Tag Archives: fingers

Dancing fingers

Posted on May 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

Last night, unable to sleep, I was wandering around YouTube encountering unfamiliar music. And so I encountered Anouar Brahem for the first time. He’s an oud player from Tunisia. I’d not heard of him before, which is probably bad as he seems to be one of the world’s most famous players of the instrument. But I think I may have heard of one of his pieces before, Astrakan Café. Here it is:

I don’t know about you, but what most strikes me about this piece is is the rhythmic sensitivity of the playing. What I mean is that he knows precisely how loud each note should be to bring the music alive, and does so brilliantly. Everything weighted just as it should be.

What happened when I tried to tweet about the music was slightly unexpected. I had quite a lot of difficulty in typing continuously and without making more typos than usual. I don’t think that was just because it was 3 am, since the same thing is happening today if I try to type while listening to the piece. It’s this: typing has its natural rhythm. The music has a different, competing rhythm. And whereas it’s normally possible to separate the two and just keep typing, in this case my fingers don’t want to do that. They try to dance along with the music. And they try so hard that my typing slows down to half speed, as I type little bursts of three or four characters whenever the music allows.

I’ve also found that Astrakan Café is quite difficult to get out of my head once I’ve heard it. So here’s another of his pieces, The Astounding Eyes of Rita, in case you’d prefer to have that stuck in your head instead (at least I can type to this one):

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Memory incident

Posted on May 11, 2013 | 2 comments

Recently I had occasion to use one of the public computers in my local library. At one time this was a regular occurrence because I didn’t have internet access at home, but now it’s only something I do very occasionally.

The system is: you log in to the system with your reader number and passcode, and then get an hour’s use of the computer.

I typed in my reader number, then was surprised and horrified to realise that I had no idea what my passcode was. But I remembered from a previous occasion that it had been possible to log in as a guest, so I went to the desk to ask if I could do that.

The library assistant looked rather helplessly at me, said something about not having enough access to the system to do anything, and suggested I try entering my birthday as the passcode. I knew that my birthday most certainly wasn’t the passcode. But she also told me that the system didn’t have any limit on how many times I could enter the wrong code. I wouldn’t end up getting locked out if I tried everything I could think of.

What I knew, though, was that in the days when I had known my passcode, I’d primarily remembered it not by the digits themselves or some fancy mnemonic for them, but by the pattern of keystrokes needed to type them. I’d remembered them pretty much like a fingering pattern on an instrument.

I went back to my seat and stopped trying to remember the passcode. I typed in my reader number, thought about where my finger should probably go for the first digit of the passcode, then let my fingers type a sequence of keys that felt right on the keyboard. I clicked OK.

Immediately, on the first attempt, I found myself logged in. The key to remembering my passcode had been to stop trying to consciously remember it, and to let my fingers follow the pattern that they always had done when typing it before. The code wasn’t still programmed into my brain, but the movements for typing it were still programmed into my fingers.

That’s what musicians are talking about when they mention kinaesthetic memory.

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Posted in computers, psychology

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