Am in the particular stage where I am penning down all my thoughts in my diary instead of this space because I feel like what's written here must be my final say, an essay, instead of a documentation of my processes of thought. In essence, I am afraid of saying the wrong things. I am reluctant to speak because I feel the people will normally take your words as (your stand), because they probably do not have the chance to hear your other stand at another point in time. People are always in a process of change, and nothing is ever the final say.

I do not like discussions, I only like asking and getting answers, and evaluating answers on my own. Because (I think) people can get defensive (over their ideas/argument) and judge even your evaluation. This should be a thinking I should change.

(edit: I still ended up typing quite abit..)

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Today I read three chapters of "moonwalking with Einstein" about human memory and what struck me the most is that memory is not a by-product of expertise, but the essence of expertise. In other words, to have great expertise is to have a great bank of retained information regarding that field gained after time. (instead of having memory of things of that field because of a particular skill. -actually this sentence does not even make sense now -)

Also, in the context of chess playing: professional chess players are normally experienced players (roughly 9 years of playing etc) who do not use on-the-spot thinking during competitions unlike non-experienced players. They play intuitively because they have the "skills" drilled into their muscle memory.

(I will stop here because I might end up writing a summary and summaries normally get me quite frustrated because I often have too much to say, and makes me feel like I HAVE to get a point across. When I actually don't have to.) Anyway.

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So I did an experiment while playing piano today, and crossed my hands to play it. Meaning, playing the right-hand parts on the lower octave, and the left-hand parts on the higher octave. (instead of RH on higher octave and LH on lower octave).

Discovered that songs I've learnt when I was young came to me naturally - the fingerings just came to me and I didn't have to look at scores (probably because they were already in my "muscle memory". So when I swapped hands to play, there were absolutely no problems in doing so even though the song sounded weird.

As I grew older, I became more sensitive to the relationship between notes and chords and started playing "by ear", meaning I memorize pieces by the way the pieces sound, not so much of the positions of the fingerings visually/by looking at the scores. So when I tried to play with the position of my hands swapped around, I couldn't do it properly, because the piece sounded weird, different from how I usually learned them.

Honestly I do not know which way of learning is better.

Also, the classical pieces seemed easier to play with swapped hands than the ones in the 20th century/impressionistic pieces (eg. by Debussy). Probably because classical pieces were created more structually and therefore easier to break down? I'm not sure about this, maybe google can help.

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One last thing I remembered from the book:

our memory is never, static - it is always being shaped by our experience.

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6 more chapters to go but I have to study Jap now. Sayonara.