There is nothing more dulling than hours spent mindlessly going over finger patterns. This does not prepare you to be either a pianist or a musician. Too often, teachers assign technical exercises as a shortcut to technical mastery. It is easier to assign pages from an exercise book than to analyze and break down the physical elements in a specific difficult passage of music... Dorothy Taubman is one of the well known pedagogues who campaigns against technical exercises, asserting that they do far more damage than good. Certainly, indiscriminate practicing of exercises can damage a pianist just as forcing repetition of a difficult piece. In my mind, the question should not be whether or not to use technical exercises, as much as how to think physically at the piano.