Over the past couple of months I’ve been getting back to training regularly, working my way through the Stage 4 sequences. I thought I should write down some of my impressions on the aural and visual variations.

In particular, I have been struck by the different way that my brain tries to grasp onto and hold different kinds of information. In the visual sphere I’ve found the color sequences tremendously challenging, very much harder than the grid sequences at Stage 3. I can feel myself pressing my brain to do something it has no particular inclination or aptitude for — i.e., remembering a random color sequence.

On the aural sequences the musical tones are proving equally tough. As a musician I was looking forward to this aural variation. And while I’m enjoying it, I’m surprised at how hard my brain finds it to hold each note, and how it gets confused between the relationships between tones as the sequence changes. I’m curious to see how this ability improves and what impact it will have on my music.

Random, constantly modified pitch sequences challenge the brain’s working memory much more than a repeated melody, I suppose, because we’re lacking the feedback of the relationships between the notes. Someone with perfect pitch (the ability to identify a pitch without any reference point) would probably fare much better with this exercise than those of us who don’t!

Anyone else have impressions on Stage 4?