My highly musical mother and brother seem to have simply memorized the relevant patterns, as you say.
Thinking along the lines of the in-progress Math Ability sequence, I think some people (including myself) are so reliant on being able to quickly derive and compute things in our heads that we have allowed our facility of memorization and memory-recall to atrophy. The prospect of learning, for example, all the individual notes on a guitar fretboard feels so agonizing to me that I still just “derive” the notes when I need them, even though this is terribly slow, after many years of playing the instrument.
As to Question D, a large fraction of scientists I’ve known are also musicians, so I think all we can surmise is that there are different ways that different brains can achieve the same objectives.
Thinking along the lines of the in-progress Math Ability sequence, I think some people (including myself) are so reliant on being able to quickly derive and compute things in our heads that we have allowed our facility of memorization and memory-recall to atrophy. The prospect of learning, for example, all the individual notes on a guitar fretboard feels so agonizing to me that I still just “derive” the notes when I need them, even though this is terribly slow, after many years of playing the instrument.
I have a horrible problem with foreign language vocabulary for a reason very similar to this: there’s no way to derive the word for “green” from a list of every other color word except “green”...
My highly musical mother and brother seem to have simply memorized the relevant patterns, as you say.
Thinking along the lines of the in-progress Math Ability sequence, I think some people (including myself) are so reliant on being able to quickly derive and compute things in our heads that we have allowed our facility of memorization and memory-recall to atrophy. The prospect of learning, for example, all the individual notes on a guitar fretboard feels so agonizing to me that I still just “derive” the notes when I need them, even though this is terribly slow, after many years of playing the instrument.
As to Question D, a large fraction of scientists I’ve known are also musicians, so I think all we can surmise is that there are different ways that different brains can achieve the same objectives.
I have a horrible problem with foreign language vocabulary for a reason very similar to this: there’s no way to derive the word for “green” from a list of every other color word except “green”...