Great article, Mike, and very thought provoking. I have several comments and I’ll try to lay them out in a coherent fashion.
Regarding playing music by ear as a product of intuition; I’m not sure that intuition is the only faculty we utilize. I have played guitar for years without the benefit of formal instruction and so, we might say, I play by ear. There is certainly some intuitive guessing involved but I have noticed that the “guessing” becomes more accurate because my ear has become familiar with and recognizes tones in much the same way that one reads by the use of phonics. As I listen to a song my brain thinks, “That’s a C chord, that’s a G, that’s an E minor…” and so on. When I encounter a sound (a chord) I do not recognize automatically, the intuition kicks in and I only have to make a few stabs at it before getting it right. But the ‘stabs’ are based on notes and their position on the fret board that I already recognize. “That sounds like…” something I already know.
That said, I find that in my case successful right brain function and the ease with which it occurs depends on the application.
I once worked for a large corporation in a position in which I juggled a number of responsibilities as the coordinator of various projects. I developed a reputation as a creative thinker, one who “thinks outside the box” because of my ability to come up with new ways to accomplish business practices that were long thought to be “this is the way we do it because there is no other or better way to do it”. On that plane of creativity I excelled effortlessly and coming up with entirely new ideas seemed my forte.
When I was taking high school and college composition courses, if the instructor asked for a 500 word essay on some specified topic, I could whip one out in record time and always made an A. But if the instructor said, “I want you to make up a story…” it was like a huge steel door in my mind slammed shut; my brain locked up and all I could see was the computer equivalent of the ‘blue screen of death’. This plane of creativity seemed to elude me entirely and the harder I tried the more elusive it became.
For quite some time I convinced myself that I simply do not have that ability. But in the last few years it has occurred to me that perhaps because that plane of creativity does not come naturally to me that I have convinced myself of a falsehood for the sake of convenience, and am further convinced that creativity can be developed on any plane and to some degree if only one believes that this can be accomplished and sets forth with that belief firmly fixed in mind.
Further, it is my considered opinion that we often do not develop right brain faculties because we are so trained in left brain operations as to believe that right brain development should follow the same sort of logical patterns as the left, when in fact that approach is erroneous for obvious reasons. Using established left brain patterns as a template for right brain development simply cannot work. I think we must treat the right brain as a completely different animal, learn its ways, and train it accordingly.
Cheers,
Mike  |