I find it interesting how the mind works, especially related to learning. We are all so different in so many ways and learning is no exception!. While preparing to write a review of a project for a class recently I was reading about learning and encoding new material into memory I came across the fact that we automatically store things in multiple categories. As Julie Dirksen explains it in her book Design for How People Learn, you can think of memory as categorizing things onto shelves you create over time through learning and experiences. The more “shelves” you have that you can use to store a word, new idea, or other learned concept on, the more likely you are to retain it.   The human brain creates patterns and the more patterns you have to access the information, the more likely you are to be able to recall it when you need it!

As a music teacher my mind immediately went back to a teacher who taught me a learning concept that I’ve used regularly with my own students when helping them learn to practice. She would remind her students that looking at your music from multiple angles created different learning paths in the brain and the more paths you had, the better you knew your music, and the less likely you were to forget it or stumble under stress. First we would learn to read the music, hands apart, then put the hands together. After that we practiced by starting the piece wherever she would point on the music, then we memorized the piece, and finally we would work on playing it with our eyes closed. Once she mentioned this to me I always wondered how or why that would work, but it sure did seem to work.

When I look at the concept of shelves I can see how her method of learning music allows students to place the learned piece on different shelves.  There are actually a few more they can place them on including genre, key of the piece, era, and so on. And, I can certainly say that the better I knew a piece and thought of it in different ways, the less likely I was to make a mistake or forget what I was playing. Well, it worked for me unless someone else was in the room at least. Stage fright has haunted me for a very long time and it seems that no matter how well I know a piece of music if there’s someone else in the room all the rules go out the window, but that’s a story for another time!

April 9, 2018