*this article was originally published in Saxophone Today (Jan 2017)*
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Can
Dyslexia Teach Us About Learning Music?
As a university saxophone professor, a
large portion of my work is spent helping students to learn repertoire. I’m also constantly working on new music,
while trying to keep the old standards as fresh as possible. This heavy emphasis on the learning process has
lead to an obsession with increasingly effective methods of learning (and
teaching). We all have limits to the
amount of time that we can devote to practicing, so we need to make every
moment count. I am particularly
interested in what we can learn from modern technology, so when I heard Gabrielle Emanuel’s fascinating NPR report on current
research to better understand dyslexia, http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/11/29/503693391/researchers-study-what-makes-dyslexic-brains-different, I was very excited about what I perceived to be obvious
parallels between understanding the way humans read written words and the way
we read music. Moreover, a method for
helping dyslexics to improve reading skills seems likely to have applications
in music.
In the big picture, written language is a
relatively new development for humans.
Evolution has hard-wired our brains for certain critical skills, like
recognizing faces and learning spoken language, but reading requires a step
beyond pure instinct. Without getting
too technical (and I encourage you to read Emanuel’s excellent article for slightly
more detailed information), our brain likes to take pictures of things. The first time you see an object, your brain
needs to learn what the object looks like, and that means recognizing it from
many angles. Figuring something out for
the first time happens in a particular part of the brain, but a different
structure takes over when you can recognize an object in the abstract. For example, if you see a car from the rear,
you still easily recognize it as a car.
This skill involves a certain part of the brain called the occipitotemporal
cortex. Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI) shows that this area of the brain is not only used for
recognizing objects, but it also plays an important role in reading written
language.
Our brains basically try to take “pictures” of
words, so that we can quickly recognize those words without having to sound
them out every time we see them. This
allows the brain to treat common words like symbols, seeing them as discrete
objects, rather than a bunch of letters.
If you see the word “the,” your brain recognizes it quickly because it
has stored an image of that word. Words
like this are known as sight words,
and they are a vital component of learning to read. Unlike cars, words are not objects that have
the same meaning from different angles; think about a young child that writes
some of their letters backwards, or reverses mirror-image letters like
lowercase b and d. This is unnatural for
the brain, which is why we all need time and practice to learn the art of
reading and writing. [I taught myself to
write with both hands, but I sometimes have trouble writing lower case q with
my right hand, because I can’t remember which way the letter is oriented, but
this only happens with my non-dominant hand, and only when I am tired!] Dyslexics exhibit difficulty with sight
words, and fMRI shows that their brains are less active in the involved neural
structures when they are exposed to sight words, when compared to
non-dyslexics. Everyone must learn that
a car, when viewed from any angle, is always a car, but letters and words are
like one-way streets – direction matters!
Emanuel goes on to explain research being
conducted by Guinevere Eden of Georgetown University. In short, subjects with dyslexia were given
intense training in learning to recognize words at sight, which resulted in a
measured increase in activity in the appropriate structures of the brain. Moreover, fMRI showed an increase of activity
in other parts of the brain,
suggesting that the brain can compensate for problems in some areas by
recruiting other structures. This can
also be seen in patients with brains damaged by injury. With disciplined practice, the brain forges
new neural pathways.
In many ways, reading music is identical to
reading language. When we first learn to
read music, we count the lines and spaces on the staff and use a mnemonic
device (like “Every Good Boy Does Fine”) to determine the note names. With practice, our brains will memorize an
image of the staff, and then quickly identify note names by their positions in
the staff. I find it particularly
interesting that an inexperienced music reader might confuse B with D, for
example, because the two notes form a similar image, especially if one
temporarily loses the visual center line of the staff. From a more advanced perspective, scale
passages are quickly recognized at sight, and the same holds true for triads
and chordal structures. A similar
process happens when reading rhythms, where we go from having to count out the
individual components to seeing a group of notes as an image that is a symbol
for a certain cliché. Young readers can
easily execute quarter notes in a row, but syncopated figures are like little
riddles that must be solved (sounded out?) before they can become grouped into
images that can be recognized at sight.
All
this had me thinking about a method of practicing that I use, and how this
method could be refined to take advantage of the brain’s strong tendency to
organize components into meaningful image-symbols. I tried working on some long, complex lines
of music using the following method:
1. Divide the line into clear visual groupings of notes.
2. Play each group slowly with a pause between each group.
3. Gradually increase the tempo within each group, but maintain a
pause between groups.
4. Play the line very slowly with no pauses, but still try to see
each group as a separate unit within the longer line.
5. Play in time, as written, increasing to the desired tempo.
In my own practice, this method worked very
well. In a relatively short amount of
time, I was able to see each group as a “chunk,” and my eyes were
free to move ahead to the next grouping while I was still playing the notes of
the previous group. I tried it with some
of my students who came to their lessons with trouble spots in their prepared
etudes. While none of this was done in a
scientific manner, I can say that the anecdotal evidence of taking the student
through these five steps resulted in a rapid improvement, and the desired
outcome was reached with seemingly far less repetitions than is required by the
common method of repeating the line slowly and very gradually increasing tempo.
There are many well-known approaches to “note
grouping” as a method for learning and interpreting music, so this is not
really anything new. With that said,
fMRI is providing us with profound insights into the way that our brains work,
and this information is bound to have broad applications for enhancing the way
that we teach and learn. While we might
not ever be able to download talent directly into our minds like in The Matrix movies, we can definitely
supercharge our practice by knowing how to quickly stimulate the parts of the
brain that are involved in the acquisition of certain skills. I will be following up on this article when I
have a chance to do some of my own research.
Good luck, and practice well!
