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Yes, more than half our body weight is the bacteria we carry in/on ourselves, most of which reside in our gut.

They have a rôle in changing our attitude towards ourselves (as well as towards them) .

No doubt, but I was thinking more the enteric nervous system.

I completely agree with this, and I've become more and more aware just how important this is. It is a colossal mistake to give a student repertoire that is too difficult for them to reasonably perform well, and I feel that a lot of instructors (especially in the USA) take this approach.

The far better approach is to concentrate on building technique with etudes, exercises, and a piece that is designated for that purpose. For performances, a student should have pieces that are well within their technical abilities so they can practice the art of connecting with the audience in a relaxed way.

For my first 2 years I was saddled with repertoire that taxed me in practice and so when it came to performances flubs and mistakes were almost impossible to avoid, and so therefore were the feelings of self-doubt and frustration.

As a researcher and pianist, I've subscribed to this viewpoint for the past 40+ years, and it's done well for me. But, Atrys, how do you account for the fact that having a tune in your head - hardly an item of informed scientific knowledge - can hugely affect your brain's ability to generate behaviour that dramatically increases your chances of finding and reproducing its sound on a keyboard? And more reliably so than all the current scientific literature about that is able to explain? Similarly, the likes of Liszt, Hofmann, Godowsky etc., did just fine long before Ortmann and Schultz taught piano-pedagogy the underlying science of piano-playing kinematics and skeletal energy-transmission.

At the end of the day, all information the brain uses to direct behaviour amounts to trains of electrical impulses from neuron to neuron. It doesn't make the slightest difference to a neuron what the semantic content implied by this or that train of impulses might be - it merely needs to be sufficiently excited by them to generate a further train, neuron after neuron in turn until the final neurons' trains reaches their targeted neuromuscular junctions. If you happen to believe that your playing-movements are controlled by fairies that you must talk to politely in a special language, then that utter mumbo-jumbo will do the trick just as effectively as any scientifically derived, nail-on-the head, mental model or algorithm.
All human progress, civilization, culture, science itself, is based on knowledge likely to be fallacious in some respects, if not all.

Science is always studying the past, and using it to form models to predict the future. One must never confuse the model with reality. Consciousness is always on the razor's edge of the present and reality. The former can never catch up to the latter, although it can certainly inform present decisions for the better, because it appears that nature is full of wondrous patterns and mathematical laws. In order for scientists to understand pianism, they must study the pianists and their brains as they do what they do. But science itself can never do.

For more on this subject, read David Hume's take on induction. Love me some philomosophy.

appears being the operative word here. I don't subscribe to the view myself.

I think I laboured a good 9 or 10 years before figuring that out, hahah! I think the teachers didn't see how huge the effort to learn the repertoire was becoming, so long as it seemed like I was able to make noticeable progress each week. I like how you put it: "the art of connecting with the audience in a relaxed way" - I would consider that the number 1 priority and put advancing skill in the very near second place.

You are right 1 - connecting with the audience is the number 1 skill. If there's to be chat, I think that's to whom it should be directed.

......as long as it's not on the order of what the great Vladimir de Pachmann used to do. Not for nothing was he dubbed "Chopinzee" for 'the playfulness of his platform manner' .

Since I am my own main audience, that connection is relatively easy to achieve. Advancing artistry and skill are much more difficult, and are what matters to me the most.

Not so, you still need to connect with the composer.

In this forum, if you are responding to something someone posted in a thread (other than the original post), it's always a good idea to explicitly connect to the post to which you are responding in some way, so people will know. The way the message quoted above looks when read in the listing of messages, it seems you are talking to yourself, because all it referenced is your user-name.

Surely apposite?

Just guessing that you might be responding to a post of mine...

The answer is no, it is not apposite. The reason should be obvious.

Oh. Well, it was your post. I figure the composer is always in the room. That's why I play.