Faculty Biography

"I first started reading in the cognitive sciences because I wanted to know how my memory worked. Why is it that I retained some things but not others? It had to do with being taught what to do but not how to go about it. When I kept asking, for example, how to make my feet move faster, every answer I got was 'just play rudiments' or 'just play this pattern' or 'whatever you do with your hands, do it with your feet.' But that doesn't work—your feet aren't supposed to work like hands. That's why I picked up cognitive science books.

"After I find out who my students are, I explain to them what they are—as human beings, with limbs and a brain and a memory that works in a specific way. The message that I give, whether it's in a one-on-one session or a group seminar, is that we're people first, and this is how our bodies work. When I talk to people about their experiences—to think about when they retain information and when they don't, and how they felt when they didn't, and what they were or weren't thinking about—they realize that there are ways to learn that will allow them to retain information. For me, the bottom line is learning how to learn.

"Studying with me means that when you walk out of the practice room you're better; you've retained the information because you've studied how to retain it, no matter what music you're playing. As someone trained as a software engineer, I see music as a 'high-level language.' But I'm working at the level of the 'binary code' and the 'circuits.' I'm showing students that their 'high-level language' (music) doesn't work quite right because their 'circuitry' isn't right.

"I don't give a student a song and a chart and tell them to go learn it, because they might not know what they're listening for. But if they can use their imagination to picture what the drummer is doing, then they might understand something about stick height and body position. I give my students musical exercises based on what they like and ask them to think about them in three different ways: what to see, what to hear and what to feel. Then I tell them that's what they need to think about after they walk out the door."