The Centipede’s Dilemma
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
(First, a retelling of the original)
> High above the forest floor, a millipede strolled along the branch of a tree, her thousand pairs of legs swinging in an easy gait. From the tree top, song birds looked down, fascinated by the synchronization of the millipede's stride. “That's an amazing talent,” chirped the songbirds. “You have more limbs than we can count. How do you do it?” And for the first time in her life the millipede thought about this. “Yes,” she wondered, “how do I do what I do?” As she turned to look back, her bristling legs suddenly ran into one another and tangled like vines of ivy. The songbirds laughed as the millipede, in a panic of confusion, twisted herself into a knot and fell to the earth below.
(The second part)
> On the forest floor, the millipede, realizing that only her pride was hurt, slowly, carefully, limb by limb, unraveled herself. With patience and hard work, she studied and flexed and tested her appendages, until she was able to stand and walk. What was once instinct became knowledge. She realized she didn’t have to move at her old, slow, rote pace. She could amble, strut, prance, even run and jump. Then, as never before, she listened to the symphony of the songbirds and let music touch her heart. Now in perfect command of thousands of talented legs, she gathered courage and, with a style of her own, danced and danced a dazzling dance that astonished all the creatures of her world.
Judging from the bibliography of the wiki page, there doesn't seem to be much (recent) research into the effect. I'd love to know more about the nature of these (automatic) neural "highways" and why conscious thought can't reliably interact with them the way it can with the regular pathways.
I don't know my password at all. I remember it in terms of finger movements.
I also cannot resume at any location but only at specific “keyframes.”
That's a bit like reciting a poem from memory, from my experience, as if these things were memorized associatively in sequence, like a linked list.
The there's instinctive shooting style where you just basically look at what you want to hit and muscle memory does the rest. It's amazing how accurate this can be.
- Muscle memory is extremely transient; it starts to fade a bit after just a day or two of not practicing one specific piece, and drops off extremely quickly the longer you go.
- Your sense of timing in muscle memory is based on how long it takes for you to physically move your fingers, rather than on the rhythm of the piece. This means that as your muscle memory gets better and better, you unconsciously and inconsistently speed up, causing you to actually become worse at maintaining a steady tempo.
- Muscle memory immortalizes bad technique/"shortcuts" that you took early on in learning the piece. This can cause sloppy playing; inconsistent ability to nail tricky sections; an inability to push the piece beyond a certain tempo; or even repetitive strain injury.
- As you observed, your muscle memory can't get you back on track if you get disrupted.
- Muscle memory doesn't work when you're playing with other people, because you need to be able to consciously adapt your playing to your bandmates.
- You can't improvise/transpose/adapt your playing on-the-fly when relying solely on muscle memory.
- Muscle memory will randomly fail you at the most inopportune times, especially when you're nervous. It's no fun to suddenly forget all your music whenever you try to play in front of people!
My piano teacher taught me a variety of practice techniques designed to disrupt muscle memory; to force me to be able to play a piece because I know it in my mind and not just in my fingers. For example:
- Metronome! Lots and lots of metronome practice. Putting it on the metronome trains you to play to the pulse of the piece, and playing at a variety of speeds disrupts muscle memory because of how timing-dependent muscle memory is. My teacher recommended starting each practice session by playing each piece half-speed on the metronome, and repeating a few times at increasing speeds until reaching my desired tempo.
- Practicing in "rhythms": play a section (with just one hand), pausing briefly after every other note. Then play it again, but pause after the other notes this time. For me, this does wonders for tricky scale-like runs, because those little pauses force me to consider each transition between notes.
- "Backwards practice": play the last measure of a section, then play the two last measures, then the three last measures, etc. This is remarkably effective for me, especially in learning how to resume playing the piece anywhere rather than just at specific spots (which is really important for being able to smoothly recover from mistakes).
All of these practice techniques are infuriating, because suddenly really easy stuff you can play in your sleep is hard! But the goal is to reach a point where you have comfortable muscle memory, and are able to play without thinking too hard about it -- but you also have the "head knowledge" to keep you on track, and to fall back on when your muscle memory suddenly fails you.
Practicing a piece to perfection or at least a presentable quality might be good for motivation. But for long term improvement my guess is that the time needed for that would better be spent on sight reading, by ear, or technique. Reducing the time to learn some piece later.
Might cause confusing chats: I've been practicing X for Y years -- can you play something? -- actually, not really.
That made me think about my security code and I also couldn't remember! But the thought tripped me up so much, that I couldn't let it go and the next time I had to withdraw some cash, I didn't know what to put in. I actually had to return my card and get a new one a few days later. Now I make a conscious effort to think about what I am entering.
I put my credit card PINs and my Android pattern in my password manager after that. Still makes me wonder how I would access my secrets if I were to forget the thing I enter several times a day, every day.
Sadly so far there's no evidence to back up Douglas Adams' theory that we're all able to fly if we could stop ourselves thinking about how we're clearly not biologically capable of it and would injure or kill ourselves hitting the ground if we tried.
To relate this to the article, it seems like unless you're really good at "consciously" playing poker, then playing thoughtlessly (like the centipede) is probably your best bet and how you often see beginners stitching up all but the real masters.
This phenomenon is absolutely everywhere.
On the other hand, high levels of competence has the downside of usually being really surprised when you do make a mistake, especially on something you didn't even think was a task a person might need to be careful with.
State-dependent memory isn't the only factor, though. Things like relaxation could well have an even larger impact.
These times feels almost like beginners luck when you barely have any context and just trying things--like hitting that tiny bonus target while axe throwing for the first time as a hail mary, 'why not go for it?' shot.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/13/its-time-end...
NB: Poetry for Physicists doesn't exist. Physicists apparently are fonts of general knowledge who can learn, nay, MASTER, any topic in full without a special one-semester class. This is satirized in the Sheldon Cooper character.
An action so unconsious, that the moment you think about it, becomes incredibly taxing