A Fork in the Road

In a piece of music there are almost always repeating patterns of one sort or another.  But the repetitions can lead to new places.  That’s part of the musical narrative.  First A leads to B.  Later A reappears, bit this time it no longer leads to B; instead it leads to C.

The process of learning and memorizing those passages is interesting to me.  I learn A.  I can execute it easily.  Then I continue to B.  It may take some effort, but I learn B and I learn that A leads to B. Now I can execute the passage A-B just fine. I've built the A-B entity in memory.

Who's old enough to remember the
 Slauson cutoff and the fork in the road?

Next I have to learn a new passage, where A leads to C.  I can execute A, but it takes considerable conscious effort and concentration to get A to go directly to C.  It wants to go to B.  But with time and repetition I get it.  A goes to C.

Unfortunately now I've lost the A-B connection.  In my memory, A now leads to C, not to B.  Now I have to go back and relearn the A-B connection.  It won’t take as long to learn it as it did the first time, but it will take some effort.  And doing that may make the A-C connection a little shaky.  Now that path has to be reinforced.

Eventually I get to the point where I can execute both A-B and A-C without a problem.  But it’s quite a complicated process to get there.

The brain seems have a hard-wired proclivity to assume the highest level ‘truth’ that it can find.  That’s what makes us so smart.  We look for large patterns that will help us survive.  But sometimes the largest pattern needs to be broken, and a smaller pattern added at a lower level.  We can do it, but it seems to run counter to our nature.

We find patterns that help us.  We jump to conclusions. It’s part of who we are.  But we have to be willing to go back and reconsider another outcome.  There might be possibilities that we might not have imagined at first. Might some of those conclusions be faulty, or at least incomplete?

But we can’t consider every outlandish possibility.  Up is not down, right?

Or might it be? Do we have courage to find out?