Intro

• Author sets out to learn (but not master): chess, singing, surfing, drawing, making (wedding rings), and juggling
• Advantages of being a beginner:
  • No expectations or imposter syndrome
  • Can usually see progress faster
  • More open-minded → see possibilities others with experience cannot
• Younger brains (<20) → faster, more "intuitive" style of thinking, more reliant on intuition
  • Older people → other knowledge/experience can interfere with learning and memory retrieval
  • Fluid vs crystallized intelligence

Lessons from Infants

• Infants learning to walk = ideal beginners— very high failure rate, yet little negative feedback; designed to not get hurt when falling… other lessons from infant learning?
  • Practice in many contexts → may be less successful, but learn more; explore variety of solutions
  • Fail often!
  • Skills rarely transfer (eg. from crawling to walking)
  • Learning can be nonlinear— can get worse before getting better
  • Operate at the edge of impossible— zone of proximal development → fastest learning
  • Take advantage of opportunities that arise; don’t stay too fixed on set goal

Learning to Sing

• Very vulnerable to perform/sing in public— think about the last time you did so!
• Why are so many of us poor/mediocre singers?
  • Kindergarten → 6th grade, people improve at singing, but regress by college-aged— likely because less “practice”
  • Development of musical self-consciousness, despite lack of correlation btw actual performance and self-perception → people identify as “musical” or not, affecting amount of engagement (assumed to be innate talent)
• Can be therapeutic (both physical and mental)— singing activates more emotions than speaking, no one liking their own voice
  • Need to be physically relaxed to let lungs and larynx work optimally
• Often learning consists of doing less, not more— trying too hard → tension, which inhibits vocal cords
  • Replacing old habits rather than simply not doing them → less likely to revert to old ones under pressure (ex. bending down when singing high notes)
• Mimic the conditions of singing in the shower! Warm, relaxed, standing, energized

Virtues of Learning on the Fly

• Chorus effect: disconnect of sound from its source when coming from many people together, resulting from combination of each individual deviating slightly from perfect pitch
• Performing in groups can lead to social facilitation (doing “better”) or social loafing (doing worse)
  • Acts as social glue: choirs usually around 50 people, ideal size; faster bonding than other groups from synchrony of singing
• Singing alone makes you feel good; singing in groups makes you feel even better— lowers cortisol, ups oxytocin
• Choirs → ideal learning environment: many people to observe, immediate feedback, motivation to contribute
  • Unique skill to sing in choir than alone, though! Different focus

The Challenges of the Advanced Beginner (Surfing!)

• Classic beginner mistake = looking at ourselves vs where we want to be going— surfing, biking
  • Across most skills, do better if focusing on external goal vs ourselves— in golf, thinking about the hole vs elbow; in music, overall sound vs hands
• Initially, beginners adhere to context-free rules; to become advanced beginner, start incorporating context
  • Leads to U-shaped learning curve— learning gets harder after beginning; start to know what you don’t know, can overgeneralize rules
• Goes to Simply Surf!
• Third (of five) stage after beginner, advanced beginner, is competent → emotional and personal involvement in success or failure (not just a result of you knowing or not knowing something)
  • Can be okay with staying at this stage— if the skill (ex. surfing) is more an enthusiasm than a job, want to improve as long as it keeps being fun

How We Learn to Do Things (Juggling)

• Juggling = often studied in science of learning— right difficulty, easy to measure
• As we get better at a skill, become more efficient with use of muscles; not as much memorizing the physical motion as the mental patterns
• Repetition without repetition → important to practice in different contexts, solving the problem again each time rather than mastering one solution
• Motivation/desire to learn → learn more from observation (one of best ways to pick up a skill; necessary but not sufficient)
  • Also need someone watching you— getting both positive and negative feedback
• Being a beginner, regardless of skill, age, and progress, leads to increase in neuroplasticity

Learning to Draw

• Not a motor skill, but a thinking one: learning to draw what we actually see, rather than in categorical prototypes
• Could be considered equal to reading in terms of things people should learn → gives us visual literacy in addition to verbal
• To draw precision drawing, start with envelope to set up basic geometric proportions, add high and low points
  • Abstract everything— see curves as series of small lines