M2M Day 235: I’m concentrating so hard that it’s putting me to sleep
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
Yesterday, I discovered the humming progression (a better way to train), which works as follows:
- During the first session of the day, after each note, audibly hum the resolve back to C.
- During the second session of the day, after each note, mentally ‘hum’ the resolve back to C.
- During the third session of the day, after each note, pause, allowing the brain to subconsciously resolve back to C.
As I mentioned yesterday, this is how I plan to train for the rest of the month (or at least for the next few days).
Today, during the first phase of the humming progression, I correctly identified 92% of the notes. Interestingly, the eight notes I missed were all in the last 30 notes of the session.
In other words, I correctly identified the first 70 notes in a row, before I started to fatigue. But, once I started to fatigue, I just couldn’t maintain the necessary level of concentration.
In fact, because Phase 1 of the humming progression requires a particularly deliberate approach, this first 100-note session took me about 20 minutes to complete. Maintaining complete concentration and intensity for 20 straight minutes turns out to be very mentally taxing.
By the end, I basically just wanted to go to sleep. (Side note: Last week, when I was in California practicing during my morning commutes, my training did put me to sleep a few times).
Hopefully, this desire to sleep at the end of each training session is a sign that I’m optimally engaging my brain in the training.
Or, maybe it just means that I’m tired. (To be fair… I practiced my perfect pitch today immediately after I got home from a 21-mile bike ride, so my body already wanted to relax.)
Either way, if I keep dedicating ~30 minutes daily to this kind of intense practice for the next week, I should be able to complete this month’s challenge before the month ends. It’s going to be close.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
