Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum I know how mistakes happen!

It's about how they happen, but as you ask - a mistake can't be undone, unlearned, or changed. You can only work around it. And thanks, but no thanks, for the web etiquette advice.

Need I say any more (about this rude, pseudo-intellectual charlatan)?

Please don't.

+1

This is unconscious flattery to Keyboardklutz' conscious unconscious.

kbk -

I, too, would like to know if you have found experimental research that this is indeed the way what you call the non-conscious works - that once a mistake is made it keeps trying to correct "a" mistake even after the original mistake has been fixed, and that this is a different phenomenon than others here have described in terms of residual anxiousness or other concern. I've read articles reporting research that shows we often do things before we are consciously aware of intending to do so - moving our fingers to a button in response to a picture on a screen, etc. I also just read an article that talked about the way our brains sometime interpret images in our peripheral vision as something "dangerous" before we can consciously understand what the object actually is. So I think most of us understand that there are things we do with what you call the non-conscious. But I haven't seen anything that indicates it works as you are positing here about mistakes. Is this a hypothesis of yours, interesting as it may be, or is there research that supports it?

Cathy

So mistakes are permanently engraved onto the brain, never to be erased or changed? That just doesn't seem to click with reality. I've imprinted mistakes into my subconscious before, but have always been able to change those mistakes or habits, never to be seen again. And I'm sure plenty of you, including KeyboardKlutz, have experienced this as well. Wouldn't that imply that the mistakes were erased or changed?

As far as how they occur there is an unending source of causes: misunderstanding the piece, mis-reading a note or rhythm, anxiety, nervousness, stage-fright, distraction, etc. I think you can prevent these by being patient and focused while learning and practicing a piece. Never have expectations before you sit down to play. Just accept your ability at that moment, begin within in it, and then build upon it. You will inevitably make a mistake no matter what, because you are human. When you do, correct it then and there before it gets imprinted onto your sub-conscious/limbic brain.

Web etiquette advice politely withdrawn. Voila! (I spelled it right!!!)

Cathy, as far as I know there is no research on the piano and the non-conscious. There is plenty on stuff on embodiment and consciousness. All of it involves theories of body image vs body schema or conscious vs non-conscious. The problem is there is no standard terminology as the 'science' of the non-conscious is fairly recent. You can call my OP an hypothesis if you like, but I experience it.

Maybe. My guess would be they are quarantined and perhaps, given time, fade away.

Yeah, it certainly isn't a cut and dry process. Old mistakes do occasionally rear their heads, and as they say "old habits die hard". "Quarantined" feels right to me.

I'd forgot "old habits die hard". Good one!

Not strictly true. You believe that you experience it, based on a guess. Or are you now proclaiming yourself to have access to what you refer to as the 'non-conscious' mind, permitting you to consciously assess what is going on in there before reporting back to us? Call me a cynic, but I can't help but sniff something of a contradiction. By definition, the non-conscious is that which we are NOT conscious of. But you have transcended such limitations and bridged the divide- allowing you to claim to be fully cogniscent of your unconscious processes?

Regardless, this is hardly enough to warrant a dismissive 'wrong' in response to a poster who holds the more accepted belief that anxiety about certain areas is the issue, or to state your wholly unsupported piece of guesswork as if it were fact (even if this is 'your' thread)...

Oh dear, I had another post disappear into the ether. I'll try to reconstruct it:



I don't think the research would have to be piano-brain specific. Your hypothesis is about the way the non-conscious processes mistakes, which seems to me to be a broader issue than just piano.

I don't doubt that you experience the mistakes "moving" to a different place. But without experimental research, to me your description of what is the ultimate cause of that is not more or less valid than other people's descriptions of their experiences and what seems to them to be the cause - and the fix. Again, I think most of the posters here are aware that there are "non-conscious" actions, and they describe their experience with mistakes, and correcting those mistakes, in varying degress of addressing conscious and non-conscious actions. So while I think yours is an interesting hypothesis, I don't see it as being anything more than that

JMO of course. YMMV

Cathy

That's voilà.

Voila is a form of the verb voiler, which means to veil.

WHAT AN AWESOME THREAD!!!!!!!!

I disagree. One necessarily has expectations, and one has to have an understanding of the piece before being able to learn it. A piece of music is not an assemblage of notes.

As for mistakes or errors, I think that they flow from an insufficient understanding of the piece, of the instrument; you are trying to speak a language that you don't master sufficiently. It is exactly that you see an assemblage of notes, and not the music. You can't see the forest for the trees.

If you take all of times that Horowitzian posts this awesome comment you put him back to the 2000 post club.

I know nothing about teaching piano and little about psychology, but I know a great deal about making mistakes. In fact, I'm one of the world's foremost experts at making mistakes.

Thus I'll forgo my usual reluctance to post on the teacher's forum to make two points:

1. To say mistakes are caused by the "non conscious" mind, is roughly equal to saying they're caused by green cylindrical creatures from the planet Tralfamadore. There's no way to prove it one way or the other so it's just idle speculation.

2. To suggest that anything regarding avoiding or preventing mistakes is off-topic makes the whole discussion about as pertenent as a game of tic tac toe.

[edited for brevity]

There's a vital difference though. A forest is a bunch of trees placed anywhere. You can afford to look at the whole without caring about any individual component. A performance of a piece requires the notes to be inter-related in a particularly specific layout. In other words, you need a 'forest' where every 'tree' is in exactly the right place. The only way to create such a specifically laid out 'forest', is to concern yourself with the placement of every individual 'tree'. Only having done so, can you begin to step back.

It's all very well to learn something and go on to stop concentrating on fine details so actively. If you never learned something in the first place however, the difference is collossal. It's looking too much at the 'forest' too soon, that leads to people tripping up. Start walking around without lookning up to observe the individual 'trees' (before you've got to know things terribly well) and you might just end up tripping over a 'tree' that wasn't where you expected it to be.

That seems to be the case when you don't know anything about forests.




I am not in agreement with you, Nyiregyhazi.

If you don't know that the piece before you is, say, a minuet, you will never understand the notes that make it up. The more you know concerning minuets, the better you are able to see or to hear what is going on, and to sit down and play it well.