Why More Effort Can Lead to More Mistakes
Effort
A while back, I was doing some research for a video about how long it actually takes to learn the piano. In that research, one thing kept appearing over and over again. I have mentioned it a few times in videos, these Monday Music Tips and in posts inside The Practice Room. However, the topic itself warrants its own article. That is the idea of “cognitive load”.
Many of us, when practicing, are trying to fight our brain’s natural comprehension and focus capacity. A study was done in 1988 by John Sweller in which he developed the Cognitive Load Theory. His idea was that working memory has a limited capacity. For the piano, that means that if you are trying to focus on the notes, rhythms, fingering, dynamics, articulation, pedalling and everything else, then your cognitive load and the demand on your working memory are very high. Which is made even worse if we get something wrong and try to focus harder on that particular thing. That might be some wrong notes, a wrong rhythm, incorrect fingering or some missing dynamics.
Interestingly, another study found that working memory can hold around seven items at a time. For a motor skill like the piano, which requires some automation of your hands, not everything that you play is in your working memory. It is typically the things that are less secure or are new within a piece of music, so essentially, the things that are more likely to cause a mistake. Schneider and Shiffrin carried out a very famous study in 1977 which showed that there is a difference between controlled processing (something that is slow, conscious and effortful) and automatic processing (something that is fast, effortless and unconscious). The game in piano playing is to begin with controlled processing and turn that into automatic processing.
So this tells us quite a lot about how we can use the way that our brain works in order to learn the piano much more effectively without increasing the cognitive load or fighting against our natural capacities.
Attention
So how should you practice?
Well, from the studies, the aim of the game is to play with as low a cognitive load as possible so that you have more focus for the things that you can’t yet do, and also to play slowly, consciously and effortfully so that, with repetition, we can automate those things.
The better we get at the piano, the more processes become automatic. If you think about recognising notes on the page, playing arpeggio patterns on the piano, scales or any other element that makes up learning the piano, these begin as high-effort, conscious activities, but over time they become automatic and part of your vocabulary.
When first learning to play a C major scale, the only task is to play the correct fingers on the correct keys in your right hand, then in your left hand, and then hands together. Playing a C major scale just in your right hand is a much easier task because the cognitive load is reduced to just one or two things, which is playing the correct notes with the correct fingers. However, as many will know, when you first try to play a C major scale hands together, suddenly your focus is split and the cognitive load increases drastically. Once you have automated playing a C major scale, though, if you see it in a piece of music, it becomes something that doesn’t require quite so much attention.
The difficulty comes when some of these processes are automatic and others are not within the same context. Now, if you imagine that you’re learning a piece of music where there are lots of different types of things that you are required to play, you may see a C major scale, some big jumps in the music, some staccato notes, a key signature you’re less familiar with, a tempo that requires you to process things faster, some awkward rhythms or countless other things. In this situation, you have to be much more conscious about how you reduce the cognitive load, depending on how many of these things are already automated or still require slow, conscious and effortful practice.
Direction
The brain isn’t really designed to consciously control lots of different things simultaneously. In fact, another study was done by Meyer, Evans and Rubinstein in 2001 which showed that our brain can’t really focus on multiple things simultaneously at all. Instead, we task-switch very quickly. Our attention shifts from one thing to another in rapid succession.
This is the exact reason that a teacher can give you one correction in a piece of music and suddenly the whole piece falls apart. It’s not because you’ve suddenly got worse. It’s because your attention has had to move somewhere else, which means that the things you were previously focusing on can no longer occupy the same attention.
So this means that, in order to get better at the piano, we have to; focus on one thing, reduce the cognitive load and play something slowly, consciously and effortfully until that particular thing is automated.
But what does that mean in practice?
Well, the answer is quite simple and something I’ve mentioned many times before. Don’t play through a piece of music, practise it instead. Find a single mistake so that you are able to focus on it with relatively low cognitive load and play it slowly, consciously and with effort many times until it becomes automated. Then find another mistake and do the same again. Playing the piano is a little bit like whack-a-mole in the sense that, over time, we are trying to find mistakes and iron those mistakes out so that they are no longer mistakes in future pieces of music. If you do that enough times, there will be very few things that come up in pieces of music that you haven’t seen before and already fixed.
So if you find yourself practicing and feeling overwhelmed by the number of mistakes or the number of things that you need to do, focus on just one, work on making it automatic and work with how your brain works rather than against it.
Matt