Use the body to make the mind do what it's supposed to

Attention goes where you point. Action follows what you say. Use this on yourself or on other people.

I read once that Japanese train operators have elaborate rituals of pointing at things. They have to check a lot of dials and knobs and switches to make sure the train is operating safely and efficiently. Instead of just checking the dials and knobs and switches, they point to them and call out their status. They're instructed to do this because it makes them actually pay attention to what they’re doing, so that they actually perform the check. Without a physical action, it seems, our brains see little difference between actually performing a task and merely guessing that we already did it.

A few months ago, when my six-year-old daughter started piano, the music teacher told me that she should say the names of notes as she sight-reads from her music book. I found she was not yet able to do this while also playing the notes and keeping the rhythm, so I let it go. One thing at a time. But now she knows how to read notes — it’s just that sometimes she won’t. She not only won’t read the notes, she believes that she is reading them, so telling her to slow down and read the notes more closely doesn’t help. How, then, to make her read the notes? The solution is precisely what I once dismissed: make her say the names of the notes first.

Today, I discovered it was the same with fingers. Sometimes you need to play not only the right notes, but with specific fingers, to pull together the desired performance. In these cases, the fingers to use are written above the notes, from 1 for thumb to 5 for pinky. But this girl Does. Not. Care. about the fingers she’s supposed to play with. So what do I do? I have her say the finger before she plays it. Works like a charm.

That’s it, that’s the post. A single insight about how our brains work, supported with three observations. Good night and have a normal one.