Why You Can’t Think and Play at the Same Time
1. Thinking
There are many moments when playing the piano when your brain seemingly empties out onto the floor. There’s often a feeling before playing something of “I should easily be able to do this”, yet sometimes, when you try to do it, it doesn’t quite turn out to be as easy to play as you thought.
Why is that? What causes the discrepancy between what we think we should be able to do and what we can actually do?
Well, the answer is that when we are inside our own heads and have the full ability to think (without distributing focus to physical movements or trying to play under time pressure), we have more bandwidth available to think through what is actually happening in the music. However, when extra elements are added (particularly with the ever moving time pressure of the music), we have to prioritise our focus. This means that many things quickly get thrown out of the window (either that or everything starts to fall apart).
The problem is that you are trying to control your fingers, your timing, the dynamics, the rhythm, and which keys to press all at the same time. If any of these requires a particularly high amount of focus, then it may mean that it becomes difficult to continue.
Imagine that your focus is a battery that is at 100%. If you are playing a piece, you might be applying 50% focus to which notes to play, 10% to the correct fingers, 10% to dynamics, etc. You may be playing a piece and operating at 90% total focus used (leaving 10% to focus on what you are going to have for dinner). However, if you come across a section in the music where the fingers are a little less stable and you need to apply more focus to that (let’s say now the fingers are 40% of your focus), then you have exceeded your 100% available focus and the piece will start to fall apart.
Although this is a rather simple analogy for the complexity of the brain, this is, in essence, what is happening when you play. Before you start playing, the level of focus you require to analyse and understand the piece is far lower, so you are able to pay more attention. But when you start to play, your focus starts to prioritise and “thinking” becomes a luxury.
2. Playing
Having said that, you can use this information to your advantage. As you become more familiar with something, it requires less focus. Your battery becomes more efficient. Instead of the notes requiring 50% focus, it might come down to 30% of your focus. Once you have used the same fingers for a section of a piece of music many times, it might fall from 10% of your focus to 5%.
This means that if you are playing a piece of music and you have no brain space left, then you need to bring down your focus utilisation from elsewhere.
Typically, we can do this in two ways; the first of which is through repetition. Very much like a muscle, each element of a piece of music that needs focus will become much stronger and more reliable with repetition. However, the repetitions need to be correct in order for your brain to strengthen its synaptic pathways and become less thought intensive. If you play with a different set of fingers each time, then this will become much less stable rather than more stable and will require more focus.
The second real-time way in which you can reduce the focus required is by isolating or reducing the speed of the music.
By isolating a section of a piece of music, you can apply more focus to that particular section. It’s a little bit like a sprinter vs a distance runner. The sprinter can apply much more power because it’s only required for a short period of time, whereas the long distance runner needs to go at a pace that is sustainable.
Reducing the speed, similarly, gives you more time to think before the music moves on, so this also reduces the focus required. By slowing the speed by 50%, you might need 50% less focus for each aspect of the music (the numbers here are made up, but the idea is the important part).
3. Separation
What this tells us is that we can gain a lot of information about a piece of music and what we need to work on just by how brain intensive it is to play. If something feels like it requires a lot of focus to play correctly, then you can reduce the speed or isolate sections to reduce the level of focus required.
Similarly, if you are making mistakes, then this means you have exceeded your 100% available “brain battery” and you need to adapt to start bringing those numbers down.
Although it is never going to be the case that you are able to apply the same level of focus to what’s happening in a piece of music while actually playing it, we do want to try to allow enough space to think about how we want the music to come across to a listener.
If you find that you are playing and aren’t able to leave enough space to focus on how you want to shape a piece of music and what that piece of music means, then maybe you should try reducing that brain battery utilisation.
Matt
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