As so often with a blog posting, you find yourself writing the title, and then find that you've pretty much said everything that is on your mind. But just in case I am being a little cryptic, I will expand.

I'm now playing a recently acquired CD, the Hyperion recording of the Edward MacDowell piano concertos as it happens. Very nice. I love piano concertos, and I love the sound they make. MacDowell PC1 has a particular pleasing slow movement.

However, just before that movement ended, nature summoned me urgently to make a different sort of movement, and I pressed the pause button, and went you know where.

While seated you know where, I read, at the conscious level of my mind, the first few pages of an enticing little book about Einstein called Einstein and the Birth of Big Science. However, underneath, above and beyond my reading of that, so to speak, the tune of the MacDowell PC1 slow movement was held in my mind, as it were in suspension. So, nature having been placated and the Einstein book set aside, there remained this tune in my head.

Now here's the thing. I didn't any longer know what this tune was. Was it the tune I had just been listening to? I wasn't sure. I pressed the pause button again (which reverses the interruption and resumes the playing) and of course, the tune I had rattling about in my head was the exact tune that then resumed. So what happens when the flow of music is interrupted is, thanks to the way the brain handles the situation, not so much of an interruption as you might think. (The parallel with doing two or more things at once with a modern personal computer springs to mind at once.)

But, interesting further observation. I'm now into the third movement, and have quite forgotten that slow movement tune. I no longer need to remember it, I suppose. Whereas that tune was where I was standing, my journey interrupted, now it is gone, and I need to be concentrating on the next part of the musical journey. Seriously, if you told me to hum that slow movement tune, on pain of death I could not now do it.

Nevertheless, we all know enough about the brain to know that the tune is there in my brain somewhere. A hypnotist could probably excavate it and make me hum it perfectly, in a minute.

Which leads me to speculate that an interruption of this sort might actually cause me to get to know this tune even better than I would have done normally, without interruption. The interruption process obliged my brain to go to work to deal with the interruption, and as a result my brain paid more attention to that tune than it normally would have done, without interruption.

One thing the definitely happens just before you pause is that you do definitely listen to that which you are about to pause. You can't help yourself, and why would you want to?

What on earth does all that prove? You tell me, if so inclined.