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How do owls manage to calibrate the visual world with the auditory world? The Stanford biologist Eric Knudsen explored this question by raising owls in a kind of virtual reality world, in which prisms shifted everything by twenty- three degrees. This disrupted the owl’s normal capacity to see and forced the owl to adjust its internal map of the visual world. The earlier the prisms were installed, the better the owls were able to cope with the altered world. Young owls could easily learn to compensate for the distortion, whereas old owls could not. If that were the only paper I had read, I would have given up on the guitar right there. But I soon stumbled on a more recent study, less widely known, in which Knudsen discovered that older owls weren’t entirely hopeless after all. Although Knudsen’s original results still stand— adults definitely aren’t as flexible as baby owls— adult owls can often get to the same place, so long as their job is broken down into smaller bite- size steps. Adult owls couldn’t master twenty- three degrees of distortion all in one go, but they could succeed if the job was broken down into smaller chunks: a few weeks at six degrees, another few weeks at eleven degrees, and so on. Maybe I didn’t have talent, and maybe I was old (or at least no longer young), but I was willing to take it slow. Could adults like me acquire new skills if we approached them bit by bit, owl- style?
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With a guitar in one hand and a laptop in the other, I set out to understand the limits of human reinvention and how humans, young and old, talented or otherwise, become musical.
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The second prerequisite of expertise is what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice,” a constant sense of self- evaluation, of focusing on one’s weaknesses rather than simply fooling around and playing to one’s strengths. Studies show that practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice that most people do, most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect. Sooner or later, most learners reach a plateau, repeating what they already know rather than battling their weaknesses, at which point progress becomes slow.
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Ericsson’s notion of practicing deliberately, not just fooling around but targeting specific weaknesses, bears some relation to an older concept known as the “zone of proximal development,” the idea that learning works best when the student tackles something that is just beyond his or her current reach, neither too hard nor too easy. In classroom situations, for example, one team of researchers estimated that it’s best to arrange things so that children succeed roughly 80 percent of the time; more than that, and kids tend to get bored; less, and they tend to get frustrated. The same is surely true of adults, too, which is why video game manufacturers have been known to invest millions in play testing to make sure that the level of challenge always lies in that sweet spot of neither too easy nor too hard.
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the only known way to defy the speed- accuracy trade- off is through practice, using the only technique that the brain can bring to bear, a process known as automatization or proceduralization, in which the brain makes a transition from explicit or “declarative” knowledge, which can in principle be verbally articulated (albeit slowly), to implicit or “procedural” knowledge, which can be executed rapidly. As knowledge becomes proceduralized, we sometimes feel as if we know something in our fingers or muscles but lose the capacity to explicitly explain what is going on.
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Music and language may draw to some extent on the same parts of the brain, but it is very likely that the parts of the brain they share first arose in the service of language and only later became recruited in the service of music.
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both language and music represent an interesting mix of the universal and the culturally acquired, but that mixture itself is not unique. You can see the same sort of juxtaposition in religion, which is also nearly universal yet instantiated in different ways in different cultures, and in dietary preferences (every culture has some, but as foods like sushi and grasshoppers show, one culture’s taboo may be another’s delicacy). Music is like language, but it isn’t language; it’s just one more wondrous skill that a suitably motivated human brain can acquire.
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The comedian Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Although one can certainly use language to describe music, it is painfully obvious that words at best offer only a distinctly limited window into the true nature of music, akin to the underpowered adjectives like “dry,” “flinty,” “grassy,” “chewy,” and “rounded” that vintners settle for if asked to describe their wares in verbal terms. Even words that we take for granted aren’t universal; pitches that we describe as “high” and “low” are described as “light” and “dark” in Norwegian.