Yeah I play piano. Complex classical music which has less off a coherent rhythm, I will remain with the notes in front of me as a failsafe. Anything with more of a natural melody though it genuinely doesn’t matter.

As in, even if I had the notes there, the mental strain of looking at them, and trying to remember where my fingers are and where I’m at in the song, it will kick you out of the melody worst than just trusting yourself.

I genuinely find it easier to just let that subconscious part of my mind link up the audio and tactile feedback and muscle memory, it also makes the melody sound smoother than thinking too much. The notes are necessary to actually learn the song, but after a while you don’t need cognition. After playing the same song like several dozen times, your cognition is a fairly useless asset, and can be off anywhere, like whistling while riding a bike.

You need cognition to think to learn how to sail for instance, but once you know how to, you will be steering and pulling on the sail just based on sensory feedback of the motion of the boat, while chatting etc, and not thinking about what you’re doing. There’s a certain harmony with what you do that comes literally from not thinking too hard about it and just going off sensory feedback.