Gary Marcus, in the red shirt, helped hone his playing skills at the DayJams summer camp, by playing in a band.
Image: Athena Vouloumanos
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Gary Marcus suffers from what a friend jokingly describes as congenital arrhythmia—the inability, despite many hours of his youth spent practicing and taking lessons, to learn to play a musical instrument. A few years ago Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, decided at 38 to make one last try when he took up guitar. No surprise: He did not succeed in becoming the next Jimi Hendrix, but managed to acquire a modicum of skill—and went on to describe his experience in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning.
Marcus says his personal experience jibes with current theories in neuroscience that adult brains are plastic—that, in practice, they can learn new skills that scientists once thought had to be acquired during the so-called critical period of prepubescent childhood. Marcus, though, calls into question the conventional wisdom that hard work alone suffices. Raw talent also plays a role, he says—a message that will come as a surprise to many people in an era that lauds "tiger moms" and 10,000-hour apprenticeships. Marcus spoke with Scientific American about music and the brain. Excerpts
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What is a critical period?
It's supposed to be a window in development that defines the only period in which a thing can be learned.
How has our understanding about this concept changed?
There used to be an idea that there were very strict critical periods, that you had to learn something by a certain time or you wouldn't be able to do it all. That's the dominant idea in the textbooks. What we've found in the last decade is that there's a gradual decline rather than an immediate falloff.
Neurons do become less flexible over time, which makes learning more difficult, but not all in one moment. There's sort of a gradual decline. The other thing that gets in the way relates to interferences with what's learned early in life. So if you try to learn a new language that works differently from your old language, you sometimes get stuck when using the new language. Another reason for difficulty learning new things is that adults are simply busy with other obligations.
There have always been late bloomers. Grandma Moses and Anton Bruckner, among others.
For sure! People like that presumably have considerable innate talent, to begin with, and then later in life develop a passion that consumes them and leads them to great heights.
How far do you think someone could go? Do you think it would ever be possible to start playing at 50 and become a concert violinist?
I think it's possible. It's less likely; starting earlier is better. If you're starting later in life, I think you need to temper your ambitions. But I don't think it's completely impossible if you devote yourself to something—especially if you have some raw talent.
How important is talent? The popular psychology literature has focused a lot of attention on the question of motivation—the idea that 10,000 hours of concerted practice can make you an expert in virtually any field.
The idea of 10,000 hours is a nice first approximation, but also very much oversold. It's weird the way some prominent people seem to have forgotten about genes. Some people become experts faster, some slower, and it also depends on what skill you are trying to acquire.
The fact that practice is important doesn't mean that talent isn't. Most of the top performers in any field are people who combine industry with predisposition. You can actually see that in the original studies that inspired the "10,000 hour" rule of thumb—some people who had practiced for 10 years were better than others that practiced for 20, and that's what talent is. There is also a huge literature in twin studies that highlights the contributions of genes and heritability. Without talent you can become very good, but to be truly outstanding, you probably need the right genes, too.
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10 Comments
Add CommentI refuse to believe in 'talent' it's a wooly concept that collectively describes the results of being motivated enough to put in the work required to be skillful.The lazy don't comprehend dedication to an art form, so they bleat about talent The preamble to the article suggests that Marcus, after years of possessing little or no instrumental ability, suddenly acquires a noticeable level of skill... but by whose judgement? Nothing to be learned here...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisho hum, slow day in the land of science journalism ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople's brains may remain plastic and capable of learning, but apparently some people's minds are not. I wonder what causes the switch to be turned off.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTalent isn't so much a wooly concept as it is a confluence of abilities which ARE probably genetically determined. For one thing, intelligences -- both the test-measured kind & all the others -- vary by person. One person may grasp a concept; another may struggle. One person may synthesize ideas; another may remain in an unvarying mental groove. Not to mention that one person's mind may find certain pursuits appealing & others not so much so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, of course, application makes a difference. I learned to play tennis in my late twenties; I loved it. I practiced like crazy, by myself or with anyone who would deign to play with me. I took lessons. I played for 4-6 hours every day. And within 3 years, I became a reasonably skilled club player; but I never had the killer instinct or the desire to win that takes players to the top. Not only that, but I saw another friend, of about the same age, pick up a racket & play with some skill from the moment she began. She didn't have to teach herself to keep her eye on the ball & she was naturally athletic.
There IS such a thing as talent, though of what it is comprised varies from skill to skill. I could play the violin for 20 years & never sound as ineffably sweet as Nigel Kennedy. I could paint for 10,000 hours & never be Renoir or Van Gogh or Picaso or Kandinsky. And I could graduate summa cum laude from Harvard Business School with an MBA & I'd never be a top CEO (I'd rather poke needles in my eyes!).
Application is not ALL it takes.
Love your statement. Can I add it to my Facebook page? I think people conform to life and give up the wonder they once had in learning new things. Life being bills, bills, and more bills taking their time and wonderment with life away.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are welcome to use it. Thanks for the compliment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps you are right. Maybe it is the difficulties of daily life that turn us off to the possibilities of the new.
I am a professional cellist. In addition to playing in a symphony orchestra, I teach private cello lessons. I have seen a range of combinations of talent and application in children, and it does take both to reach a high level. To some extent, lack of application can be made up for later, but lack of one or more crucial talents (and what exactly those are is a subject for a long conversation) almost certainly create a firm limit on a person's potential.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have also worked with adult amateurs, and I consider it astronomically unlikely that someone could start studying violin at 50 and become a "concert violinist," if by that you mean a high level professional performer. I have worked with students of this type, although admittedly not a large sample, including a few who really practice diligently over many years and who possess a driving passion. The requirement for extremely fine levels of motor skills, coordination, and dexterity -- all certainly aspects of talent but also things that must be cultivated -- and the optimized neuromuscular aspects of playing an instrument seem excrutiatingly harder for adults to acquire. Even adults who played the instrument in youth and stopped for a time during young adulthood find it painfully hard to regain the refinement and reflexes required to play at a level as high as their understanding and discernment. Sometimes this seems like an example of the adage that youth is often wasted on the young.
Talent is a strange facet of playing ability. I was a quite competent lead trumpet player, less competent in a classical setting. In college, I didn't want to play in the marching band so switched my major (instrument) to piano. Despite many, many hours of practice, my forte on piano was only in playing scales. I never progressed to even a minor skill in sight reading as I always seemed to have a disconnect between what I saw and the impulses to the hands to perform what I saw and could hum. I had to be the absolute worst piano major the school ever had and I did devote hours a day to practice. My talent seemed to lie in the single dimension of an instrument offering one note at a time. I have, at times, gigged on different brasses, flute, bass (upright), drums and (even, in a pinch) piano. I have a working knowledge of woodwinds and strings but have no proficiency in their performance (though I was making some progress with a few months of cello lessons which I loved but did not continue). I occasionally go to the keyboard but have lost almost all the few skills I once had. I have had friends who could not seem to acquire the skills to perform adequately on brasses or reeds despite hours of practice but could perform difficult piano sonatas or etudes with ease after a modest amount of time working out the fingerings and expression.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is nothing new in this story - It's been done before in Never Too Late: My Musical Life Story - written by John Caldwell Holt in the Seventies. "If I could learn to play the cello well, as I thought I could, I could show by my own example that we all have greater powers than we think; that whatever we want to learn or learn to do, we probably can learn; that our lives and our possibilities are not determined and fixed by what happened to us when we were little, or by what experts say we can or cannot do."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was 55 when I started teaching myself how to play drums. I am 57 1/2 and now write and play originals only in the style of Dream Theater, Tool, Rush mostly. It is weird to feel how my perception of music has changed, it is also weird how I feel my limbs as if they are acting on their own accord, like a different person but I know it is me doing it because my limbs play what I want them to play, but still, it feels very weird to say the least. BTW, I was "clocked" on the top 2% on IQ tests when I was younger, don't know if that has something to do with my ability to learn and master new things now that I am older. I am also an "impulsive learner", meaning anything will attract my attention, and there I am hitting the books on the subject. I think there is no limit to the brains ability to learn and master new things at "old" age, or at least I refuse to think otherwise. LOL
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