I want to talk to you about Neuroplasticity. It’s the phenomena of the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to repetitive stimuli. We are maybe more familiar with talking about our subconscious, the part of our brain that has been ‘programmed’ and acts immediately without thought, well neuroplasticity describes the brain’s incredible ability to rewire itself in response to repetitive training. This is really important for musicians. Imagine trying to play a guitar if you had no memory of the song but also had to consciously think about where to put your fingers on the fretboard. There certainly wouldn’t be much chance of playing anything more complicated than a few notes per bar. I’ve been playing guitar now for nearly 40 years but I can still vividly remember the cognitive effort of trying to work out which fingers go where. If you want to re-live that experience, try playing a guitar the opposite way. I used to wonder why as a right handed player why my right hand was so utterly useless trying to fret anything on a left handed guitar but yet as a keyboard player my right hand is 20x faster more dexterous than my left. There’s no physical difference in the flexibility or muscles, it’s just down neuroplasticity, how the brain is wired and how you’ve trained it.
So here’s the exciting bit…. once you realise the brain is elastic and can be rewired, you can do really amazing things with it.
If like me you’ve also wondered why you’ve been playing for long but you can’t play anything better then you did when you were in your 20s, then don’t blame old age or ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’, it’s just that you relying on ‘replay’ from your brain and not spending enough time in ‘record’. You just forgot how to learn. Give yourself a challenge. Write your next solo without using a single one of your favourite techniques that you keep going back to and replaying like a broken record. Learn a solo from another player, then you will realise how prescriptive and limited your own playing is.
It works with any creative endeavour. I’ve written so many songs now that my neural pathways are tuned to finding a route through writing one without thinking about it. This is also dangerous because it’s the reason why many songwriters just end up putting different lyrics to the same four chords. They simply don’t notice because it’s what they’ve always done. Other song writers spot it instantly though.
But when it works for you it’s amazing. I’ve recently been hammering my brain with studio time trying to get this album finished. On playing back a certain section of a song I was mixing for the umpteenth time, it struck me I had no conscious memory of writing any of that music. To me it felt like it had been written by someone else and I’d been possessed by some other worldly creative force. The exciting bit for me is that I didn’t recognise the style I was playing in. It felt entirely alien to me, in a good way. A lot of musicians describe their work writing songs in a spiritual way, as being some sort of conduit where they are gifted a song from the ether and they just channel it into reality. I love that view of it, but I think it also demeans their own talent which is that they’ve spent hours, days, months, years, decades rewiring their brain to make song writing seem that unconscious and effortless.
As a post script to this, you will of heard of musicians being gifted songs and music in their dreams. Paul McCartney famously created Let It Be from a dream about his Mum. Somehow last night my brain had managed to create an entire new piano section for a song I was working on late in the studio. I can remember some of the chords I was playing whilst asleep, but sadly there’s just not enough detail there to recall into reality.
