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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

#71

Post by bbeonx »

peterlk wrote: post #36
jancsika wrote: post #11

Is there a control group of people who spend an equal amount of time and fervor investigating a new musical or artistic path without first having the "epiphany?" I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an inst…

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out the other side with a much better…

Very true. I just started playing basketball for the first time in over 20 years. I'm 31 and pretty overweight (300+ at 5"11') and I've been playing for three weeks. After the first week I got my ass kicked by my in-shape friend who plays recreationally in 1v1 over and over again. After two weeks of 3+ hours /day I beat him handily a few times.

Granted, he hadn't touched the ball since our last set of matches but I'm not letting that take the wind put of my sails.

Obsession is the name of the game. Balance is for chumps. Nobody ever got great at anything by spending a reasonable and well adjusted amount of time working on it.

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

#72

Post by maxxxxx »

mkl wrote: post #51
SamReidHughes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge spectrum of natural athletic ability in children; you could see it in plain sight you just played sports as a kid.

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.

Have you ever engaged in any sport and seen young people develop? You would immediately see that some people just "get it" and are better than others. They are faster, stronger and move better. The superstars are the ones who combine talent with hard work.

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

#74

Post by projektir »

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…

> Anyone remember the lightbulb moment of grokking pointers?

Strangely enough, I don't think I do. There was a spectrum where I didn't get pointers, I thought I sorta got pointers, I thought I got pointers, I thought I get nothing, and over time I got a bit better at understanding pointers thanks to C++ and Rust. Definitely more of a continuum.

I did have a lightbulb moment for understanding recursion, though, thanks to an assembly course.

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

#75

Post by projektir »

bbeonx wrote: post #71
peterlk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people underestimate the amount of discipline that it takes to get good at something, and overestimate the amount of time it takes. I learned WAY more in one summer of programming 16 hours a day than I did in a year of classes where I was supposedly immersing myself in learning. When I say that I was programming 16 hours a day, I was. That was _all_ I did. But I came out the other side with a much better…

Very true. I just started playing basketball for the first time in over 20 years. I'm 31 and pretty overweight (300+ at 5"11') and I've been playing for three weeks. After the first week I got my ass kicked by my in-shape friend who plays recreationally in 1v1 over and over again. After two weeks of 3+ hours /day I beat him handily a few times. Granted, he hadn't touched the ball since our last set of matches but I'm…

> Obsession is the name of the game. Balance is for chumps. Nobody ever got great at anything by spending a reasonable and well adjusted amount of time working on it.

You had a good point but this seems completely unnecessary. You're not making it into the NBA here, so "great" seems like a very strong word. For most people, basketball and such is not the main purpose, but a side event, a hobby, etc., so it's pretty strange for them to choose to obsess over it.

Of course focusing on one thing and only just that one thing will make you relatively good at it. Everyone already knew that. The issue is just that people have jobs, relatives, other hobbies, etc., so balance becomes more relevant. It's more interesting when someone gets good at something without being able to allot huge amounts of time to it.

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

#76

Post by lawnchair_larry »

Treffert has come up before, and he is bogus. He’s the only one who acknowledges “sudden savant syndrome”, which he made up. I know someone on his list, and I know how that person got on his list. By emailing him, and claiming that after he hit his head, he was a savant. That’s it.

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

#77

Post by lawnchair_larry »

emp wrote: post #44

Who is judging the skill of these sudden savants? Aside from code, I draw and paint well (art school) and have built my own furniture. I know I am far from an expert. However to people who's last artistic endeavour was finger painting as a kid, my skills appear expert. I don't think they could tell apart the skill of a real practicing artist vs me, they have no foundation to judge from. One day I want to take off 3 m…

In at least one case I’m aware of, it’s the savants themselves. Treffert wants his pet theory to be true so badly that self-attestation is enough for him to count you.

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

#78

Post by shams93 »

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…

Western music has a fairly simple base system, with only 12 tones in total its much easier to get by ear than other systems like classical Turkish music which has 9 microtones within the space of one half step. It would be interesting to see how universal this phenomena is or whether its actually partially a byproduct of western music being relatively simple and easy to get by ear, even classical pieces like Beethovan's Song of Brotherhood. Are there musical prodigies in Turkey? Certainly we don't see cases of prodigies in the US spontaneously picking up complex classical Turkish microtonal music by ear.

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

#79

Post by 3131s »

maxxxxx wrote: post #67
ryandrake wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

> 10.5 over 100m

I can run a 10.5 after a lot of training, so maybe it's my ego talking here, but I refuse to believe this! I think you must just not have been aware of the training this person did. If they could really run a 10.5 in high school with no training, then with minimal effort they could bring their time down enough to qualify for most any country's Olympic team. A 10.5 100m is good enough to win the high school state tournament in an average US state.

> 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.

These people must have had prior training in other sports. Once you've done strength, agility and speed training and have good coordination, it's easy to pick up another sport.

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

#80

Post by djaychela »

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.

I've been a guitar teacher for about 20 years, and my experience disagrees with your feeling. Some people have much more aptitude for the guitar than others; I've had some kids who have picked up playing chords in a tiny fraction of the time that is typical. While generally the ability to learn seems to correlate with their general intelligence level, there have been some who are far better than you would expect.

This is not to say that practice isn't the most reliable way to achieve gains (it is!), but some 'just get it' and have ability (either musical or dextrous) on the instrument that most take a lot longer to achieve.

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