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Natural aptitudes for certain activities

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A while ago, while working out, I was thinking. I can do 20 pull-ups, easily. I didn't work for it, and I don't have to be working out to do them. I haven't gone to gym in over a year and I know I can still do 20. My body is just built in such a way that doing certain core exercises are just insanely easy for me. Now, I wonder if there are parallels in the mind. Is it possible that we have some innate aptitude or talent? 

 

While I've spent a great deal of my time pursuing X, maybe innately (biologically) I'd be much better geared towards Y (let's just say... music). So if only I'd have found and started to play music when I was young I'd be insanely talented. I know from having done many performance activities that the tiniest edges in talent actually multiply and so the learning curve is just absurdly different. Someone can spend 5 hours practicing something, another, with some innate aptitude, can spend the same 5 hours, but they would equate to 50-80 for the other person.

 

It bothers me to think about the possibility that my brain may be innately much better at doing something else than I'm currently doing. Does anyone else think about this?

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A while ago, while working out, I was thinking. I can do 20 pull-ups, easily. I didn't work for it, and I don't have to be working out to do them. I haven't gone to gym in over a year and I know I can still do 20. My body is just built in such a way that doing certain core exercises are just insanely easy for me. Now, I wonder if there are parallels in the mind. Is it possible that we have some innate aptitude or talent?

Absolutely.

 

While I've spent a great deal of my time pursuing X, maybe innately (biologically) I'd be much better geared towards Y (let's just say... music).

I suppose that's possible, but I think it's unlikely. In my experience, people who have what you're calling an "innate aptitude or talent" (I would add "innate passion or interest" to that) discover it very early in life. They don't have to go looking for it.

 

So if only I'd have found and started to play music when I was young I'd be insanely talented. I know from having done many performance activities that the tiniest edges in talent actually multiply and so the learning curve is just absurdly different. Someone can spend 5 hours practicing something, another, with some innate aptitude, can spend the same 5 hours, but they would equate to 50-80 for the other person.

I've seen the same thing many times in my life. Certain people are just naturally born to be either more interested and focused on certain things, or more capable of understanding and performing certain activities than others.

 

It bothers me to think about the possibility that my brain may be innately much better at doing something else than I'm currently doing. Does anyone else think about this?

As I mentioned above, I think it's unlikely that you wouldn't have already discovered any innate aptitudes, talents or interests. Usually, it hits people when they're very young, and they can't be dragged away from what they want to do.

But if you have talents that you haven't yet discovered, it wouldn't be difficult to find them. Spend just a few hours each day (or once a week, or whatever) trying something new and which you think might be fun or satisfying. Try to learn to play a musical instrument that you've never played before, try to solve a complex math problem, try to paint someone's portrait, etc. If, after a few hours at each activity, you don't perform as well as the average person who spent 50-80 hours on the same tasks, or if you have little or no interest in continuing, then you'll have your answer: you're not innately talented or interested in those areas.

I hate to mention it, given your apparent optimism, but there's also the possibility that you possess no innate aptitudes or talents (beyond the ability to do pull-ups without working out regularly). You might not have any genius-level interests or aptitudes.

So I think the question is, do you enjoy what you're currently doing? If so, why worry about the possibility that you might be better at something else which hasn't already stimulated any sense of curiosity or enjoyment in you? It's like, what if you were really good at a certain tedious but highly valued task that no one, including you, wanted to do? Would you be willing to change careers and do that miserable task just because you're innately better at doing it?

J

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I have thought much on this. I have been called something of a freak of nature physically-athletically. I had a 6 pack at 9 yrs of age. But some of the most pleasing things to do for me are intellectual. Studying philosophy for example. I grew up being told that this was a "gift from god" and I should use these physical "talents" for "gods glory"... Fortunately I was also told that I had to be a good "steward" of these gifts and do my best to develop them to my highest ability.... This sense of "duty" coupled with the silly belief that "no matter what I do If its not gods will, It wont happen", effected my enjoyment of the productive effort of applying myself 100% at every aspect of wrestling. I wrestled Daniel Cormier 2x in the finals my first yr. in wrestling. I scored 5 points on him and had not even trained in freestyle wrestling but 2 weeks.(only weeks before he placed 3rd in Budapest Hungary as a sophomore ) In spite of all this I couldn't wait for my High School wrestling career to end so I could focus on "spiritual things"..... What I'm saying is, that to this day, when I see Daniel on TV. I always wonder what I could have done unfettered by stupid religious beliefs keeping me from loving-enjoying something I gave 100% dedication to.

 

I ask myself constantly if I should return to such skills that come so naturally, such as in coaching wrestling again.....This starts the whole process in my mind of thinking about intellectually challenging efforts as opposed to skills that are more "automatically" pleasant.

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I've taught chess on the side for many years. I originally believed that anyone with a certain base level of intelligence could succeed at chess if they only applied themselves sufficiently. I thought this because the game came easily to me when I worked at it and I found it all very logical. It turns out this isn't the case at all - some people just really suck at chess and won't ever be good at it, no matter how much they practice. Their minds just don't work the right way.

 

Of course, the single biggest determinant is whether you take up a skill early in life because your brain hardwires itself into a machine to more efficiently playing chess, music, tennis, or whatever the activity is. Once you are past your early 20's, the window for molding your brain in this way has passed. You can still learn or memorize the skill on the intellectual level and keep up to an extent, but you will never possess the innate ease and advantages of someone who began learning it early in life and made those hard neural connections.

 

This always presents something of an ethical quandary for me: when I get a new potential student who is 40-60 years old, and they tell me they want to improve, I'm not sure how brutally honest I should be with them. The reality is, at that age, I can teach them the game and teach them basic competencies, but there is no way they will ever be able to be truly great at it or compete at a serious level.

Edited by Robert Baratheon
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I base the following solely on my own observations, so I can't prove anything, but there is no doubt in my mind that aptitudes are genetically determined. While one can improve his proficiency at a given task, the range of possible improvement is genetically delimited, and the differences between individuals are so significant that one man's "floor" can be higher than another man's "ceiling." What I think this means is that the faculties that enable us to learn and acquire skills are physiologically fixed. They have to be, because even to the extent that the brain can make new connections and improve, whether process whereby it does so is still carried out according to genetic instructions.

Edited by happiness
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Any time people start talking about genetic predispositions for this or that specific, learned skill, red flags go up for me.

 

We're all limited by our physiology, obviously so. However, how this plays out in practice is debatable (to say the least). If you give a second look, people are usually comparing the end result of a child's learning to the beginning stages of an adult learning. On top of that, a child usually has more willingness and sheer time to focus on a new activity, and he doesn't think of it as a chore or some chosen pursuit. As such, he doesn't have mental baggage hindering his learning. He can also keep doing an activity for as long or as short as he wants -- he isn't thinking about his "real" job, his kids, his bills, etc. He's just doing something that interests him, by his choice. So, comparing a child's intense, focused interest to an adult's distracted, chore-like, time-restricted "learning" isn't really comporting the same thing at all.

 

If the kid loses interest, he just moves onto something else. So, by the time an adult notices the kid's interest, he's already been doing it a LOT. "Oh, wow, Johnny's really got a genetic predisposition for soccer." Well, no, he's been in a field the past two summers by himself kicking a ball around in a million different ways -- in between that he's been catching grasshoppers and stuff. So, no, he wasn't born with an innate understanding of life forms, either, now that you bring it up!

 

Certain people can process and integrate faster and better than others, but I think that's about as far as you can take the physiological argument. Even then, people are so complicated, the continual choices they make can easily turn a genetically "inferior" brain into a wild success of work ethic, relative focus, drive, etc., while turning a genetically "superior" brain into a total failure of self-defeat, malevolence, and lack of confidence.

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Someone can spend 5 hours practicing something, another, with some innate aptitude, can spend the same 5 hours, but they would equate to 50-80 for the other person.

How do you know that it was innate aptitude, not learned aptitude, that caused that difference?

Of course someone who's done 15 years of math in school is gonna end up learning a programming language 50 times faster than a guy who never paid attention to math. But the cause is the difference in how they spent the 15 years, not their genetic makeup.

None of the professional skills we learn as adults stand on their own. They are all built on prior education and experience. Of course if there's nothing to build on, you can spend five hours building and end up with nothing, while the guy who has the right foundation adds to his knowledge with ease.

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How do you know that it was innate aptitude, not learned aptitude, that caused that difference?

 

 

I don't. And I'd agree when it comes to subjects where the learning is held verbally then background is important. 

 

I wasn't precise when I wrote the first post, but they activities I had in mind often require pre-verbal knowledge. E.g. poker, chess, athletics. I used to play poker semi-professionally and a lot of really great players thought process seemed to be partially instinct based. I use the term loosely. But I just mean they are not often able to articulate or prove to you why something is the best play.

 

I'd say driving a car is the same. You can be kinda specific in that you can say "you need to slow down when someone's infront"... "you press your foot on the accelerator when you want to go" etc but all those little adjustments etc seem to be pre-verbal knowledge. It's not something you really articulate. When I feel this I press the accelerator this much, when I feel that I press on the break that much and look that way depending on what I see...

Edited by LoBagola
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We're all limited by our physiology, obviously so. However, how this plays out in practice is debatable (to say the least). If you give a second look, people are usually comparing the end result of a child's learning to the beginning stages of an adult learning. On top of that, a child usually has more willingness and sheer time to focus on a new activity, and he doesn't think of it as a chore or some chosen pursuit. As such, he doesn't have mental baggage hindering his learning. He can also keep doing an activity for as long or as short as he wants -- he isn't thinking about his "real" job, his kids, his bills, etc. He's just doing something that interests him, by his choice. So, comparing a child's intense, focused interest to an adult's distracted, chore-like, time-restricted "learning" isn't really comporting the same thing at all.

 

I think psychology plays an enormous role, and it may even be responsible for the gaps I've witnessed in people's ability to learn. Psychology to me would be whatever core beliefs are driving you (so philosophy then...). Take two online poker players:

A gets in 100,000 hands for the month. B gets in 100,000 hands. Both love the game. But A focus seems somewhat split. He has some units of his crow used up on thinking about other things (pushed on him by his emotional reactions). So A is operating with the poker learning snail epistemology (2 units at a time). B is operating at or near the poker learning crow (6 units of information). 

 

Therefore A might get 50 units of learning from the 100,000 hands, B might get 150 units of learning out of them. Of course it's more complicated than that, and the progress could be non-linear etc but that's a basic model of my thought.

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If we're talking psychology, then I agree with you. That's what I was getting at with the self-defeat vs. drive comment -- differences in personality and approach to life, approach to learning, reaction after defeat, etc. But, I thought you were emphasizing physical makeup of the brain, independent of human experience and free will "imprinted" upon it (ie. long term psychology).

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Any time people start talking about genetic predispositions for this or that specific, learned skill, red flags go up for me.

We're all limited by our physiology, obviously so. However, how this plays out in practice is debatable (to say the least). If you give a second look, people are usually comparing the end result of a child's learning to the beginning stages of an adult learning.

No, I don't think that people are comparing a child's learning to the beginning stages of an adult's learning. They are comparing children to children, and adults to adults. Certain children are instantly and massively better at the same new task than other children of the same age. Certain adults are instantly and massively better at the same new task than other adults of the same age. One person who begins to, say, play guitar will be a "natural" at it, versus other people of the same age and general intellect who could spend years trying to be as good and never succeed.

 

On top of that, a child usually has more willingness and sheer time to focus on a new activity, and he doesn't think of it as a chore or some chosen pursuit. As such, he doesn't have mental baggage hindering his learning. He can also keep doing an activity for as long or as short as he wants -- he isn't thinking about his "real" job, his kids, his bills, etc. He's just doing something that interests him, by his choice. So, comparing a child's intense, focused interest to an adult's distracted, chore-like, time-restricted "learning" isn't really comporting the same thing at all.

If the kid loses interest, he just moves onto something else. So, by the time an adult notices the kid's interest, he's already been doing it a LOT. "Oh, wow, Johnny's really got a genetic predisposition for soccer." Well, no, he's been in a field the past two summers by himself kicking a ball around in a million different ways -- in between that he's been catching grasshoppers and stuff. So, no, he wasn't born with an innate understanding of life forms, either, now that you bring it up!

That's why, in an earlier post, I suggested that an inherent "interest" or "passion" be included along with the concept of inborn "talent." Certain people are born with an intense interest, passion or capacity for certain things. They don't "lose interest" and "move on to something else." It's not a choice: A child prodigy doesn't begin by listing all of the possible fields that he might want to pursue, logically weigh the potential benefits of each, and then rationally choose one and become good at it. The interest and ability/capacity is already there, and he would not be anywhere as near as good at anything else. In fact, he will most likely be quite deficient in other specific areas despite trying his hardest.

The issue was well-stated in a scene from Good Will Hunting:

Will: Beethoven, okay. He looked at a piano, and it just made sense to him. He could just play.

Skylar: So what are you saying? You play the piano?

Will: No, not a lick. I mean, I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn't paint you a picture, I probably can't hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can't play the piano.

Skylar: But you can do my o-chem paper in under an hour.

Will: Right. Well, I mean when it came to stuff like that... I could always just play.

 

Certain people can process and integrate faster and better than others, but I think that's about as far as you can take the physiological argument. Even then, people are so complicated, the continual choices they make can easily turn a genetically "inferior" brain into a wild success of work ethic, relative focus, drive, etc., while turning a genetically "superior" brain into a total failure of self-defeat, malevolence, and lack of confidence.

I'd like to see proof that choosing to have a good "work ethic, relative focus, drive, etc.," could result in any person having prodigy-level ability at any subject that he choose, or any subject that was chosen for him by others. One would have to demonstrate that a person who was not naturally inclined toward a certain subject could choose to focus on it and become great at it. Scientifically we'd have to start by analyzing what an individual person was good at, and then choose for him: asking him to will himself to become great at something which is extremely difficult for him and which he dislikes doing.

J

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I don't understand why you're making that distinction. What relevant difference is there between verbal and non-verbal learning? 

 

In my mind verbal learning requires a slow, more precise form of conscious thought, whereas non-verbal is something done subconsciously.

 

If I'm learning to internalize certain dance patterns for a given beat, I don't think the speed at which I do so is that much dependent on my conscious thinking skills.

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In my mind verbal learning requires a slow, more precise form of conscious thought, whereas non-verbal is something done subconsciously.

 

If I'm learning to internalize certain dance patterns for a given beat, I don't think the speed at which I do so is that much dependent on my conscious thinking skills.

I don't think that's true (language for instance is most often not learned consciously either), even if it were, what difference does it make?

Subconsciously learned abilities are just as learned as consciously learned ones. They're not innate.

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In my mind verbal learning requires a slow, more precise form of conscious thought, whereas non-verbal is something done subconsciously.

In my own experience, all learning is a mix of conscious and subconscious. They blend so much that it's hard to make the distinction sometimes. You hear an idea about the subject at hand, you try it out. If you're doing an activity, while you're trying the new idea you're constantly drawing on prior knowledge, then checking your new results in the moment, in real time, as you go, etc., thinking of new ideas explicitly but then also immediately switching to subconscious stuff -- back and forth. If you're thinking about a big new philosophic idea, which is more "verbal" I suppose, the same process takes place.

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