Sightreading, the eyes, the brain

I saw an interesting program on The Learning Channel last night. The program was about this guy who had a childhood injury which caused him to be blind in one eye. The damage was not to the eye itself, but somewhere on a connecting path betweent the eye and the brain. Anyway, they demonstrated that this guy could, with 100% accuracy, tell which direction visual images (provided on a television moniter) where heading, even though he was only using his 'blind' eye, and had no conscious awareness of any visual stimuli.

Scientists have identified at least 10 paths between the eye and the brain. They are studying the role of 'unconscious vision' in things like human intuition, or deja vu, or how a tennis player can return a 130 MPH serve with the sweet spot of his racket., or ......

I began to wonder what role 'unconscious vision' plays when sightreading new sheet music, or playing known music from sheet music.

For myself, I know that there is a mode of playing where I have played a piece enough times so that I am somewhat familiar with it, but I do not have it memorized. I can play the piece if I consiously read the sheet music. I also can play the piece if the sheet music is in front of me, but I am not consciously reading it. If I hide the sheet music, I can't play the piece because I do not have it memorized.

Anyway, just sharing some thought about something I think is interesting.

If you can't play the song without the music, because you 'don't have it memorized' (as you said), then I would say you are not an ear-player, or improvisationalist, or that those skills are rudimentary, depending upon the difficulty of the piece. In any event, I think the rest of what you said supports a theory of eye-brain patterning.

In terms of not consciously reading the music, isn't it possible that you are reading it more than you think you are, that it's merely a matter of the brain quickly recognizing something it has seen before and executing its response, all without as much conscious awareness on your part as when you first were learning it?

Think of it this way: don't you suppose that your brain had to do more work when you were crawling and trying to learn to walk? Nowadays, though are you consciously aware of the brain telling your legs to walk (if you're in a wheelchair, forgive me...)?: No, you're not. The brain has been there, done that, can do it at the sub-conscious level.

I feel that with sightreading, the phenomena is more than your brain recognizing material from a single piece that it has seen before. I think that if it has seen *similar* patterns on the page before (from other pieces), then there's a good chance that it will execute those patterns (musical notes, rhythms, etc.) on the given piece quicker and with less processing effort on your part. Thus when the brain encounters in piece 'B' something similar to piece 'A' (and all the 'Piece A's' before it) you would be aware mostly of anything *dis*-similar, while the brain handles the other on its own. To some extent, depending upon the music, an entire piece can demand little computational power