Can science turn a psychologist into Jimi Hendrix?
Are musicians born or made? All my life, I wanted to become musical but I always assumed that I never had a chance. My ears are dodgy, my fingers too clumsy. I have no sense of rhythm and a lousy sense of pitch. I have always loved music, but could never sing, let alone play an instrument; in school, I came to believe that I was destined to be a spectator rather than a participant, no matter how hard I tried.
As I grew older, I figured my chances only diminished. Our lives, once we finish school, tend to focus on execution rather than enrichment. Whether we are breadwinners or caretakers, our success is measured by outcomes. The work it takes to achieve those outcomes, we are meant to understand, is something that should happen quickly and behind closed doors. If the conventional wisdom is right, by the time we are adults it's too late to learn anything new. Children may be able to learn anything, but if you wanted to learn French you should have started when you were six.
Until recently, science supported this theory. Virtually everybody in developmental psychology was a firm believer in "critical periods" of learning. The idea is that there are particular time windows in which complex skills, such as languages, can be learned; if you don't learn them by the time the window shuts, you never will. Case closed. But the more people have actually studied critical periods, the shakier the data has become. Although adults rarely achieve the same level of fluency that children do, the scientific research suggests that differences typically pertain more to accent than grammar.
There is also no magical window that slams shut the moment puberty begins. In fact, in recent years, scientists have identified people who have managed to learn languages with near-native fluency, even though they only started as adults.
If critical periods aren't quite so firm as once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbour secret dreams – whether to learn a language, become a pastry chef or pilot a plane. And quests such as these, no matter how quixotic they may seem, and whether they succeed, could bring unanticipated benefits, not just for their ultimate goals but for the journey itself.
Exercising our brains helps maintain them, by preserving plasticity (the capacity of the nervous system to learn new things), warding off degeneration and literally keeping the blood flowing. Beyond the potential benefits for our brains, there are benefits for our emotional wellbeing, too. There may be no better way to achieve lasting happiness – as opposed to mere fleeting pleasure – than pursuing a goal that helps broaden our horizons.
From primary school, every musical attempt I made ended in failure. The first time I tried to play guitar, a few years ago, my friend Dan Levitin (who had not yet finished his book This Is Your Brain on Music) kindly offered to give me a few lessons. When I came back to him after a week or two of practice, he quickly realised what my primary school teachers had realised long ago: that I had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. Dan offered me a metronome, and when that didn't help, he gave me something my teachers couldn't – a diagnosis: congenital arrhythmia.
And yet I never lost the desire to play. Music hasn't been studied as systematically as language in terms of critical periods, but there are certainly artists who started late and still became first-rate musicians. Tom Morello, the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine and among Rolling Stone magazine's greatest guitarists of all time, didn't start until he was 17. Patti Smith scarcely considered becoming a professional singer until she was in her mid-20s. Then there is the jazz guitar star Pat Martino, who relearned how to play after a brain aneurysm at the age of 35, and Dr John, who switched his primary allegiance from guitar to piano at 21 (after his left ring finger was badly injured in a bar-room fight) and won the first of his five Grammy awards in his late 40s.
Given my arrhythmia, I had no aspiration of reaching such heights, but at 38, long after I had completed my PhD and become a professor of cognitive psychology, I realised that my desire to become musical wasn't going away. I wanted to know whether I could overcome my intrinsic limits, my age and my lack of talent. Perhaps few people had less talent for music than I did, but few people wanted to be able to play more acutely.
I began to read the scientific literature. How did children learn music? Were there any lessons for adults? To my surprise, although children had been well studied, there was hardly any systematic research on people my age. Nobody seemed to know much about whether adults could learn to play late in life, and it wasn't just music that we knew little about; the literature on the capacity of adults to learn new skills in general was far sparser than I had imagined.
We know something about gradual declines in memory, but the only truly firm result I could find concerned perfect pitch (the ability to identify a single note in isolation). For that, one must indeed start early, but luckily for me and anyone else starting late, it is also clear that perfect pitch is more luxury than necessity. Duke Ellington didn't have it and neither did Igor Stravinsky (nor, for that matter, did Joey Ramone).
Other studies show some advantages for music learners who began earlier in life, but most of those don't take consideration of the total amount of practice. When it came to other aspects of music, such as the ability to improvise or compose, or even to learn a simple melody, there was almost no compelling literature. Although any number of studies have shown that the more you practise the better you get, startlingly few have compared what happens when people of different ages get the same amount of practice.
How could such a basic scientific question remain so unanswered? I wondered about this for months, until Caroline Palmer, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, explained the answer to me. The problem wasn't a lack of scientific interest – it was a lack of subjects. To learn a musical instrument, you need to put in a lot of work – 10,000 hours is an oft-mentioned (if somewhat oversold) number – and to do a proper study, you'd need a reasonably large sample of participants, which is to say a big group of adult novices with sufficient commitment. Nobody has studied the outcomes of adults who put in 10,000 hours of practice starting at 42 because most people of that age have lives and responsibilities – few adult learners are prepared to invest the kind of time that a teenager has. No subjects, no science. At that point, I decided to become a guinea pig.
by Gary Marcus, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Jan Persson/Redferns
