Impulse

I need a light switch for the left half of my brain — the side that ana­lyzes the heck out of every­thing. I often find that think­ing too much screws things up, yet haven’t found a reli­able tech­nique for curb­ing my brain.
I’m work­ing on doing some ear train­ing using a pro­gram called Ear Test. It plays a note, I play it back, and it tells me if I’m right. The fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple is that notes sound dif­fer­ent, inde­pen­dent of pitch. A C, any C, sounds dif­fer­ent from any D or any F#, etc. The prob­lem is that the lit­tle engi­neer in my head tries to hyper-analyze the wave­form com­ing into my ears. I find that when my left brain kicks in like this, I guess the wrong note most of the time. However, occa­sion­ally and mag­i­cally, my brain goes silent — no thoughts, only sounds. When this hap­pens, I’ll go on a streak of 50 or so notes with­out mis­take.
Same thing is true for other things: I play music smoothly when I’m not think­ing. My pho­tographs are much, much bet­ter in com­po­si­tion and emo­tion if I just look through the viewfinder and stop think­ing. I already blogged about how pho­to­shop & dis­tract­ing the brain. Heck, back in Little League, I always got on base at the begin­ning of the sea­son, when I wasn’t think­ing about hit­ting, but struck out con­sis­tently when I tried to fig­ure out how to swing bet­ter.
So here’s the open ques­tion for any­one who is read­ing this blog: How do you turn off your left brain? Or — what are good tech­niques you use for get­ting into that mind­less, self­less, yet atten­tive zone where you cre­ate freely and smoothly?