First article is titled: "What DOES it take to be a Professional Orchestra Musician?"
This blog post also points out something that is a significantly huge part of preparing for focal dystonia rehabilitation! Changing your mindset from a performance technique mindset to an exploratory mindset full of love, creativity, and adaptability.
Everything taught to you haas to go out the window. Foget it all (i.e. all knowledge and practice of technique, embouchure formation, setup, proper breathing...). Literally have to deprogram everything so you can start over and start physical rehabilitation from a healthy mental place. Not easy because musicians instruments and reputation are woven tightly into their identity.
What a great article! If you're like others who lean more towards this side, do whatever it takes to regain even a little ownership of your own voice/sound and expression in music. This is why guitar has always been my secondary instrument. It allowed me to feel creative and free of many limitations at times, or when demands got tough.
Second article is titled: "Focal Dystonia of the Hand and What the Brain has to Do with It"
A glimpse at part of the article:
"We get similar effects in blind people who read Braille with several fingers at once: they develop a single representation of all these fingers on the somatosensory cortex, but are not able to determine which part of the information received in the brain comes from which finger. Psychologist Thomas Elbert further points out a parallel of this in all of us: our toes are generally stimulated only simultaneously as we walk, and most of us have trouble telling which of the middle toes has been touched upon application of a light pressure stimulus. Indeed, our toes are not individually represented on the somatosensory cortex as our fingers are."
"Dr Merzenich of the University of California San Francisco calls focal dystonia of the hand a “learning-based catastrophe” and a “failure of the brain’s learning processes”. Consequently, he focuses on developing techniques that will help to “re-normalize the learning system”, in helping to newly distinguish the areas on the somatosensory cortex that have become blurred. Although this approach is very new, Merzenich claims some good results in training children with linguistic impairments, such as dyslexia, which show similar blurring of representations in the brain."
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