6D82.
54. Ibid., 7.
55. P. K. Dalal and Debasish Basu, “Twenty Years of Internet
Addiction . . . Quo Vadis?” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 58, no. 1
(2016): 6.
56. Ioannidis et al., “Cognitive Deficits,” 2.
57. Mark Bauerlein, PBS, June 9, 2009,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/extras/interviews/bau
erlein.html.
58. See Kit Smith, “53 Incredible Facebook Statistics and Facts,”
Brandwatch, June 1 2019, www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-
statistics/.
59. See Dan Noyes, “The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics,”
Zephoria, September 2019, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-
facebook-statistics/.
60. Gabriel Dance, Michael Laforgia, and Nicholas Confessore, “As
Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech
Giants,” New York Times, December 18, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html.
61. Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar, “Mark Zuckerberg Leveraged
Facebook User Data to Fight Rivals and Help Friends, Leaked
Documents Show,” NBC News, April 16, 2019,
www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-leveraged-
facebook-user-data-fight-rivals-help-friends-n994706 .
62. See Ben Lovejoy, “Global Smartphone Revenue Continues to
Rise, Despite Falling Sales,” 9to5Mac, February 25, 2019,
https://9to5mac.com/2019/02/25/global-smartphone-revenue/.
63. See Pew Research Center, “Mobile Fact Sheet,” June 12, 2019,
www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/.
64. See Entertainment Software Association, “2019 Essential Facts
about the Computer and Video Game Industry,” 2019,
www.theesa.com/esa-research/2019-essential-facts-about-the-
computer-and-video-game-industry/; and the NPD Group, “NPD
Group: Total Industry Consumer Spending on Video Games in U.S.
Increases 40 Percent to $19.5 Billion for First Half 2018,” August 29,
2018, www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-
releases/2018/npd-group-total-industry-consumer-spending-on-
video-games-in-us--increases-40-percent-to-19-5-billion-for-first-half-
2018/.
65. Turkle, “Interview.”
66. Arielle Pardes, “Google and the Rise of ‘Digital Well-Being,’”
Wired, May 9, 2018, www.wired.com/story/google-and-the-rise-of-
digital-wellbeing/ .
67. Center for Humane Technology, “About Us,” 2019,
https://humanetech.com/about-us/#primary.
68. Cory Doctorow, “Writing in the Age of Distraction,” Locus,
January 7, 2009, www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-
doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html.
69. David Greenfield, “Tips for Electronic Etiquette and Mindful
Technology Use,” The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction,
2017, https://virtual-addiction.com/tips-electronic-etiquette-mindful-
technology-use/.
70. Jonah Engel Bromwich, “A Manifesto for Opting Out of an
Internet-Dominated World,” New York Times, April 30, 2019,
www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/books/review/jenny-odell-how-to-do-
nothing.html.
71. Quoted in Thompson, “Meet the Life Hackers.”
72. Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria
to Freud (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 14.
73. See William Weber, “Did People Listen in the 18th
Century?” Early Music 25, no. 4 (1997): 678–91.
74. Gay, Naked Heart, 18.
75. Stephanie Clifford, “Texting at a Symphony? Yes, But Only to
Select an Encore,” New York Times, May 15, 2009,
www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/arts/music/16text.html .
76. Beenish Ahmed, “‘Tweet Seats’ Come to Theaters, but Can
Patrons Plug In without Tuning Out?” NPR, December 12, 2011,
www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143576328/tweet-seats-come-to-theaters-
but-can-patrons-plug-in-without-tuning-out.
77. Steve Martin, “The Art of Interruption,” New York Times,
December 2, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/opinion/05martin.html?
_r=2&ref=opinion.
78. Sammy Perlmutter, “Steve Martin at the 92 St. Y: Book Talk
Leads to Ticket Refunds!” Huffington Post, December 5, 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/05/steve-martin-at-the-92-
st_n_791667.html.
79. Mary Elizabeth Williams, “92nd Street Y Goes ‘American Idol’ on
Steve Martin,” Salon, December 2, 2010,
www.salon.com/2010/12/02/steve_martin_92y_fiasco/print.
80. Martin Schneider, “More on Martin and Solomon and 92Y,”
Emdashes, December 2, 2010,
https://emdashes.com/2010/12/more-on-martin-and-solomon-
and.php.
81. Yondr, www.overyondr.com/.
82. NPR, “Lock Screen: At These Music Shows, Phones Go in a
Pouch and Don’t Come Out,” July 5, 2016,
www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/07/05/483110284/lock-
screen-at-these-music-shows-phones-go-in-a-pouch-and-dont-
come-out.
83. Eric Piepenburg, “Hold the Phone, It’s Patti LuPone,” New York
Times, July 9, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/theater/hold-the-
phone-its-patti-lupone.html?module=inline.
84. Robert Viagas, “Patti LuPone ‘Putting Battle Gear On,’ Questions
Stage Career after Cell Phone Incident,” Playbill, July 9, 2015,
www.playbill.com/article/patti-lupone-putting-battle-gear-on-
questions-stage-career-after-cell-phone-incident-com-352959. For a
more humorous take on this incident, see Therandyshow,
“LuPWNed! (The Patti LuPone Audience Freakout Remix),”
YouTube, January 21, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=F5Wh6DAFpW4.
85. Maggie Jackson, blog, “We’re All Distracted” (June 19, 2008),
http://maggie_jackson.com/2008/06/19/were_all_distracted/.
86. Matt Richtel, “A Force for Face-to-Face Communication,” New
York Times, November 4, 2013,
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/04/a-force-for-face-to-face-
communication/.
 Chapter 8
Emotion, Empathy, and the
Unification of Art and Science
Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis rescued emotion
from scientific banishment and installed it alongside reason as an
equal partner. Emotion has always been valued by artists, so while
we may not necessarily accord it any further reverence now that it
has been rediscovered by science, we musicians should be glad that
science has turned its lens on the commodity in which we trade not
only for its exoneration as an aid to attention but because emotion
inculcates one of our greatest evolutionary gifts, empathy, which
allows us to step outside ourselves and enter the soul of another. If
the eyes are the window of the soul, then surely the ears are one
doorway into it.

EMOTION
As I explained in chapter 1, throughout most of the twentieth century,
rational thought was exalted as the pinnacle of human wisdom, while
emotion was deemed too silly to merit a serious scientific look.
Emotion is still popularly viewed as a trait that one must tame,
silence, or outgrow. Yet recent research on emotion from the field of
cognitive neuroscience reveals that emotion, rather than being a
frivolous accessory, is fundamentally entwined with human reason.
“Emotion,” Damasio notes, “is not a luxury.”[1]
But is this news to artists? Do we musicians really need science
to tell us that emotion is important, much less that music has the
power to induce it? If musicians do not need evidence of music’s
power, apparently some scientists do:

The most intense musical experience of my life was on a

winter’s evening in 1983 when [my wife] took me to hear Fauré’s
Requiem in a candlelit York Minster. It has taken me the last
twenty-one years of studying human evolution and the last year
 of writing this book to understand why I and so many others
were moved and inspired by the music we heard that night.[2]

So let us assume that musicians know, through lived

experience, that music has the power to induce emotion in both the
creator and the listener. This assumption leads to some questions:
Why should we care? Is emotion important? From a scientific
viewpoint, the work of scientists Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, the late
Jaak Panksepp, and others testify emphatically yes. Emotion can no
longer be considered a separate or lesser brain function or a
distraction from reason. Indeed, Damasio’s epiphany was inspired by
studying people with significant brain damage in the reasoning areas
of the brain. Because these people could attach no significance to
their decisions and could not privilege one choice above another,
they were forever stuck in a pathological fog of indecision:

After studying those patients in great detail, we could not explain

their failures of decision making and their completely disrupted
social life in terms of impaired intellect, impaired language, [or]
impaired memory. . . . Something else needed to figure into the
explanation, and that “something else” offered itself very clearly
to us: [it] had to do with emotion.[3]

Often the worth of a basic human characteristic is revealed by

its devastation. Yet artists, the empaths of human societies, have
honored the worth and magnitude of emotion for as long as they
have lived among us, weathering the mutability of human culture
that, as literary critic Edmund Wilson notes, periodically experiences
a “swing of the pendulum away from a mechanistic view of nature”;
that is, away from rationalism toward something more organic,
humanistic, and emotional.[4] After over a century of rationalism, we
in the Western world may be collectively riding that swinging
pendulum toward living a more emotionally aware existence. Like the
Romantics who upended the mechanistic principles of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have again come to
realize that the universe is, as Wilson notes, “not a machine, after all,
but something more mysterious and less rational.”[5] We have been
here before. And yet, this time the change has not been a reaction
against science; on the contrary, it was heralded and partly created
by the branch of science that undergirds this book.
So be it resolved that music has the power to induce emotion,
and emotion is a vital component of human existence. The power of
emotion has been recognized for as long as modern humans have
existed, and more recently, emotion has been recognized for its role
in reason. Yet emotion does not always unleash the better angels of
our nature; we can be guided by the emotions of jealousy and hate
and fear of the other, as well as by altruism. There are numerous
vectors within us, both individual and communal, that spread both
positive and destructive emotion. To balance the wide swath of
human emotion, we also harbor inborn mechanisms that act as
emotional constraints, guiding and regulating the distribution of
emotion. Among the most powerful of these is the vital entity we call
empathy.

UNDERSTANDING EMPATHY
Empathy may be defined very simply as the ability to feel the
experience of others. Evolutionary psychologists tout empathy as
one of the most critical of our human traits and one that has
persisted throughout human evolution. Think of it: empathy is a
powerful explanation for why we are all still here. How else might we
explain why we have not yet annihilated each other? Empathy is a
cornerstone of a civilized society.
Tania Singer, a neuroscientist who researches empathy, states
that “there are almost as many definitions of empathy as there are
researchers in the field.”[6] Singer’s definition incorporates the
complexities of empathy:

We define empathy as follows: We “empathize” with others

when we have (1) an affective state (2) which is isomorphic to
another person’s affective state, (3) which was elicited by
observing or imagining another person’s affective state, and (4)
when we know that the other person’s affective state is the
source of our own affective state.[7]
 There are key components in this definition that concern us.
First, the scientific term affective state encompasses both feeling
and emotion. While most of us likely use these two terms
interchangeably, scientists recognize them as two distinct human
attributes. We may hearken back to the term proprioception as a
synonym for feeling.
Part three of this definition illustrates the phenomenon whereby
we are literally able to experience another person’s joy or pain by
observing them score a touchdown or be violently tackled to the
ground. Thanks to our mirror neuron system, we are also capable of
wincing by simply imagining that scenario. All of these effects are
amplified if we hold a strong emotional attachment to the person
being imagined, such as a parent might feel for a child.
Part four of Singer’s definition refers to the distinctly human
attribute of metacognition, or awareness of one’s own thinking; in
shorthand, “Knowing about knowing.” This is a key component of
empathy, namely, our understanding that, while we are experiencing
the joy or pain of another, we do so from an objective, safe remove.
Without this crucial ability to distinguish between self and other,
witnessing someone else’s emotions could result in one of two
equally disastrous consequences: feeling absolutely zero emotion
upon witnessing the pain of another (this deficit is the foundation of
sociopathology) or being so entirely overwhelmed by empathy that
we completely fall apart. Indeed, in its extreme form, too much
empathy can be paralyzing (and apparently there exists a tiny
percentage of the population that experiences the sensations of
others this deeply).[8] For the rest of us, there seems to be a
barometer that allows most of us to hover on the edge of feeling,
enough to generate a frisson of emotion without pulling us under—
that is, enough to compel us to pull out our checkbook in response to
a faraway humanitarian disaster and then not give that disaster
another thought once the check is in the mail.
But is this true empathy? For while empathy is closely aligned
with other attributes, such as concern, sympathy, and compassion, it
nevertheless stands apart from each of them. For a grief-stricken
widow whose spouse has died, you may feel a range of emotions—
concern, sympathy, or compassion—in direct proportion to your
relationship to her. If her husband was your dear kid brother, along
with fielding your own grief, you would likely also experience
empathy for the depth of your sister-in-law’s grief. You would
experience her pain even as you recognize it is not exactly the same
as yours, for empathy can trigger affective symptoms, or mood
changes.
But if this widow is a little-known colleague from work, sympathy
and compassion are appropriately calibrated. In fact, we may
experience no personal sadness at all. We can feel sorry for our
colleague but not feel grief ourselves.
Similarly, we may feel sadness when listening to sad music, but
most of us, in most situations, will not be overwhelmed to the extent
that we are forced to flee in tears from the auditorium. This brings us
to an intriguing facet of empathy studies: how much control can we
exert over our empathetic responses? In Singer’s review of the
current state of empathy research, she notes that most researchers
agree on the critical role of attention and decision-making in
empathic experience:

Empathy is not a purely sensory-driven process in which

affective states are induced in the observer solely by means of
bottom-up processes. On the contrary, it has long been argued
that contextual appraisal, cognitive processes, and top-down
control are important constituents of human empathy.[9]

In other words, while we may have an instantaneous gush of

sympathy, compassion, or even empathy for a fellow human, there
are also plenty of settings in which we will step back, assess the
situation, and then make a decision about whether we care enough
to care.

PAYING ATTENTION TO EMPATHY

While many people equate empathy with a purely emotional
response (“I feel your pain”), the current scientific understanding of
empathy is that it is a complex process wherein bottom-up, or gut,
responses collide with top-down cognitive processes (i.e., the
rational mind) that appraise the situation while exerting a calming
influence on the gut response. Thus empathy is not an all-or-nothing
proposition; it is flexible. Researchers like Singer therefore study
parameters such as attention, situational context, and relationships
for clues as to how our rational mind exerts this flexibility when our
empathy is aroused. Recent experiments in attention have shown
how important yet malleable attention is in the doling out of empathy.
Participants in one study had measurably negative and visceral
reactions to pictures showing people in pain. This is good news for
the human race. Yet when the participants were distracted by a
simple task and shown the same images, astoundingly, they had no
reaction at all to the disturbing images.[10]
Music teachers, as they interact with clients and students who
are by and large operating in some state of emotional vulnerability,
would do well to note this: our capacity for empathy is toggled to our
attentional abilities. For example, we can decide whether to glance
at a text message or not in the midst of a teacher-student interaction.
To choose to ignore the message is to remain open to empathy,
while to give in to temptation is to sever the momentary tie that binds
us to another human being. Attention, like empathy, is flexible,
indeed—and it is also fragile and fallible.

EMPATHY AND GOODNESS

Our ability to appraise situations and choose how to allocate our
emotional resources feeds into one of the most intriguing yet
controversial aspects of empathy research, that of prosocial
behavior, or doing right by a person or group of people for altruistic
reasons; that is, doing right by doing good. There is currently a keen
scientific interest in how the ability to inhabit another person’s
circumstances affects levels of empathic concern. In fact, a seminal
neuroscientific experiment in 2004 showing that experiencing pain
and empathizing with the pain of others evoked overlapping brain
responses launched a brand-new field: the social neuroscience of
empathy.[11] Research from this new field suggests that, when
people use their imagination to walk in another person’s shoes, such
an exercise can spark “heightened personal distress and an egoistic
motivation to reduce that distress.”[12] This sparks the obvious
question “If this is so, can empathy be taught to those who do not
possess it or heightened in those who do, in order to actually
promote prosocial behavior?” Can empathy make a better society as
a whole by making us better people individually? The link between
empathy and doing good has been touted in both the popular and
scientific press and by politicians, activists, and scientists alike. A
position paper by two experts in this new field from the University of
Vienna examines the link between empathy and altruism:

In the public, but at times also in the academic discourse, it

appears to be taken for granted that empathy can act as a
remedy or a stronghold against anti-social phenomena which
seem to affect our society to an increasing extent—such as the
selfish greed in the financial industry supposedly contributing to
the global financial crisis, or the many armed conflicts we are
witnessing these days. . . . Such views have certainly been
influenced by the folk intuition that empathy motivates prosocial
behavior, such as helping others in need. Indeed, this intuition
has received widespread support from social psychology as well
as more recently from the field of social neuroscience. . . . At
first glance, such a link between empathy and altruism might
imply that increasing empathy in our society will reduce egoism
and selfishness and the social conflicts associated with them.[13]

Due to the potency of the “folk intuition” surrounding empathy, a

2011 study led by Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, attracted widespread attention when it reported an eye-
catching 40 percent drop in empathy among college students over
the past thirty years.[14] This was alarming news for, as Konrath
herself notes, the traits that society purports to value (the prosocial
benefits of honesty, compassion, and selflessness) are directly
related and proportional to empathy:

Participants who score higher on the EC [empathic concern]

subscale indicate more continuous volunteer hours per month . .
. and are more likely to have returned incorrect change, let
 somebody ahead of them in line, carried a stranger’s
belongings, given money to a homeless person, looked after a
friend’s plant or pet, and donated to charity within the preceding
12 months.[15]

So any damage to the prosocial benefits of empathy and missed

opportunities to engender it have raised an alarm about an empathy
deficit. President Obama began using this term when still a senator
in 2006:

There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I
think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—the ability
to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world
through those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry,
the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your
dorm room. As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of
empathy will become harder, not easier. There’s no community
service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care.
You’ll be free to live in neighborhoods with people who are
exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools,
and narrow your concerns to what’s going in your own little
circle.[16]

EMPATHY AND BIAS

While humans possess a great capacity for empathy, they also
demonstrate strong biases for where they choose to place it. Most
disturbing is our propensity to favor those most like ourselves and to
withhold empathy from those we perceive to be very different from
ourselves. This inclination is seen most nakedly via ethnicity bias, a
fairly robust finding backed up by numerous studies in social
psychology.[17] We seem to readily feel great gobs of empathy for
those closest and most like us (relatives), but our empathic concern
radiates out in ever-widening and ever-weakening concentric circles
until we feel little to no empathy for those who look and act least like
us.
 Worse, these biases have been shown to result in not just
withholding empathy but in actually celebrating others’ misfortunes, a
behavior known as schadenfreude. The ability to empathize does not
always turn itself to good; empathy can be weaponized. The most
effective bullies and torturers are shown to be those who possess a
great capacity for empathy, for they understand exactly how to inflict
the deepest pain. And if the worst psychopathic figures from history
just sprang to mind, the social neuroscience of empathy reminds us
that, in our roles as lovers, spouses, parents, and offspring, we are
similarly capable of striking with surgical precision at the secret
targets in our loved ones whose locations we know too well.

LEVERAGING HOMOPHILY
Is empathy trainable? How might we disassociate the parochial and
ethnicity biases that can sully our loftier ambitions for instilling
empathy? The social neuroscientists from the University of Vienna
warn that blindly racing into efforts to grow empathy without coming
to grips with our deeply rooted biases risks amplifying our divides
even more severely:

Initiatives simplistically aimed at a generalized increase of

empathic sensitivity will likely not promote a more impartial
society. Rather, it will likely replace egoism by its twin brother:
an in-group favoring type of altruism—thereby widening, rather
than diminishing, the boundaries between social groups.[18]

In other words, practicing empathy when it feels natural to do so

—with kin and very close friends—strengthens those existing familial
and parochial bonds, thereby reinforcing the narrow confines of our
understanding. Yet this is not an argument against pursuing easy
empathy; after all, caring for one’s family is an innate human
characteristic. Perhaps easy empathy offers practice for more
challenging scenarios.
So how might we look beyond our immediate families, friends,
and neighborhoods to cultivate empathy? For this, there is one
overarching response that emanates from social science: our best
hope in instilling empathy is to practice envisioning others as
extensions of ourselves. This egocentric response definitely goes
against the grain of such popular wisdom as respecting differences,
even celebrating and embracing them. How might this work?
It starts by acknowledging that homophily, the tendency for
humans to be attracted to those most similar to themselves, is more
common than we might like to believe.[19] Once this is accepted, we
can leverage this trait as the kindling needed to light the fire of
empathy. Stated bluntly, we are least likely to harm those we see as
extensions of ourselves; stated more aspirationally, we can turn our
inclinations toward developing compassion for others to see that we
share more fundamental characteristics in common than those that
divide us. If we accept Obama’s charge to practice this change in
perspective—seeing others as extensions of ourselves within a
larger tribe of humanity—is there any more fertile territory available
to us than the arena of art?

INSTILLING EMPATHY THROUGH ART

So let us agree that music has the power to induce emotion and
emotion is a vital component of human existence, not least of which
is emotion’s power to instill empathy. We care about empathy
because it explains our evolutionary past. We must safeguard
empathy, for it can help secure our future. We must reassert that
empathy is a cornerstone of a civilized society. Rearranging our
perspective to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves instills
empathy. Exactly how this change in perspective is realized is by
engaging with art.
This sentiment is lived philosophy for intellectual titan Martha
Nussbaum, winner of the 2018 Berggruen Prize, awarded annually
to a thinker whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human self-
understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.”[20]
Among Nussbaum’s many pursuits, making music—in her case,
singing solo operatic repertoire—is one of her most cherished. She
invited an interviewer to observe her weekly singing lesson with the
reasoning that “it’s the actual singing that would give you insight into
my personality and my emotional life, though of course I am very
imperfect in my ability to express what I want to express.” Music,
Nussbaum says, allows her to access a part of her personality that is
“less defended, more receptive.”[21] As a moral philosopher, she
recognizes the critical roles that emotion and empathy play in the
collective good and issues calls to action through her writing:

For a society to remain stable and committed to democratic

principles, [Nussbaum has] argued, it needs more than
detached moral principles: it has to cultivate certain emotions
and teach people to enter empathetically into others’ lives. She
believes that the humanities are not just important to a healthy
democratic society but decisive, shaping its fate. She proposed
an enhanced version of John Stuart Mill’s “aesthetic
education”—emotional refinement for all citizens through poetry
and music and art.[22]

This is not a highfalutin string of nostrums from an intellectual

elite. It is a rallying cry for saving the culture. As musicians, our
calculus for doing so is strikingly simple: we can cull the fruits of
science for better music teaching, learning, and performance, and in
the process, we will improve our ability to sow the seeds of empathy.
Musicians can help save the culture.
Yet does our culture need saving? We humans continually suffer
from empathy deficits, from our smallest daily individual interactions
to the grandest of scales, when one country declares war on
another. There will always be a need for art to mitigate our basest
instincts and demonstrate its power to inculcate sympathy;
compassion; and, the ultimate soul swap, empathy.
Because empathy is nothing less than a cornerstone of a
civilized society, its components—civilization, society—must be
vigilantly safeguarded. Those in positions of power must enforce our
laws, but reinforcing commonly held beliefs about justice and human
decency are the mandate of each and every citizen. Such a mandate
will always find common cause with the pursuit of art and beauty. Art
and empathy have this in common: both are among our noblest
attributes, yet both require deliberate practice.
 CODA: THE FOURTH CULTURE AND THE
UNIFICATION OF ART AND SCIENCE
There is ample evidence that we are no longer on the verge of a
fourth culture but are squarely in it, as envisioned by C. P. Snow in
1959 and as prophesized by Edmund Wilson in 1931:

Who can say that, as science and art look more and more
deeply into experience and achieve a wider and wider range,
and as they come to apply themselves more and more directly
and expertly to the needs of human life, they may not arrive at a
way of thinking, a technique of dealing with our perceptions,
which will make art and science one?[23]

The new science of mind offers the most promising arena for a
unification of the arts and the sciences because the scientific
questions have changed from only those things that can be directly
observed and measured to the most ineffable elements of life. While
science poses questions, it is the experience of living that raises the
deepest questions we wish to ask in the first place. While science
proffers answers to those questions, it is only art that can illuminate
those results with meaning.
In closing, I urge musicians, as in the beginning, to experiment
between the boundaries of art and science; one need not be an
expert in cognitive neuroscience to do so, and it will take many
creative minds to engage the discoveries made there. In so doing,
we will have to choose what to embrace of the mind’s new science—
this new enchantment. But those choices should be fully informed by
the historic trajectory of scientific knowledge as well as its current
state, and our choices should be tempered by the wisdom that
human knowledge is not ultimately limitless. As we reach the edges
of our collective cognitive capacities, what is left to illuminate the
human condition is the boundlessness of art.

NOTES
1. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the
Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), 130.
2. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music,
Language, Mind and Body (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005),
ix.
3. Antonio Damasio, “A Conversation with Antonio Damasio and Siri
Hustvedt,” Big Think, September 21, 2010,
https://bigthink.com/videos/a-conversation-with-antonio-damasio-
and-siri-hustvedt.
4. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative
Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931),
17.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Tania Singer and Claus Lamm, “The Social Neuroscience of
Empathy,” Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 1156, no. 1 (March 2009):
82.
7. Ibid.
8. Jamie Ward, Patricia Schnakenberg, and Michael J. Banissy, “The
Relationship between Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia and Empathy: New
Evidence and a New Screening Tool,” Cognitive
Neuropsychology 35, nos. 5–6 (2018): 314–32.
9. Singer and Lamm, “Social Neuroscience of Empathy,” 88.
10. See X. Gu and S. Han, “Attention and Reality Constraints on the
Neural Processes of Empathy for Pain,” Neuroimage 36, no. 1 (May
2007): 256–67.
11. See Claus Lamm and Jasminka Majdandžić, “The Role of
Shared Neural Activations, Mirror Neurons, and Morality in Empathy:
A Critical Comment,” Neuroscience Research 90, no. 1 (January
2015): 15.
12. Singer and Lamm, “Social Neuroscience of Empathy,” 90.
13. Lamm and Majdandžić, “Role of Shared Neural Activations,” 20.
14. Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing,
“Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students
over Time: A Meta-analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology
Review 15, no. 2 (May 2011): 180–98.
15. Ibid., 183.
16. Barack Obama, “Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy,” June
19, 2006,
www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2006/06/barack.html.
17. Lamm and Majdandžić, “Role of Shared Neural Activations,” 20.
18. Ibid., 22.
19. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds
of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of
Sociology 27, no. 1 (2001): 415–44.
20. Jennifer Schuessler, “Martha Nussbaum Wins $1 Million
Berggruen Prize,” New York Times, October 30, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/arts/martha-nussbaum-berggruen-
prize.html.
21. Quoted in Rachel Aviv, “The Philosopher of Feelings,” New
Yorker, July 25, 2016,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/martha-nussbaums-
moral-philosophies.
22. Ibid.
23. Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 235.
 Index

A
acting, method, 1.1-1.2
ADD/ADHD, 1
acquired, 1 , 2
addiction, 1 , 2
digital media, to, 1.1-1.2
incentive-sensitization, theory of, 1 , 2 , 3
internet, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5
affective
disorders, defined, 1
neuroscience. See neuroscience, affective
states, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Agassi, Andre, 1
AIR, applying intelligence to the reflexes, theory of, 1 , 2
Alexander Technique (AT), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Alzheimer’s Disease, 1
anxiety
music performance anxiety (MPA), 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 ,
6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13
physiological basis of, 1.1-1.2
stories of, 1.1-1.2
treatments for, alternative, 1.1-1.2
treatments for, standard, 1.1-1.2
upside of, 1.1-1.2
arousal, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6
attention
attention deficit disorder/attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADD/ADHD), 1 , 2
attention deficit disorder, learned or acquired, 1.1-1.2
audience, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
default mode of, 1.1-1.2 , 2
empathy, role in, 1.1-1.2
flexible, 1.1-1.2
focus of, external, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
focus of, internal, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7
focus of, music, 1.1-1.2
focus of, theory of in motor learning, 1.1-1.2
general, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 ,
12 , 13.1-13.2
pre-attentional phase of, 1 , 2
renaissance of, 1 , 2
automatic processes, processing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2
automaticity, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 ,
12.1-12.2
autonomic nervous system (ANS) See nervous system, autonomic
avoid avoiding, 1.1-1.2

B
baby Einstein See brain, baby products for
bear
bear hunt, story, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
The White Bear Problem, 1.1-1.2 , 2
behaviorism, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
Berridge, Kent, 1 , 2
Bjork, Robert, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Blank Slate, theory of, 1
Bloom, Benjamin, 1.1-1.2
Boethius, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Bolte Taylor, Jill, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
brain
activity in learning, 1.1-1.2
baby products for, 1.1-1.2
biochemistry of, 1
cleaning, 1 , 2
decade of the 1990s, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
development, critical window/critical period of, 1 , 2 , 3
development, toxicity to, 1
the digital brain, 1 , 2.1-2.2
fitness of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
fixed theory of, 1 , 2.1-2.2
functional specialization theory of, 1.1-1.2
hemispheres, hemispheric specialization of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 ,
5,6,7
imaging, MRI, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ,
13 , 14 , 15 , 16
left/right dichotomy of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
left/right styles, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
lesion-deficit analysis of, 1 , 2 , 3
localization theory of, 1
networks and connectivity of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
neural substrates of, under spontaneous musical performance (jazz),
1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
personalities of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
processing, bottom-up, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
processing, top-down, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
split-brain studies of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
structural differences in musicians, 1 , 2.1-2.2
See also music, brain and See also neurons See also neuroplasticity
brainporn, 1 , 2
brainscams, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
brainworms, 1
brainy baby See brain, baby products for
Broca, Paul, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
Brockman, John, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6
Brooks, David, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

C
California Institute of Technology, 1
Carr, Nicholas, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Carroll, Joseph, 1 , 2
Chaffin, Roger, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Chalmers, David, 1 , 2
choking, choking under pressure, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8
, 9 , 10
Chua, Amy, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8
chunks/chunking, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
cognition, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
embodied, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
in-action principle, 1.1-1.2
meta-, 1
cognitive
archeology, archaeology, 1.1-1.2
argument, 1.1-1.2
behavioral therapy, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
development, 1
dissonance, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
fitness, 1.1-1.2 , 2
fog, 1.1-1.2
impairment, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
load, load capacity, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
modes, theory of, 1.1-1.2
neuroscience, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
neuroscience of music, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
overload, 1 , 2
processes, processing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2
science, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8
therapy, 1.1-1.2 , 2
See also brain, processing, bottom-up See also brain, processing,
top down See also cognitive revolution See also psychology,
cognitive
cognitive revolution, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 ,
9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16.1-16.2
compression and rarefaction (of a sound wave), 1
consciousness, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7
of the self, self-consciousness, 1.1-1.2
constrained action hypothesis, 1 , 2
constructed memory See memory, constructed
controlled processes, processing, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8
corpus callosotomy, 1
creativity, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 ,
11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14
critical period, window See development, critical window/critical
period of
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
Cuddy, Amy, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
cues
holistic or one-word, 1.1-1.2
performance memory retrieval, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2
culture
fourth, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
third, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
two, C. P. Snow’s, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5
curse of expertise, curse of knowledge, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Cusick, Suzanne, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5

D
Damasio, Antonio, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9
daydreaming mode, 1.1-1.2
default mode of attention See attention, default mode of
deliberate practice See practice, deliberate
Descartes, René, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
desirable difficulties, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7
determinism, infant, 1.1-1.2
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V, 1 ,
2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
digital
activities in a digital minute graphic, 1
age, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
brain, effect of media on, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
detox, 1.1-1.2
immigrants and natives, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
media, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2
technology, 1.1-1.2
technology, net worth of, 1.1-1.2
distraction, theory of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Doidge, Norman, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
Duckworth, Angela, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Dweck, Carol, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

E
ecological validity, 1 , 2
Edwards, Betty, 1.1-1.2 , 2
efficiency of muscular movement, 1 , 2 , 3
effort, as requirement for learning, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 ,
10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14.1-14.2 , 15.1-15.2 , 16 , 17 , 18.1-18.2 ,
19.1-19.2 , 20 , 21.1-21.2 , 22
embodied cognition See cognition, embodied
emotion, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2
attention, learning and memory, role in, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 ,
4.1-4.2 , 5
automatic processing role in, 1
disavowal of, 1.1-1.2
empathy and, 1 , 2.1-2.2
history of, 1.1-1.2 , 2
operating systems, Panksepp’s, 1.1-1.2 , 2
practicing, 1 , 2.1-2.2
response in performance anxiety, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
return of, to scientific inquiry, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
speech, role in, 1.1-1.2 , 2
empathy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2
deficit of, drop in, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
definition of, 1.1-1.2
mirror neuron system, and, 1.1-1.2
social neuroscience of, field, 1.1-1.2 , 2
teaching, and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
trust, and, 1.1-1.2
environmentalism, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Ericsson, K. Anders, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-
9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20
Erskine, Peter, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
executive
attention, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
control, control system, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
function system, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
expertise, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
curse of, 1 , 2.1-2.2
development of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
experts and, 1
parents role in, 1
research in, studies, field, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ,
12 , 13
exposure
is not learning, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
therapy See therapy, exposure
exteroception, 1 , 2
exteroceptive feedback See feedback, exteroceptive

F
feedback, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ,
14
amount of, 1.1-1.2
auditory, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
augmented, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6
bandwidth method of, 1
concurrent, 1.1-1.2
delayed, 1.1-1.2
divisions of (table), 1
exteroceptive, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
filled feedback-delay intervals, 1
frequency of, 1.1-1.2
immediate, 1.1-1.2 , 2
inherent, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
instantaneous, 1.1-1.2
manipulation, 1.1-1.2
summary, 1
terminal, 1.1-1.2
See also power posing
feedforward instructional technique, 1.1-1.2
fixed brain theory See brain, fixed theory of
T
the flow, go with, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
See also optimal experience, theory of

F
functional equivalence hypothesis, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
functional specialization theory, 1.1-1.2

G
Gage, Phineas, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
Gagné, Françoys, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Gardner, Howard, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ,
12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
Gazzaniga, Michael, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2
generalizability, 1
Gilfry, Rod, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
goals
disengagement from, 1.1-1.2 , 2
goal-setting, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8
motor learning, of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
Gorilla Experiment, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Greene, Don, 1 , 2
grit, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8
guidance hypothesis, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

H
Hallowell, Edward M., 1 , 2
Harris, Judith Rich, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Hebb’s Rule, 1 , 2
Hermann, Ellen, 1.1-1.2
historical time, expertise over, 1
homophily, 1 , 2

I
inattentional blindness, 1
instrumentalists, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
guitarists, 1.1-1.2 , 2
percussionists, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
pianists (keyboard), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
string players, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7
wind players, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
interruption
science of, 1.1-1.2
technologies, 1.1-1.2
introspectionism, 1
ironic
effect, 1.1-1.2 , 2
processes of mental control, theory of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

J
Jackson, Maggie, 1 , 2 , 3
jazz, 1 , 2 , 3
improvisation, fMRI study of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
See also brain, neural substrates of, under spontaneous musical
performance (jazz)
just-do-it principle, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

K
Kageyama, Noa, 1
Kandel, Eric, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9
Kanengiser, William, 1 , 2.1-2.2
Koffka, Kurt, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Kohn, Alfie, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Krakauer, John, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6
Kraus, Nina, 1 , 2 , 3

L
Lang Lang, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
Langella, Frank, 1.1-1.2 , 2
learned helplessness, 1.1-1.2 , 2
learning, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-
10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12
LeDoux, Joseph, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Lee, Timothy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Lehrer, Jonah, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6
declarative, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
defined, 1.1-1.2
difference between performance and, 1.1-1.2 , 2
experiential, 1
exposure and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
neurological basis of, 1.1-1.2 , 2
prerequisite for, 1.1-1.2
procedural, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2
styles, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
triumvirate of, 1.1-1.2 , 2
See also motor learning
Limb, Charles, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
Lisboa, Tânia, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5

M
maladaptive persistence See persistence,
maladaptive/nonproductive
Mandler, George, 1 , 2
manipulation
hands-on use of in motor learning, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
maintenance plus, in learning, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Marcus, Gary, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Mark, Gloria, 1 , 2 , 3
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 1 , 2
masterclass syndrome, 1.1-1.2 , 2

T
the Maxim (Montero), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
M
McGilchrist, Iain, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
measurability, 1.1-1.2
meditation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
melodic intonation therapy (MIT), 1.1-1.2
memory
age-related decline, 1 , 2
biological bases of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
consolidation of, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
constructed, constructive, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
episodic, 1
impaired, 1
learning and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2
, 12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18.1-18.2 , 19 , 20
long-term, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12
short-term, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8
working, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10
See also cues, memory
mental
health, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9
representations, motor imagery, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
See also practice, mental
mentalism, 1.1-1.2
Merzenich, Michael, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
method acting See acting, method
Midori, 1.1-1.2
Miller, George, 1 , 2
Miller, Wayne, 1 , 2 , 3
Miller, Zell, governor of Georgia, 1.1-1.2
mind
decade of, 1 , 2
new science of, 1
wandering mode, 1.1-1.2
mind-body problem, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
mindset, Dweck’s, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6
mirror neurons See neurons, mirror
Montero, Barbara, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9
motor
pattern/plan/program, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11
, 12 , 13 , 14.1-14.2
simulation theory, a.k.a. functional equivalence hypothesis, 1.1-1.2 ,
2,3,4
three phases of, in learning and performance, 1
See also mental, representations, motor imagery
motor learning (all), 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
attentional focus in See attention, focus of
definition, 1.1-1.2
feedback in, 1 , 2 , 3
language as barrier to, 1
manipulation in motor learning See manipulation
retention in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
theory, field of, 1 , 2 , 3
motor performance
feedback in, 1
goals of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
hallmark of, 1
skill, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
transfer in, 1 , 2 , 3
See also choking
Mozart
Leopold (father), 1 , 2 , 3
Nannerl (sister), 1 , 2
Wolfgang Amadeus, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

T
the Mozart effect, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-
11.2 , 12.1-12.2 , 13

M
multiple intelligences (MI), theory of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
multitasking, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
music, 1.1-1.2
audience behavior, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
Boethius, treatise on, 1.1-1.2 , 2
brain and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8
cheesecake as (Pinker), 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
emotion, empathy, and, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
intelligence (MI theory), 1.1-1.2
pedagogy, 1.1-1.2
perception and cognition, field of, 1
torture, weapon of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
use of, evolutionary, 1.1-1.2 , 2
music performance anxiety (MPA), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

N
narcissism, 1 , 2
narcissism epidemic, 1.1-1.2
Nass, Clifford, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
nature versus nurture debate, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
nervous system
autonomic (ANS), 1
parasympathetic (PNS), 1.1-1.2 , 2
sympathetic (SNS), 1.1-1.2 , 2
networking, 1
neural
decline, age-related, 1
network, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
pathway, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2
neuroaesthetics, 1.1-1.2 , 2
neurogenesis, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6
neuromyths, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
neurons, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 ,
12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14 , 15
mirror, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
neuroplasticity, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12.1-12.2
, 13.1-13.2 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21.1-21.2 , 22.1-
22.2
cross-modal, 1
neuroscience, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12 ,
13 , 14 , 15.1-15.2 , 16.1-16.2 , 17.1-17.2 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ,
24.1-24.2 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28
affective, 1 , 2
of empathy, 1.1-1.2 , 2
of music, 1.1-1.2 , 2
nihilism, neurological, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Nussbaum, Martha, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

O
Obama, Barack, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
operant conditioning, 1.1-1.2
optimal experience, theory of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
overload, cognitive See cognitive, overload

P
Panksepp, Jaak, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5
parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) See nervous system,
parasympathetic (PNS)
parenting, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 ,
10
parents
helicopter, 1
importance of to young musicians, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 ,
6,7,8
performance, difference between learning and, 1.1-1.2
performance shifts, 1.1-1.2
negative, 1.1-1.2
positive, 1.1-1.2
Perry, Antoinette, 1 , 2 , 3
persistence, maladaptive/nonproductive, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
personalities, brain, 1
phones, cell and smart, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Pierce, Stephen, 1 , 2 , 3
Pinker, Steven, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 ,
12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
plan
individualized education, 1
motor, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
for practice and performance, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
plastic paradox, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
plasticity, neural See neuroplasticity
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 1
postural feedback effect See power posing
power posing, 1.1-1.2 , 2
practice
deliberate, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 , 12
empathy and, 1
mental, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Mozart and, 1.1-1.2 , 2
performance anxiety and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2
power law of, 1
10,000 Hour Practice Rule, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
three rules of effective, 1.1-1.2
praise, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8
inverse power of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
pre-attention See attention, pre-attentional phase of
proprioception, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9
psychoacoustics, 1
psychology
academic, and American school of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 ,
8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17
cognitive, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
evolutionary, 1.1-1.2 , 2
experimental, 1 , 2
mainstream, standard, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10
popular, 1 , 2
positive, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
reproducibility crisis in, 1 , 2 , 3
social, 1
sports, 1 , 2

Q
quitting
upside of, 1 , 2.1-2.2
See also persistence, maladaptive/nonproductive

R
rarefaction and compression (of a sound wave), 1
Ratey, John, 1 , 2
reaction time, 1.1-1.2 , 2
recombination, 1
repeatability, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
resilience training, 1.1-1.2 , 2
rewards, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12
roadblock, roadblocking, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Robinson, Daniel, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Robinson, Terry, 1 , 2
Romero, Pepe, 1
See also motor learning, retention in See also psychology,
reproducibility crisis in

S
Sacks, Oliver, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Schellenberg, Glenn, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
schema theory, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
schemas, schemata, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Schlaug, Gottfried, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
Schmidt, Richard, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10
screen
addiction, 1 , 2
invasion, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
self-consciousness See consciousness, of the self, self-
consciousness
Seligman, Martin, 1
sidetone, 1
singing, singers, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12
, 13.1-13.2 , 14 , 15.1-15.2
special cognitive dissonance of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Skinner, B. F., 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
sleep, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
Small, Gary, 1.1-1.2 , 2
Snead, Sam, 1 , 2
Snow, C. P., 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
Society for Music Perception and Cognition, 1 , 2
somatic marker hypothesis, 1 , 2 , 3
somatic symptoms, effects, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8
sound, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
airborne, direct airborne, 1.1-1.2 , 2
body-conducted, 1.1-1.2 , 2
bone-conducted, 1.1-1.2 , 2
definitions of, 1 , 2.1-2.2
indirect airborne, 1.1-1.2 , 2
processing, in the brain, 1.1-1.2
PTSD, as trigger for, 1 , 2
riddle of, 1.1-1.2
room-reflected, 1.1-1.2 , 2
spatial orientation, 1
Sperry, Roger, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
stage fright, 1
Stanley, Jason, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6
STEM topics, 1
Sternberg, Robert, 1.1-1.2
stress, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2
conditioning, 1.1-1.2
response, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7
suppression
during sleep, 1.1-1.2
thought, 1
synapses, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7
synaptic pruning, 1.1-1.2 , 2

T
talent, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10.1-10.2
development of, 1.1-1.2
task
switch cost, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
switching, 1 , 2
therapy
alternative, for MPA, 1.1-1.2
behavioral, 1
cognitive, 1 , 2 , 3
cognitive behavioral, 1
desensitization
exposure, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
melodic intonation, music, 1 , 2 , 3
psychodynamic or psychoanalytic, 1 , 2
tiger mother, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8
Turkle, Sherry, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
Twenge, Jean, 1.1-1.2 , 2
two cultures See culture, two, C. P. Snow’s

U
unlearning, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

V
vocalist See singing, singers
voice, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
science, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
volition, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

W
Watson, John B., 1.1-1.2
Wegner, Daniel, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7
Wernicke, Carl, 1 , 2 , 3

T
The White Bear Problem See bear, The White Bear Problem
W
Wilson, Edmund, 1 , 2 , 3
Winner, Ellen, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Wulf, Gabriele, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ,
13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17

Y
Yerkes–Dodson Law, 1
yoga, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
Young, Kimberly S., 1

Z
Zukerman, Pinchas, 1
 About the Author

Lynn Helding is professor of practice in vocal arts and opera

and coordinator of vocology and voice pedagogy at the University of
Southern California Thornton School of Music.
Ms. Helding is a thought leader within the dynamic field of
contemporary voice science, or vocology, and was thus elected to
lead the founding of the first nonprofit vocology association, the Pan
American Vocology Association (PAVA). She is an associate editor of
the Journal of Singing and creator of the journal’s Mindful Voice
column, which illuminates current research in the cognitive, neuro-,
and social sciences as they relate to music teaching, learning, and
performance. She is in demand as a master teacher and popular
lecturer on cognitive topics at universities, conferences, and
workshops across the United States and Canada.