> But you don't think about what your finger does, do you?
>
> No, that's precisely the point. When re-reading the sentence above I think
> I should clarify that I meant "thinking with the finger" i.e. that the
> thought itself is happening "in the finger" and not only in the brain.
> (if that makes sense). Neither in typing nor guitar playing do I
> think about what my fingers are doing. I'm just saying that thinking
> and playing seem to be pretty much the same process (in real-time)
> when playing acoustic instruments whereas thinking and programming
> has this special latency.
>
> That's where the Flow comes in. I agree that one can get totally absorbed
> in a coding session but that's not the same type of (embodied) flow
> that we have with the instruments we play.
>
Muscle Memory is a term I remember hearing frequently as a
justification for "practice." Be it playing soccer or playing piano,
the point of the practice was to train the subconscious parts of our
brain to react (or cause our body to react) in a certain way. I
believe it is the ability to "push down" (in the cognitive sense) the
act of playing an instrument to lower levels of conciseness that
enables virtuosity. Active consciousness is slow. The notion of
"being in the zone" for physical endeavors such as sports or playing
an instrument is similar to the "flow" we describe when programming.
Our hands certainly can become accustomed to typing certain patterns (
hammering out System.out.println without even thinking....) but this
"muscle memory" is just language syntax. Do our hands have the
ability to store actual algorithms? That is to say, can we actually
train our subconscious to react to a situation with certain
algorithms? Perhaps an efficient syntax would enable more direct
access to this Muscle Memory....
OR
Are we trying to offload the subconscious aspects of the endeavor to
the machine? The machine memory IS our muscle memory, and the human
is the purely-conscious actor imbibing "will" to the machine. Thus
the computer is merely an extension of ourselves. So then I would ask
why bother with our hands at all? (
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/ )
--
mcb
Received on Wed Sep 06 2006 - 19:46:07 BST