No Error....No Excellence!!   By Patrick Pearson MSTAT

It’s astonishing to think that the brain is processing at 400 billion bits of information every single second, and yet our consciousness is aware of about two thousand bits, which means that there is way more going on than we actually know in any one moment.   So to expect that there may be a difference between what we think is happening and what is actually going on is predictable.     There is a lot of room for error and we need to be careful not to see that as an absolute negative.    Sure there are issues.  The brain can’t tell the difference between what we remember, what we experience and what we imagine.   If we are clear about what the subject is, the brain will “light up” the same in all three circumstances.     When you tune in on a Saturday night to a TV talent show and see someone who thinks their singing is wonderful, when it sounds to you and I like a strangled cat.   “Can’t they hear what they sound like?”   Actually if their belief is strong enough, then no they can’t.   In the inner world that they have created for themselves they are great singers. 

As F M Alexander clearly demonstrated we are all living with an unreliable sensory process!

That is not to say that our perceptual abilities are totally “pants” but can we be absolutely certain about the accuracy of what we think we do?   No!   We do not possess that faculty.  

We achieve skilfulness and excellence by practise.   This is where we mindfully refine a process and at each pass the brain takes on new references, experiences if you like.    Then we do what we do, which is like a rapid scan, and join the dots of appropriate references together, to give an improving result to what we are trying  to achieve.    This process is learned.   Were all skill innate, we could read a book on how to fly an airbus, climb in the cockpit and go do it.   We can’t do that either.   It is the very fact that our brain is great at making comparisons that allows our learning.   When we get an unwanted result from our practise, the brain gets it and tries to make the adjustment.   Indeed the Alexander Technique works on the basis that we think the “error” constructively into are process in order to re-educate the brain to help it shift its experience and referencing in a good way.  Over time we become more and more refined in our chosen activity and the “error” gets smaller and smaller so our deviation from the optimum gets less and less.

There was an interesting case study of a top-flight string quartet that began to lose the polish and fineness from their performance.   They upped their level of rehearsal and practise to no avail.   This is where another facet of the unreliable sensory process comes in, remembering there is a difference between what we notice and what is actually happening.    When then brain is “happy” that we are doing a good job it semi automates the process and logs off from giving that process its full attention.   After all, that which we notice is only running at 2K-bits per second, so small amounts of error can creep in and build up unnoticed.   The strenuous efforts of the musicians to correct the problem failed.   Their mentor then hit on a brilliant idea.   He set up a rehearsal and asked them to try and play at different fractions of a beat out-of-time with each other.   The shock to their system with this amount of error in place immediately woke the consciousness and error measuring back to its former excellent self.   They were back on form in a minute.  The magical ingredient being, “error”.     So in order to refine and maintain excellence there needs to be that little bit of sensory roughage to keep the comparator process working in the brain.  It’s that little bit of grit that the pearl grows around.

Here is where the Alexander Technique scores.   If you remember that to experience, remember or imagine a thing is the same as far as the brain is concerned.  So by imagining, pretending if you like, while in your teacher’s hands (that feedback reality), that something is other than we think it is; providing that thought is in the right direction, we set up a calibration error in our system that will help move us toward the optimum, be it to achieve excellence or to rid ourselves of an unwanted condition

If you'd like to learn more about how Alexander Technique can help turn your errors to excellence, you can contact Patrick through his page on the website https://integralhealthshrewsbury.com/about-us/our-practitioners/patrick-pearson/