Acquiring Skill

ACQUIRING SKILL

How does the information that supports intuition get “stored in memory”? Certain types of intuitions are acquired very quickly. We have inherited from our ancestors a great facility to learn when to be afraid. Indeed, one experience is often sufficient to establish a long-term aversion and fear. Many of us have the visceral memory of a single dubious dish that still leaves us vaguely reluctant to return to a restaurant. All of us tense up when we approach a spot in which an unpleasant event occurred, even when there is no reason to expect it to happen again. For me, one such place is the ramp leading to the San Francisco airport, where years ago a driver in the throes of road rage followed me from the freeway, rolled down his window, and hurled obscenities at me. I never knew what caused his hatred, but I remember his voice whenever I reach that point on my way to the airport.

My memory of the airport incident is conscious and it fully explains the emotion that comes with it. On many occasions, however, you may feel uneasy in a particular place or when someone uses a particular turn of phrase without having a conscious memory of the triggering event. In hindsight, you will label that unease an intuition if it is followed by a bad experience. This mode of emotional learning is closely related to what happened in Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments, in which the dogs learned to recognize the sound of the bell as a signal that food was coming. What Pavlov’s dogs learned can be described as a learned hope. Learned fears are even more easily acquired.

Fear can also be learned—quite easily, in fact—by words rather than by experience. A firefighter with a “sixth sense” of danger may have had many occasions to discuss and think about types of fires he was not involved in, and to rehearse in his mind what the cues might be and how he should react. As I remember from experience, a young platoon commander with no experience of combat will tense up while leading troops through a narrowing ravine, because he was taught to identify the terrain as favoring an ambush. Little repetition is needed for learning.

Emotional learning may be quick, but what we consider as “expertise” usually takes a long time to develop. The acquisition of expertise in complex tasks such as high-level chess, professional basketball, or firefighting is intricate and slow because expertise in a domain is not a single skill but rather a large collection of miniskills. Chess is a good example. An expert player can understand a complex position at a glance, but it takes years to develop that level of ability. The estimate cited for chess masters is at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice (about 6 years of playing chess 5 hours a day). It illustrates the extent of practice associated with expertise, rather than a universal threshold that guarantees mastery. During those hours of intense concentration, a serious chess player becomes familiar with thousands of configurations, each consisting of an arrangement of related pieces that can threaten or defend each other.

Learning high-level chess can be compared to learning to read. A first grader works hard at recognizing individual letters and assembling them into syllables and words, but a good adult reader perceives entire clauses. An expert reader has also acquired the ability to assemble familiar elements in a new pattern and can quickly “recognize” and correctly pronounce a word that she has never seen before. In chess, recurrent patterns of interacting pieces play the role of letters, and a chess position is a long word or a sentence.

A skilled reader who sees it for the first time will be able to read the opening stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” with perfect rhythm and intonation, as well as pleasure:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

Acquiring expertise in chess is harder and slower than learning to read because there are many more letters in the “alphabet” of chess and because the “words” consist of many letters. After thousands of hours of practice, however, chess masters are able to read a chess situation at a glance. The few moves that come to their mind are almost always strong and sometimes creative. They can deal with a “word” they have never encountered, and they can find a new way to interpret a familiar one.