David G. Myers' Psychology

One of my advisors went through a psychology textbook to find all the things I should be looking at while going through this project. Because I don't want to overwhelm anyone (including myself) by putting them all in one post, here are a couple of the topics I studied today:

Classical & Operant Conditioning
"Conditioning is the process of learning associations."
We smell the fresh bread, we eat the fresh bread, and decide we really like the fresh bread. The next time we smell fresh bread, we will expect another satisfying experience. The same goes for sounds. As Myers puts it: "If you associate a sound with a frightening consequence, hearing the sound alone may trigger your fear." Now this made me laugh a little. If a student of mine were to hit a wrong note, I have three options. I could ignore it, I could gently tell them that it was wrong, or I could scream at them and whack the back of their hand with a ruler. If I were to do the latter, I would most definitely cause the student to anticipate fear when they hit a wrong note! That sure would get them to practice a lot more though. However, that is not the way I want to teach. Instead, I use conditioning methods.
Classical conditioning is when we associate certain stimuli. The example Myers gives is when there is lightning, there will be thunder. Now how do we learn that? Over several instances, we notice the relationship. See lightning - hear thunder.
Operant conditioning is when we associate a consequence to our behavior. Let's look at teaching a dog a new trick. You have the dog do the trick, and when it does, you give it a treat. Repetition of this action and response will strengthen the desired behavior of the dog. As humans, we learn to repeat acts that bring positive results, and avoid acts that bring negative ones.

Information Processing
To get information into our brain, we encode. To keep it there, we store. To later get it back, we retrieve. In 1968, psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin proposed the idea that we form memories in 3 stages:

"1. We first record to-be-remembered information as fleeting sensory memory.
 2. From there, we process information into a short-term memory bin, where we encode  it through rehearsal.
 3. Finally, information moves into long-term memory for later retrieval."

As time has gone on, psychologists realized that this is an extremely simplified version of the way memory really works. I won't get in to much detail about it as it gets into a lot about unconscious encoding and stuff that doesn't really apply to what I'm looking at. But what really matters is what they say about rehearsal. Rehearsal is part of our working memory. We use our working memory when our brains are bombarded with great amounts of information all at once. We automatically process things such as space, time, frequency, and well-learned information so we can "shine the flashlight beam" on what we think matters most. I've put this to the test with a couple students. To show them what an accidental looks like, I pull out this piece that I'm working on right now for a big concert mid-March. I'm not going to lie, the music is intimidating. But when I just ask them to find this one simple thing (by them shining that flashlight beam on it) they can focus on that one note and ignore the rest of it. That's the working memory. When it comes to music, I don't have to use my working memory much anymore. Reading music is now automatically processed by my brain. I don't have to look at it one note at a time and consciously tell myself where it is and where I need to put my hand. That came through much rehearsal. So practice.