Are Filters On?

Recently I’ve been thinking about an adult piano student that I had many years ago.  He held advanced degrees in mathematics and had a high-level position at a software company.  He was a sharp guy who really wanted to do well in his piano studies.

The piano technique that I taught was based on relaxation – including loose wrists and a feeling of lightness in the arms.  I would tell him perhaps 3 to 5 times during each weekly lesson to loosen his wrists and lighten his arms.  He would immediately make his wrists stiff and arms heavy.  It didn’t seem to matter how much I demonstrated it to him. This was his consistent response.

Around the 50^th lesson, I again corrected him.  But this time he reacted in shock to my comments.  He claimed that during all of those previous lessons I had been continually telling him to make his wrists stiff.  It took me about 15 minutes to convince him that I would have never said anything like that.

He had, for nearly a year, been diligently following what he mistakenly thought were my instructions.  And of course, he didn’t get the results that he was looking for. 

What happened?  He had a preconception – really, a misconception – that it should take a huge amount of muscular force and weight to play these seriously large instruments.  That mistaken notion completely filtered out everything that I had actually been telling him – that is until the 200^th or so correction finally cracked the mental block. 

This raises a question for me.

For generations people from all over the world have said how Christian Science has healed them of all kinds of diseases.  Are skeptical folks’ health “filters” – their preconceptions that traditional medicine is the only route to health – so turned “on” that they simply block out the possibility that there is another way?

What do you think?

Comments

[Judy H]

Very thoughtful observation. I think you are right. Thanks for the blog.