By Aditya Shukla, psychologist and guitarist
Playing the guitar requires extensive training on abstract shapes and finger arrangements. Chord inversions, sequences, etc., train spatial reasoning.
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Rehearsing a song, and practicing sections with a band means the player has to constantly monitor the structure of a song and what has to be rehearsed, all while paying attention to others.
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The fretboard is an ideal layout to train attention and focus because eyes have to shift and lock-in across the board as you execute your notes.
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Composing music is a test of logic because it requires an analysis of notes and sequences. When a composer gets stuck, the notes can be resolved musically through analysis of chords/bass and prior/subsequent notes.
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While studying a song, a guitarist typically understands different musical layers and shifts attention between them. This is a core cognitive function that lets us multi-task and pay attention to complex tasks.
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Considering playing the guitar is a very physical instrument, there are a lot of opportunities for errors. Monitoring these errors during practice brings out an eye for details.
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A lot of guitar practice requires thinking and analysis. It requires feedback and exploration. The ability to think about your learning is metacognition. And it is useful in all productive tasks.
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The ability to replicate someone else's composition is a pattern-matching task. It is unique to each instrument, and the guitar allows many different ways of matching chords and phrases because the fretboard has repeating patterns.
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