Whether it is the case of an air traffic controller or
a violin player or even a heavy vehicle pilot, performing requires not only the
skills to operate the instrument but also the ability to perform a task. To perform a task according to a given procedure,
a score, a flight plan with strips requires accuracy and speed.
Performing is an episodic act in which time and
location of events are crucial. In
contrast, creating, composing, writing, designing are batch tasks in which the
final output is more important than when, where they are done.
The common point between these two, namely performing
and creating is; they are all about the human being and more specificly the
human mind.
Sartre engages with the world
pre-reflectively while writing: “For example, at this
moment I am writing, but I am not conscious of writing. … In reality, the act of writing is not at
all unconscious, it is an actual structure of my consciousness. Only it is not
conscious of itself. To write is to
maintain an active awareness of the words as they come to birth under my pen.”
Hemingway advices a novice
writer: “The
most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a
time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself
dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop.
Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and
you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next,
that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your
subconscious mind do the work. …” [
Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading
List for a Young Writer, 1934
Judith ULUĞ who played the piano in the first performance of my Viola
Sonata adviced me: “Let it go where the music leads.” during the rehearsals. This is pretty similar to
an Anatolian Hittite King’s thousands of
years old advise: “Mein
Sohn! Tue das, was in (deinem) Herzen (ist) (My son! Do what in your heart is.)” [Daisuke YOSHIDA, “Die Syntax des althethitischen
substantivischen Genitivs”, page 5 ] Both of these advices suggest the use of
subconscious and there is a slight difference between them. ULUĞ’s advice is based on good continuation
where as the ancient advice is related with conscience.
The succees in creating or performance
depends on the personal balance in using not only consciouness but also
unconcious capabilities of the mind.
Gestalt laws, Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Good Continuation apply
not only to concious perception but also to the subconscious processing.
According to Baars “brain
is a large group of separate, specialized systems that are unconscious mostly
during their operation. Some of these
processes may become conscious in sequence and this process constitutes a
conscious experience. Only one process
can be conscious at one instant of time.” [Baars,
“A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness”, 1988]
A huge variety of
things can be experienced consciously, but an unconscious specialized processor
can perform a limited range of tasks.
This is related to the necessity of focusing to do high speed or
specialized difficult tasks.
When a music
performer plays a piece, although he/she is conscious of a single note at a
certain point of the piece the previous and successive notes are in his
subconscious and they do priming effects
to the performance of the current note.
This is similar to Tanenhaus’s word example. [Tanenhaus, Seidenberg’s ‘Do listeners compute linguistic
representations?’, 1985.]
While conscious processes are consistent, the
collection of unconscious processes are not.
There has to be an internal consistency of conscious experience.
Conscious events are
shaped by unconscious factors where as unconscious processes are not context
sensitive. Conscious processes are
inefficient and error prone. During the
learning process we use conscious processes but once learned the task is
unconscious and performed with comparative speed and accuracy.
Consciousness can
relate two separate conscious events.
Any conscious stimulus may serve as a signal for any other event. The unconscious processes are closed boxes
that can not relate. This requires the
performer to manage unconscious events and conscious events at a higher level
of consciousness. [Josh McDermott,
Global Workspace Theory: Consciousness Explained, Harvard Brain, 1995.]
“Only with the
flowering of higher-order consciousness and linguistic capabilities does a self
arise that is nameable to itself.
Consciousness of consciousness becomes possible via the linguistic
tokens that are meaningfully exchanged during speech acts in a community.” [Edelman, Naturalizing consciousness:A
theoretical framework, PNAS, 2003, http://www.pnas.org/content/100/9/5520.full]
“consciousness is an
… internal functional state modulated, rather than generated by senses”.
“the thalamocortical resonant column is the
functional architecture of the active state that generates consciousness”.
“high frequency
oscillations (20 – 50 Hz) show a pattern of coherence that is either restricted
to its immediate vicinity or occurs between distant discrete areas” [Llinas, et all., “The neuronal basis for
consciousness”, The Royal Society, 1998]
“consciousness
arises as a result of integration of many inputs by reentrant interactions in
the dynamic core. This integration
occurs in periods of < 500 ms.” [ Edelman,
“Naturalizing consciousness: A theoretical framework”, 2003, Proceedings of Natural Acedemy of Science
USA].
When the consciousness
takes control of the mind, unconscious processes do not stop working. As Baars stated above, the unconscious
processes have priming effect on the active conscious process.
Classical
theories of cognitive control, therefore, propose that only conscious processes
depend on capacity-limited attentional resources and can be modulated by
executive control. …:
- Unconscious stimuli influence executive control settings. Several experiments showed that subliminal stimuli can modulate shifts of spatial (Ansorge et al., 2002; Scharlau and Ansorge, 2003) and modality-specific attention (Mattler, 2003, 2005) as well as task-specific control operations (Mattler, 2003, 2005, 2006) and task sets (Reuss et al., 2011; Wokke et al., 2011).
(2)
Furthermore, the relation between executive control and unconscious processing
is bidirectional because top-down factors such as attentional resources,
stimulus expectations, action intensions, or task sets, all factors that are
typically considered to involve executive control mechanisms (Norman and
Shallice, 1986), modulate
unconscious stimulus processing (Jaśkowski et al., 2003; Ansorge
and Neumann, 2005; Kiefer and
Martens, 2010; Wokke et
al., 2011). …
[Markus Kiefer, “Executive
control over unconscious cognition: attentional sensitization of unconscious
information processing, Front
Hum Neurosci. 2012; 6: 61. ”]
To become conscious
of something the brain needs < 500 ms to highlite all the existing semantic
relations in the cortex. In a 60
Metronom number tempo this corresponds to an eighth note. This means you can hardly become aware of
every and each of the individual notes in a sixteenth notes sequence. Conscious perception is helped by beats which
differentiate between all the notes of a bar.
The gestalt laws of proximity and similarity may help to explain this
but there is also an other aspect of consciousness: it is the unity of
consciousness.
“At any given time a
subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual
experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds
singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder,
the emotional experience of a certain melancholy… These experiences are distinct from each
other…. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a
deep way. They seem to be unified, by
being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness”. [Bayne et all., What is
consciousness?“,2003,]
Pitch, duration,
rhythm, harmony of a single beat is percieved as a single unit, as different
aspects of the unity of their consciousness.
Motives, sentences, forms, other higher level entities in music form
‘object unity’. We percieve music by
grouping things that we hear because of the bottleneck of our perception. [Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or
Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”]. The unity of consciousness
may also be based on ‘Subject Unity’, ‘Subsumptive Unity’, ‘Access Unity’ or
‘’Phenomenal Unity’.
Consciousness is the
activation of semantic relations to an input sense. Seeing a red object activates the color red
in our mind. There exists no way to
exactly determine what the mind’s encoding that corresponds to the color red is. Hence, it is also not possible to claim what
I see as red is what you see as red. The
encoding for the color red in our minds is called quale. “In any presentation, this content is either a
specific quale(such as the immediacy of redness or loudness) or something
analyzable into a complex of such. The
presentation as an event is, of course, unique, but the qualia which make it up
are not.” [Lewis, Mind and the World
Order, 1941]
Qualia belong to not
only simple things such as pitch, loudness, usw., everything we are conscious
of has a qualia in our mind. In order to be conscious of something what we
think and percieve must be consistent as stated above. If we do not understand something or get
conscious of it, it goes to unconscious.
If a performer cannot activate a quale about a situation he/she faces it
will not be possible to handle it. This
happens in airplane accidents when the pilot cannot find the emergency
situtaion in his training knowledge or reference book. The composer has to write his work in such a
way that he has to activate at least some qualia in the minds of the performers
and the audience. There has to be a
decent balance between consciously and unconsciously percievable elements of the
composition using also priming by subconscious.
The semantic tree of
our knowledge and the way we utilize it through qualia are formed by experience
and education. Qualia is the
combinations of the parts of the semantic tree that are highlighted by the
consciousness. Consciousness may be the
qualia formed by the combination of memory, emotions and it may be triggered by the recursive sensitivity of the
thalamus like the vibrating flame of a candle.
