I bought my wife a Nintendo DS with Brain Training for Christmas. Obviously, I’ve taken it upon myself to do as much testing (*cough*) as possible and am now pretty hooked, playing with it on a daily basis.
One of the games that is featured is called Low To High. You are given a brief glimpse of various shaped grids with numbers in it. The number disappear and you then have to click the squares in the correct order. Some of the grids are easy – just four numbers in a square. Others are harder – a line of eight numbers or a more random gridded shape. I’ve got a crap memory (mainly because I’m lazy and use my iPhone or the web to help me remember..well, everything), so this game is particularly interesting.
In playing this, I’ve noticed an interesting “dual mode” of memory emerging. On the one hand, I can do what I guess most people do – read through the numbers and then recite their order to myself as I figure out which empty boxes to click first. This is accurate (usually 100%) but very slow. It’s surprising how difficult it is to order numbers when you’re under time pressure…
The second method, which is rather more interesting, feels less like a “scan” and more like a “snapshot”. I find that – provided I let myself relax enough to not think I can – sometimes – literally glance at the numbers as a whole without looking at the actual detail of which one is bigger than which, and then rapidly select the order. This is at least five and possibly ten times faster than the first method. But it’s not reliable. When I can do it, it works, but for the most part it’s very hard to relax enough to let it happen. It’s intuitive rather than procedural.
Two things came to my mind with this. Firstly, it reminded me of Blink, the Malcom Gladwell book about rapid cognition:
Gladwell maintains that we “blink” when we think without thinking. We do that by “thin-slicing,” using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than they do with volumes of analysis.
The key point here is that I quite noticeably break my ability to “snapshot remember” if I think too hard about it. I can’t run the two processes next to each other – instead needing to actively prevent myself thinking about the order of the numbers if the snapshot/blink method is going to work.
The second thing relates to the way I play the piano. I’ve been playing since I was – well, forever. I’m not nearly as good as I once was, but I’m still at a pretty reasonable level.
There’s a huge level of intuition when it comes to piano playing which feels similar to the Brain Training / Blink examples. Once you’re at a particular level as a pianist, you pretty much literally follow your fingers – your brain is somewhere there but not actively processing each finger movement. It’s hard to explain, but if you listen to, say Maurizio Pollini playing a Chopin Etude, you’ll probably begin to understand that this speed and accuracy doesn’t – can’t – come from anything other than intuition.
With piano playing, things are a little different to the DS example – sometimes, particularly when you practice and re-practice a phrase your only strategy is to start slowly and work (then re-work…again and again…) on each individual finger movement. The holy grail moment is when you can release yourself from this active thinking and switch into something more intuitive. For me this is a very tangible moment – it’s very clearly when you stop thinking.
What’s also interesting – as I found recently when stumbling badly through the first half of a Beethoven Sonata before suddenly finding myself able to play one particular section incredibly well – is that this memory is deeply embedded. I’d forgotten until that moment that this latter section was one I’d worked and worked on until it became intuitive. Maybe 5 years had passed since this intensive practice, but the memory of it was still there.
