Guitarists can learn some valuable lessons from the field of cognitive science. Understanding of the limitations of working memory in the human brain is one of them.
In 1956, George A. Miller published a landmark article in Psychological Review called “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information”. The article itself is not particularly accessible to a reader without a background in psychophysics and information theory, but Miller makes some keen observations, and his conclusions are both straightforward and useful.
Working memory limitations and the power of “chunking”
One of Miller’s main observations is that human sensory and mental processing systems have informational bottlenecks, and one of the most limiting lies in what has come to be called working memory.
To demonstrate this, imagine being asked to memorize a random series of digits (4, 7, 2, 9, 5, …). Most people can remember about seven of them before their performance drops off like an EVH dive bomb.
This limit of 7 (+/- 2) applies to just about any sequence…letters, words, geometric shapes, names, animals, etc. It turns out to be a fundamental limitation of the architecture of the human brain, and it means we can only hold a handful of things actively in memory at once.
But there’s a cool (and powerful) loophole we can exploit .
Although our working memory can only hold 7 or so “chunks” at a time, each chunk can be just about anything that resides in our long term memory.
So if I asked you to memorize the 16-digit sequence 9-0-1-2-5-5-1-5-0-8-6-7-5-3-0-9, you would have a hard time unless you notice that you can break it into three meaningful chunks: Yes’s album 90125, Van Halen’s 5150, and Jenny’s phone number 867-5309. We just remembered sixteen digits for the price of three!
In general, if we can recode the information we’re trying to learn into larger, more meaningful chunks, not only is it easier to memorize, but we also often understand it better. This is because the mental models we use to do the recoding are capturing something important about the underlying structure in the data.
Okay, so how does this apply to guitar?
Melodies are sequences of notes, and harmonies are sequences of chords. If we have a rich set of melodic and harmonic patterns at our disposal in long-term memory, we can recode licks, phrases, solos, and songs—meaning we can hold more in memory as we are learning new material. The more mental models we have available, the more ways we can recode the information, and the more likely we are to be able to find a compact, easy to remember representation of the information.
This is where music theory can be useful…it offers compact explanations of chunks of music:
That section of the “Smoke on the Water” solo is a descending C blues scale followed by a G Aeolian scale played in stacked 3rds
Many of Carlos Santana’s solos use the Dorian mode
The song structure is a 12-bar blues in A, but it moves to Bm for the bridge
The opening lick of “Brown Eyed Girl” is 3rds harmony walking up two steps of the G Major scale and then back down, followed by the same thing starting on a C
A lot of the phrases in Jimmy Page’s “Stairway to Heaven” solo are pure A minor pentatonic, except for the last note which is an F note to match the root of the chord being played
This helps a lot when you’re trying to recall how to play a solo or song you learned a while back. If you know the scale or arpeggio underlying a phrase, it’s a lot easier to use your ears to guide you to the right notes, and you don’t necessarily have to explicitly memorize the fret number of every note.
Fret Science is all about giving you new mental models to make learning new music easier and to make you a better improviser. Even if you already know your pentatonic scales, the rectangle and the stack will give you a new mental model that can enhance your playing, and make it easy to mix the modes in with your pentatonic licks. You may already know your 3nps scale patterns rooted on the E string, but learning the one pattern to rule them all will let you build those patterns on the fly, starting from anywhere. And seeing the hierarchy of notes within the scale will help you target notes more intentionally.
You can never have enough mental models at your disposal. As Marvin Minsky used to say, “if you only understand something in one way, you don’t understand it at all”.
Fret Science 