Your Brain on Music

I've just finished listening to this really fantastic book, This is Your Brain on Music. I have to warn, having listened to it over the span of 2 days while working diligently at other tasks, some things will have slipped through the cracks. But I think I learn well by listening. Anyway, it reminded me of the thinking we do. He discussed a lot of really great points, but a few that stood out for me were the following.

"Practice is the cause of achievement, not something merely correlated with it. Talent is a label we are using in a circular fashion: When we say that someone is talented, we think we mean that they have some inate predisposition to excel, but in the end, we only apply the term retrospectively, after they have made significant chievements. Anders Ericsson... et al approach the topic of musical expertise as a general problem in cognitive psychology involving how humans become experts in general.l In other words, he takes as a starting assumption that there are certain issues involved in becoming an expert at anything; that we can learn about musical expertise by studying expert writers, chess players, athletes, artists, mathematicians, in addition to musicians. First, what do we mean by "expert"? Generally, we mean that it is someone who has reached a high degree of accomplishment relative to other people. As such, expertise is a social judgment ; we are making a statement about a few members of society relative to a larger population. Also, the accomplishment is normally considered in a field that we care about.... I may become an expert at folding my arms or pronouncing my own name, but this isn't generally considered the same as becoming, say, an expert at chess, at repairing Porsches, or being able to steal the British crown jewels without being caught."

And here's the cool part:

Studies indicate that "ten thpusand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class-expert- in anything... equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, or practice over ten years. Of course this doesn't address why some people don't seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time."

I really loved this section because it highlighted the cause of some frustration that I and some of my friends have encountered when we fail at certain things, and excel at others. But it's almost always aparent that "pracitce makes perfect" and all that. There was also a really good section using the example of a famous composer, and how people say his first composition was made when he was 2 or something crazy. But upon closer inspection something interesting shows through. Some of us start drawing, composing, etc. at an early age, but if you look at this particular composer's most famous works, supopsedly his "greatest" works, they are consistently the ones that appear well after his 10,000 hours of practice, meaning, it still took that smartypants the same amount of time & practice to become an "expert", even with his father pushing him since he was born.





http://www.yourbrainonmusic.com/