This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

The strongest evidence for the talent position is that some people simply acquire musical skills more rapidly than others. The evidence against the talent account—or rather, in favor of the view that practice makes perfect—comes from research on how much training the experts or high achievement people actually do. Like experts in mathematics, chess, or sports, experts in music require lengthy periods of instruction and practice in order to acquire the skills necessary to truly excel. In several studies, the very best conservatory students were found to have practiced the most, sometimes twice as much as those who weren’t judged as good. In another study, students were secretly divided into two groups (not revealed to the students so as not to bias them) based on teachers’ evaluations of their ability, or the perception of talent. Several years later, the students who achieved the highest performance ratings were those who had practiced the most, irrespective of which “talent” group they had been assigned to previously. This suggests that practice is the cause of achievement, not merely something correlated with it. It further suggests that talent is a label that we’re using in a circular fashion: When we say that someone is talented, we think we mean that they have some innate predisposition to excel, but in the end, we only apply the term retrospectively, after they have made significant achievements.