"Moonwalking with Einstein"

How experts learned:

• Pick any human endeavor in which people excel, and I’ll give you even odds that some psychologist somewhere has written a paper about the exceptional memories possessed by experts in that field.
• We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
• .. but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis... the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is.
• We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
• In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
• During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,”
• They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance.
• The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems.
• The outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance.

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