Mind-wandering
Responding to the first research question “Is mind-wandering a phenomenon that is present during musical practice?”, this study is the first one to scientifically demonstrate that musicians mind-wander during musical practice. According to the pre and post-thought probes, mind-wandering is present in musicians’ daily instrumental practice (at least in the case of violinists) up to 60 percent of the time during technical work (Table 4 MW). Responding to the second question “If so, what kind of mind-wandering, spontaneous or deliberate, is more frequent during musical practice?” the most common type of mind-wandering was the spontaneous one. Spontaneous mind-wandering lacks a distinct moment of conscious initiation and individuals are not likely to be aware that they are mind-wandering, as it is the most detrimental and unconscious kind.
In the literature, unintentional mind-wandering has been associated with working on solving difficult tasks, while a state of intentional mind-wandering is more common during the execution of easy ones (Seli et al., 2016; Seli et al., 2018). In this experiment, this was confirmed since participants decided to deliberately ruminate only during technical work (an easy task). Nevertheless, there was still a higher percentage of spontaneous mind-wandering in both difficult and easy tasks. Participants were asked to note down the reason why they had decided to deliberately mind-wander and prioritize personal issues, phone calls, emails, or planning practice were reasons for doing so.
Regarding the third research question: “How do contextual variables such as the novelty of the piece, motivation, fatigue, and worry relate to the frequency of mind-wandering?”, we cannot make inferences about correlations between these variables due to the small sample size, but we can describe how they fluctuated in combination. From the mind-wandering results, we corroborate the finding that tasks that are not so cognitively challenging, like technical work during practice, often lead to more rumination. This supports the decoupling theory, where individuals with more working memory capacity would be more likely to suffer rumination when faced with simple tasks, which do not require many cognitive resources because they have more available resources (Christoff et al., 2009; Levinson et al., 2012; Stawarczyk et al., 2014). On the other hand, participants suffered less rumination when faced with new pieces, which ratifies the cognitive failure theory. This theory states that individuals tend to suffer less mind-wandering in the face of complex tasks (McVay and Kane, 2009, 2012; Unsworth and McMillan, 2013) due to the inhibitory role of working memory during cognitively demanding tasks.
While good sleep and motivation were related to lower levels of rumination or mind-wandering, lack of sleep (Robinson et al., 2020; Kane et al., 2007), and low motivation (Kane et al. 2007; Unsworth & Mc Millan, 2013; Brosowsky et al., 2020) seemed to be overlapping with moments of more distraction. Worry seemed to relate to participants' levels of focus differently. For instance, in the case of Participant D, his motivation and good sleep may have been strong enough to overcome his worry during technical work in the post-intervention. It may have also been a developed capacity to deal with worry as a result of meditating that made him not so vulnerable to distractions. On the other hand, in the case of Participants C and B stress or worry and a lack of motivation overlapped with more rumination, which ratifies the concerns theory (McVay & Kane, 2010), by which thoughts related to mind-wandering are often related to unresolved short-term and/or long-term personal goals (Kane et al., 2007; Banks & Boals, 2017; Robinson & Unsworth; 2017).
Responding to “How does it relate to efficiency during practice?", in the post-test of the new piece, higher distraction rates in participant B coincided with lower subjective reports of efficiency, while lower distraction rates overlapped with improved efficiency in participants A and G. In the post-test of the technique, more focus brought more efficiency in Participants D and G, while for B and C the opposite happened, more distraction led to less efficiency. Therefore, it may be possible that distraction is indirectly proportional to efficiency.
Mindfulness
Answering the question “To what extent does practicing three newly designed mindfulness meditations help violinists gain control over distracting thoughts associated with mind-wandering during violin practicing over a week?" results of the experiment are inconclusive and, thus, we cannot clearly state that mindfulness made a significant impact on participants level of distraction. For instance, some participants became less distracted by both technique and the new piece (Participants A and G), while others became more distracted (Participants B and C). Moreover, one participant (Participant D) became less distracted during the technique, but not during the new piece. Notably, an increase in distraction by Participants B and C coincided with respective higher levels of stress, fatigue, and lower levels of motivation.
Responding to "how does practicing of meditations meditation help them (violinists) become more mindful according to the FFMQ mindfulness scale and the MfM scale?", according to descriptive statistics, participants became more mindful in all five facets of both mindfulness questionnaires (FFMQ and MfM) after the experiment. Participants seemed to improve in all five facets of their trait mindfulness, particularly for the “Acting with Awareness” and “Non-Judge” facets in the FFMQ. For the MfM, there were also increases in all facets, but most noticeably for the facet “Describe”. In Czjakowski and Greasley (2015), the improvement was more visible for the Non-React but also the Non-Judge facet. Hence, we could conclude that meditation is especially helpful for musicians in developing a less judgmental attitude towards practice. The general improvement in Act with awareness corroborates the findings by Czjakowski and Greasley, 2015; Czjakowski 2018; Czajkowski et al., 2020), where participants felt the mindfulness training had helped them to become readier and more focused in practice.
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The results from the intervention substantiate the findings by Czjakowski and Greasley (2015) in that participants were able to deal better with problems during practice. Meditation seemed to help participants in dealing with technical (Czajkowski et al., 2020), and postural issues, such as: dealing with the bow change (Participant C), incorporating sensations from the meditation in scales and practice (participant B), recognizing body tension (participant F) (Czjakowski and Greasley, 2015) or improving their body awareness (e.g. “groundedness”) (Czajkowski et al., 2020) (participants A and G)
Had the meditation lasted longer, participants might have had more time to experience more benefits from the meditation, as in Czjakowski and Greasley (2015), where through a formal 8-week mindfulness course, participants were able to change their perception of peer criticism and decrease in worry, besides an increase in creativity. In this study, the worry was only measured during practice, and it did not yield overall significant results except for participants C and G, who showed a decrease in the post-intervention.
Limitations and future directions
Mind-wandering
The nature of the app for monitoring for violinists' mind-wandering may have been a limitation to the study since participants had to forcefully look at the phone, which could have notified them from other apps when looking at the alarms when it notified them. Perhaps, for future studies investigating mind-wandering in musicians, it would be useful to ask participants to turn off their phone data and WiFi to completely isolate them from other distractions other than the ones coming from their rumination. However, this ideal scenario would also be flawed in that it would not recreate a real or ecological context in which musicians normally leave their phones close to looking at them. Secondly, in the one hour of mind-wandering testing, pauses to drink water or to take small breaks from practicing were marked by participants as external distractions. Since we could not ascertain if during pauses participants were on task or engaged in mind-wandering, it was decided to interpret these events as external distractions. Future investigations should clarify this aspect better or employ shorter times of testing to make sure that participants perform the thought probes uninterruptedly. Finally, since thought probes are ultimately subjective self-reports and therefore fallible. we should be careful with their interpretation.
Mindfulness
The short meditation time imposes a limitation on the study. Moreover, the lack of consistency of participants when doing the 7 meditations (some performing 4, others 5, and others 7) is another factor that could have compromised the results of this study along with the small sample size. Having such a short meditation time constitutes a risk for the experimenter since participants, even if they volunteer for the intervention, might be busy at some point in the meditation week and not able to complete all the meditations. This limitation was expected considering the particularity of this meditation of having to be done right before practicing and not as a normal formal meditation session where the instrument is not needed. In the future, it may be of relevance to the musical community to explore the effects of mindfulness practice in collegiate musicians over longer periods, spanning months (Czajkowski, 2018; Czajkowski et al. 2020; Czajkowski et al., 2021; Czajkowski & Greasley, 2015), several years or more, thus avoiding the time limitation.
Interestingly, despite the shortness of the intervention, both quantitative and qualitative data of this study resemble some of the results obtained by reviewed studies investigating mindfulness in musicians. However, it should be noted that even though the newly designed meditations employed in this study are based on formal MBSR treatments, they are much shorter and adapted to violinists, which also imposes a limitation when comparing the results to other studies that carried out a formal 8-weeks MBSR course with singers (Czajkowski, 2018; Czajkowski et al. 2020; Czajkowski et al., 2021; Czajkowski & Greasley, 2015) or with a wider range of instrumentalists (Czajkowski, 2018). This study followed the recommendation of Czajkowski et al. (2020) to investigate the specific effects of mindfulness on particular types of musicians and therefore it was decided to limit the intervention to violinists (the researcher's instrument). Nonetheless, in future investigations, other populations of musicians could be examined by reformulating the meditation recordings employed in this study to incorporate other instruments.
That the MfM questionnaire is an unvalidated measure imposes another limitation to the results. However, this questionnaire serves as an important complement to the FFMQ, as it informs about musical experiences and can be easily linked to participants' subjective reports of their mindfulness experience. Another possible limitation of the study could be the drastic change from not meditating to meditating every day by participants; perhaps, a more progressive psychological adaptation of musicians to this kind of cognitively complex activities may be required for future investigations. However, in this sense having three different meditations gave the participants the possibility to make their meditation schedule more varied and dynamic.
Finally, the lack of a control group hinders the results obtained in this study, as we cannot fully attribute the changes in trait mindfulness (FFMQ of MfM) to the meditations. However, self-reports reflected quite accurately the data collected by the questionnaires. Hence we can be more confident that the practice of mindfulness brought benefits to the participants when becoming more mindful.