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Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#61

Post by nimithryn »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #55
mkl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge spectrum in the amount of each type of athletic play children have done. I think most of that "natural" ability is still down to practice. Tiny innate differences and advantages push people in certain directions, which means they practice those more (through play, to start with), and pretty quickly there are big apparent differences.

The science has a clear cut answer to this, not only with twin studies but also with different genes having been tied to specific body features that directly affect athletic ability. If genetics didn't play a meaningful role in athleticism, we wouldn't have evolved it. But even if that was true at some point in history, that would only be temporary, because without selective pressure, genetic drift would move the pop…

Yeah it's most obvious that there is some natural/genetic talent at play in sports like swimming/track and field. I was pretty obsessed with running in high school - I trained damn hard, did 80 mile weeks in the offseasons, etc. I ended up being pretty good, but there were some guys who trained less hard and less smart than me that were just as good (or better), and I certainly was not capable of becoming an elite runner no matter how hard I trained. It is just not in my genes to run a sub-4:00 mile or whatever. While I think it's comforting to think that all natural talent is just hard work and we could all be geniuses and savants if we just put in the effort, I don't think it's true. That being said, I do think people overestimate the difficulty of picking up many skills to a proficient or superior level.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#62

Post by L_226 »

jancsika wrote: post #45

I think the article makes "epiphany" sound rather extraordinary. But in the normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to ignore for some reason. For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time. Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or month…

Also, whistling.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#63

Post by js2 »

Semi-related, this recent Radiolab episode:

> Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero."

> At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music. Arbie Orenstein tells us what happened to Ravel after he wrote "Bolero," and neurologist Bruce Miller helps us understand how, for both Anne and Ravel, "Bolero" might have been the first symptom of a deadly disease.

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/131/1/39/346188

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/unraveling-bolero

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#65

Post by chris_wot »

phyzome wrote: post #48
michaelmior wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, there is also [COMBINE PARAS] in there as well. I didn't see the COMBINED until later on in the article.

oh jeez there's actually a whole cluster of them -.-

There is also "detail[derail?]"

Looks like this escaped their copyediting system. Oops.

But this article is also written by someone promoting their website. I'd like to see some sources for where this information has come from.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#66

Post by ehnto »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #52
hobolord wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how long does it take for react to make sense?

A friend of mine is a far better webdev than I could hope to be. She knows CSS inside and out, and seems to make it a point of pride to know every little detail. She did it in three years of focused effort, with no prior programming experience. It was one of the most amazing transformations I've seen, but it was only because she worked so hard. She mentioned the other day that she's a bit sad she can't find any aspec…

To be fair, CSS is nothing like programming. So she wasn't really learning react, she was learning the entire paradigm of programming in the context of react. My guess is that would have been way harder than learning programming in a traditional language and then learning React, because you wouldn't have been able to separate the concepts that are React specific from the concepts that are just programming. It would have been harder to answer the "why do we do it this way" questions, which can be really important to developing an intuitive underatanding of programming.

I would like to add as well, as a career move, total slam dunk.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#67

Post by maxxxxx »

ryandrake wrote: post #38
ksdale wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm way into golf and on the golf subreddit, there are regularly people who show up who ask about their chances of going pro as a 20-something or 30-something, and a chorus of people will respond that all pro golfers have tremendous natural ability (which may well be true) and that if you aren't already a great golfer without really practicing, you're not going to make it. But every account I've ever read of a pro go…

It’s like the old sports coach’s expression: “You don’t need talent in order to practice!” Outside of super-rare outliers, I don’t personally believe that anyone is born with natural talent for anything. When someone is highly skilled at something, I will assume that they spent tons of obsessive time learning and practicing rather than that they tried it one day and found they were magically good at it.

Natural talent certainly exists. I used to be into boxing. Trained 6 times a week really hard for many years and improved a lot of from where I started. From time to time we would have some new guy come who clearly didn't know anything about boxing or fighting. But within weeks he would learn and get better than almost anyone else in the gym. He would be faster and punch harder. In the same way Mozart was able to compose music at the age of 3 or Gauss just understood math naturally some people just understand certain sports. In school we had a guy who could run around 10.5 over 100m without any training. I could never reach that no matter how much I trained.

Pro sports is full of natural talents and the top guys are the ones who also work hard in addition to their natural abilities.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#68

Post by ssivark »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #47
jancsika wrote: post #45

I think the article makes "epiphany" sound rather extraordinary. But in the normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to ignore for some reason. For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time. Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or month…

It's remarkable how similar this is to learning programming. Anyone remember the lightbulb moment of grokking pointers? And there you were writing C for an arbitrary amount of time t for 0 React devs probably have a moment when react suddenly makes sense. In all four cases (bicycling, music, pointers, react) what makes the difference is dogged persistence. One day you'll wake up and things will seem simple -- and the…

To take that further, this is exactly in analogy with why/how some people enjoy research (or any kind of learning that stretches cognition, in general). Every time you "get" a new concept, it's like you've "leveled up" and your experience in that domain is forever altered :-)

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#69

Post by 8bitsrule »

Our minds are driven, pattern-finding engines. Much of what we 'discover' is done 'behind the scenes'. E.g. 'he woke up with the answer'.

Many musicians have related how they learned how to 'channel' ... open themselves to write-down or perform 'incoming transmissions' as it were.

Shouldn't surprise us too much. How often do we start talking about something - at length - without prior deliberation ... as if we just opened a valve?

It's as if, once the engine has 'figured out' the patterns, we just ... turn it on.

Re: Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training

#70

Post by egypturnash »

jancsika wrote: post #45

I think the article makes "epiphany" sound rather extraordinary. But in the normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to ignore for some reason. For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you'll remember a moment where your balance just "locked in" and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time. Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or month…

There’s a big difference between “I’ve been practicing a bunch of different parts of a thing and now I can actually do the thing pretty decently” and “I have never done this thing before and suddenly I am doing the thing at a semi-pro level”.

To use your example, this article is about people who had never played piano in their life, but suddenly sat in front of one and started flawlessly improvising the blues without all that time practicing the different parts of the blues...

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