Hi, I’m Will Lanham, Head of Design here at Notepad. And I’ve been playing the piano for almost all of my life. From a young age – think I was about 5 – I started having weekly piano lessons from a pianist who lived on the same road as me. You start off with very basic stuff but over the years I progressed to around grade 7, before revolting against piano exams and instead playing just for enjoyment. I hated it to begin with, probably because the teacher was a bit of a dragon when it came to knowing every scale off by heart. As the years went by, however, I found that I thoroughly enjoyed playing. It wasn’t just the music, melody and creativity that captivated me, it was how I felt whilst I was playing.
I find creativity quite mentally exhausting. Working in a brand agency your brain always needs to be switched on, doing a form of mental gymnastics to constantly squeeze creativity into everything you work on. It’s no mean feat and I’d argue it gets harder as you get older. It is easy to get overwhelmed or find yourself in a creative well without a ladder. Sometimes your mind can’t think past an initial idea, sometimes you can’t visualise an idea accurately and sometimes you work yourself up into a frustrated frenzy because nothing at all is working for you. To put it another way, your brain gets a bit tired and grumpy.
At the first signs of this mental fatigue, I know that my mind needs a break. That is where the piano comes in – it is my mental retreat. Whilst playing I find myself entering a state of total focus, almost trance like only being semi-aware of what is happening around me. Because the task is so complex – two feet, two hands and 10 fingers all moving independently whilst reading two different lines of music at the same time – my brain doesn’t have the capacity to think about anything else and so all the outside noise completely disappears. For the time that I am playing, the piano is the only thing that has any sort of meaning and playing for 10 or so minutes is almost like flicking the reset switch inside my head. I suppose at a certain point everything goes into auto pilot mode – my body knows what it needs to do to complete the task of playing music and my brain also knows exactly what it needs to do. There isn’t really a lot of conscious thinking involved and it’s this exact state that I think can be a tremendous platform for creativity to blossom. We are constantly bombarded with content from all directions, it just never stops. Finding a way to block it all out and let your brain be… well a brain again, does you a whole world of wonders.
There have been plenty of studies into the links between playing the piano, mental health and cognitive function. Have a read of this infographic for more information. In short, it’s extremely beneficial – increase in focus, boosts pattern recognition, enhanced spatial organisation, refines motor control skills and lets your brain breathe a bit. I don’t think you even need to be good at piano to feel the benefits, it’s just an enormous mental workout regardless of your level. Pick-up a piano today.
