A very important skill needed to play a musical instrument is our
ability to see things. It is an absolute fact that the talent or gift
of vision varies greatly from species to species, race to race
and age group to age group. It is just about safe to say
few people see things the same way. Only one aspect is the ability to
see colors. Dogs supposedly see in black and white and certain ethnic
groups are believed to see colors on a duller level. This might explain
why some geriatric women wear such bright colors because they don’t see
them as gaudy and too bright.
A certain basketball coach that I have admired seems to be able to see
around solid objects because when the replay is shown he will
invariably be right from clear across the court 100 feet away and
through 3 human bodies. Is this his ability to see through solid
objects or his ability to make conclusions (filling in the blanks)
about the outcome of things that he did actually see?
Another basketball player or even more than one talks about his ability
to slow down time in his mind in order to have the time to make better
decisions. Racing drivers talk about their “getting into a rhythm”
during a race. Could it be that after a while the brain tends to
compensate for physical environments and situations that we throw
ourselves into. I personally have no dought about these things.
Ask any optometrist and he will tell you that our area of focus shrinks
with age. Could it be that some of us start off with better focus
from the start, or that somewhere in our development something we did
made our range of peripheral vision more vast. Surely some of these
gifts involve more than the eyeball itself. How the brain
perceives objects, distances, colors and an array of other aspects is a
large element in what we see or even think we see.
This brings on another topic, visualization. This part of our
perception could be and most surely is a huge part of what we think we
“saw”. We have all heard of our “minds eye” or “third eye”. This has to
do with the brain filling in the blanks or making sense of things that
our brain rejects for some reason such as disbelief. Many people see
things directly in front of them but nowhere else at least in detail.
How many times have you seen something that took a few seconds to
register because your minds eye was picturing something else at
the time. You had to use your buffer or cache to replay the incident.
It seems to me that some people (like some computers) have a larger
and/or more efficient cache memory. All these talents and abilities add
up to having a shaper, more spontaneous ability to analyze and respond
in certain harmonic environments and on certain situations in real
time. This would be invaluable for the ever changing situations in
sports and in the seemingly magic talent of “off the cuff”
improvisation.