Finding the Rhythm

Music, movement, play, and finding the kind of learning we can get lost in together.

I started playing violin when I was around seven and played consistently until I was eighteen. For a couple of those years I was also in a junior honors orchestra in Reno. Learning to read music that young was almost like learning another language. There are so many things happening at once.

You're reading what's on the page, listening, keeping time, figuring out what your fingers are supposed to be doing, controlling the bow, paying attention to the conductor and listening to everyone around you. Sometimes you're sitting in the chair that requires you to turn the page of the sheet music, catch right back up and somehow not miss a beat or throw anyone else off.

At first, those are all tiny separate things you learn to piece and blend together. Eventually, you just play. I get that feeling with dogs too. Presto loves being given things to do. He likes tricks, running through hoops/tunnels, being precise and knowing he got something right (total herding dog brain). He especially loves working for his favorite game with his flirt pole.

One of the things I like doing with him is Canine Soapbox. I originally played around with the idea during my master's program in service dog education. It's sort of a mix of agility, parkour, body awareness, problem solving and whatever else I decide to drag out of my storage container that day.

Sometimes the setups are more complicated. Sometimes they're really simple. The one that got me started on this whole train of thought was just a circle with some jumps and a tunnel. I'm on the inside and Presto is running around the outside. There's a point where the behaviors and obstacles flow, and then we are just moving and synchronizing. He's listening to me, watching where I'm going, figuring out where his own body needs to go, changing speed, jumping, going through the tunnel and anticipating what might happen next. I'm watching him and adjusting my movement and timing right back. Then we finish and he gets his flirt pole.

To him, this is a pretty great deal!

Learning With the Whole Body

There is actually some cool science underneath all of this. Research with children learning musical instruments has found changes in the developing brain alongside improvements in auditory and motor skills. Musical training asks a lot of the brain at once (sound, movement, timing, visual information, memory and coordination). Studies have found measurable changes in the brain after sustained musical training, including changes in white-matter pathways.

Some of that research has looked specifically at the corpus callosum, the huge bundle of nerve fibers that helps the two sides of the brain communicate with each other. That seems especially interesting when you think about everything happening at once while playing an instrument (listening, reading, timing, movement and coordinating both sides of your body). Repeated experience really can shape the developing brain in measurable ways, which I find fascinating.

I could probably keep going down that science rabbit hole, but the way I picture learning in my head is much simpler:

A trail through tall grass.

Walk through it once and you can probably still see where you went, but it isn't much of a trail.

Keep taking that same path and it gets easier to follow. The grass gets pushed down. You don't have to work quite as hard to figure out where you're going.

Eventually, it's a pretty obvious path.

Experience and repetition matter. The nervous system gets better at doing things it does repeatedly, however, another piece I love about this analogy is that we don't have to walk the exact same trail every time. Once you know the area, you can start taking different routes.

When we choose different dog sports and activities, we're also choosing different things to practice and get better at together. Maybe Canine Soapbox has us practicing listening, movement, body awareness, and figuring things out together. Then pieces of that start showing up while we're doing tricks, walking somewhere new, or playing. It might look like a completely different activity, but we're not starting from scratch; the dog has all those previous experiences to pull from.

Music worked that way too.

You don't learn one song over and over for ten years and call yourself a violinist. You practice scales. You learn how to read music and the difference between largo and presto. Your fingers learn where to go and develop muscle memory. You learn rhythm and timing. You learn to listen to yourself and, eventually, to the people playing around you.

Then someone puts a piece of music in front of you that you've never played before. You don't start from zero. You have all those little paths already available to you. I think about dogs the same way. I don't want them only memorizing this obstacle means do this thing or this cue means perform this behavior. I want them building a bigger library of experiences they can pull from. The details of what we're learning obviously matter. I'm also really interested in everything they're learning along the way. Brains change through experience.

We build little trails through practice. Some get traveled a lot. Some connect to other trails...and eventually we have so many more places we know how to go. A lot of learning happens through experience and actually participating in things. We're listening, looking, moving, anticipating, making mistakes, adjusting, and trying again - all at the same time.

We're giving the brain more trails to travel, and I want my dogs to have a lot of them!

Different Ways to Use a Brain

I love giving dogs a variety of things to do. Different activities ask different things of them. They get to use different parts of themselves, solve different kinds of problems, and sometimes we find strengths or interests we wouldn't have known were there otherwise.

Scent work asks something completely different of them. I can give a dog a problem where their nose has information I don't have, and they have to work it out. Exercising their autonomy, they get to make decisions and solve the problem without me giving them every answer.

Trick training gives us another kind of conversation. We can work on individual movements and eventually string them together into longer sequences. There's something about getting into that flow of movement together, where you're both paying attention and adjusting to each other in synchronization. Sometimes I wonder what the earliest humans and dogs living alongside each other would think if they could see us now. Thousands of years later, there's still this conversation happening between two species: through work, through play, and sometimes through something that looks a whole lot like dancing.

Treibball adds distance, direction, movement and teamwork. The dog is learning to work farther away from you, listen for information and make decisions about how to move through space and where to send the ball. There's a lot happening between dog and handler even when you're physically nowhere near each other. I also love that it gives the dog some responsibility within the game. There's something we're actually trying to accomplish together: get these giant balls where they need to go. There's a problem to solve, the dog has a fun role in solving it, and we still have to figure it out together as a team.

Canine Soapbox might have us slowing way down and thinking carefully about the information being given (where feet are going, which direction to move, when to pause, when to go). As those skills develop, the courses can become faster and more fluid, and we can start finding that rhythm together. We're working on listening ears, body awareness, work ethic and autonomy. I want the dog tuned in and working with me, but I also want them thinking and problem solving without me jumping in to give them every answer.

Different activities give dogs different ways to think, move, use their senses and figure things out. Not every dog is going to love the same things and that is part of the fun. You get to find out what really lights up the dog in front of you.

Find the Thing They Love

Music was probably the first thing I really learned how to practice deeply. I had multiple coaches over the years, including a "master coach", and I spent a lot of time working on really small pieces of something. Slow it down. Repeat it. Get it wrong. Try it again. Have someone point out something I didn't even realize I was doing. Keep working at it until eventually all those little pieces started coming together and I could just play. I could get completely lost in that kind of practice.

Reading The Talent Code years later gave me language for some of what I had already experienced: deep practice, working in that space where you're making mistakes, adjusting and getting a little better; ignition, that drive that makes you want to keep going; and master coaching, having someone who knows how to help you keep developing.

Dogs deserve opportunities to find their versions of this too. For Presto, movement is a big one. He loves running, tricks, chasing, jumping, performing and interacting with me. There's a lot I can build from there because I'm starting with things he already wants to do.

Another dog might completely come alive when they get to search. Another might love different aspects of play: stalking, chasing, grabbing, carrying, retrieving, tugging or dissecting something appropriate. Different dogs can really light up for different pieces of that predatory sequence.

One dog lives for the stalk and chase. Another wants to grab and tug. Some are happiest carrying something around or bringing it back to you. Other dogs would happily spend ten minutes very carefully removing every piece of stuffing from a toy.

These preferences tell us a lot about who that dog is. Instead of only focusing on what they "should learn," I also want to know:

What does this dog love doing enough to get lost in it?

What can we build around that? Where can we go from there?

Still Practicing

Learning, behavior, the human-dog relationship, and service dog education were all woven through my master's work. Somewhere in there, I came up with the P.R.E.S.T.O. acronym, borrowing the name from my dog (and conveniently from music vocabulary too), as a way of putting some of those ideas into words:

Purpose • Relationship • Enrichment • Synergy • Timing • Objective

I chose those words because they were already showing up again and again in what I was studying, writing about, and doing with dogs. A few years and a whole lot of continuing education later, they still are.

I just hear more in them now and, in some cases, a little differently.

Purpose means even more to me than it did then. I've become much more interested in biological fulfillment, what an individual dog was built to do, and what gives them something meaningful to participate in. I love the idea of a dog getting to feel like a somebody -- having things that matter to them, things they're good at, and things they look forward to. Their own little version of ikigai, perhaps.

Relationship has probably become even more important to me too. Not just whether we have a good relationship with our dogs, but what we're doing with it and whether the way we're training is actually making that relationship better. Are we getting better at communicating with each other? Does the dog feel comfortable trying, making mistakes, and staying in the conversation? I've seen over and over how much the relationship can change everything else we're trying to do.

Enrichment... I have so many thoughts about that word now that it probably needs its own future blog and project. My understanding of enrichment has expanded far beyond what I meant when I originally put that E into PRESTO. There's so much more to it than giving a dog more things to do. What do dogs actually desire and require, and how do we meet those needs well and with intention?

Synergy feels especially fitting here. I don't think I fully appreciated where that word would take me when I first chose it. It's what happens when the dog and I aren't just working alongside each other, but actually working together. We're responding, adjusting, communicating, and creating something together. There's a point where it stops feeling like a collection of separate pieces and starts feeling like something we're doing together.

We find the rhythm.

Timing is something I think you just keep getting better at through practice. The more I practice, the more I notice all the little places where it matters: when I move, pause, give information, wait, step in, or let the dog keep figuring something out. There can be a whole lot of tiny decisions underneath something that eventually looks pretty effortless.

Objective might be one of the most interesting ones to me now. When I originally chose that word, I was thinking about having something clear we're working toward: What are we actually trying to accomplish together, and does the dog understand that too? A clear objective gives us something to work toward together without me having to micromanage every move along the way.

Learning from Jay Jack's Play as the Way added another layer to it: a game has to have an objective. There's something to figure out, accomplish, win, find, catch, move, or get to. Having that shared objective gives us something to actually play together. Somewhere in there, we start developing a fluidity and fluency with each other. We don't have to focus on every tiny piece anymore. We can just play and find that rhythm again.

I don't think I realized when I first chose that word just how much could happen on the way to the objective either. The dog gets to think, make decisions, communicate, make mistakes, adjust, and try again. Reaching the objective matters, but so does everything happening between us while we're figuring out how to get there.

When I first put those six words together, I don't think I realized how much what they meant to me would keep evolving. Every dog, every experience, getting things wrong and trying again, and especially learning from people who have spent years going much deeper into behavior, play, learning, development, and the nervous system has given me more to work with and more to keep honing in my own craft. I'll never be done learning, and I don't want to be.

Learning about dogs and humans has become part of my own fulfillment. I love being able to really dig into something, practice it, get better at it, and keep finding more that I don't know yet. I hope five years from now I'm not thinking about all of this in exactly the same way I am today. The more I learn, the more I notice things I probably wasn't ready to notice yet, or didn't have enough experience to fully understand. Sometimes I've heard something before, but it takes more experience before I really understand what someone was trying to tell me. Then I hear it again years later and it lands completely differently. Maybe I finally have the ears to hear it.

Which brings me right back to music. You learn the individual pieces. You practice them. You get things wrong and adjust. Good teachers point out things you didn't even realize you were doing. Eventually, enough of those pieces become familiar that you aren't thinking about every single one while you're playing. You can listen differently. You can notice more. That was one of the things I loved about music when I was younger, and I've found another version of it in working with dogs. I'm still learning from the dog in front of me, from other people, and from all the times something doesn't go quite the way I thought it would.

I'm curious what I'll hear in all of this five years from now.

In the meantime, I'll keep learning, practicing, and adding to my own repertoire. Plenty of which will involve putting on my music, throwing a few jumps and a tunnel in a circle, grabbing Presto, and seeing if we can find the rhythm.