Born This Good?

Where did Bryan Sutton's guitar-playing genius really come from?

Bryan Sutton, whom I recently interviewed, is one of the finest flatpickers alive. Three Grammys, ten-time IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, a first-call session guitarist in Nashville for over two decades. He started learning guitar at a young age. Once he made up his mind that he wanted to learn it, progress came quickly.

“The learning came really easily to me. I have memories of just being able to pick up stuff pretty quickly.”

We have a term to describe people like this. Naturals. People for whom something seems to come easily.

Easier than it comes to the rest of us.

That was clearly the case for Bryan. Chances are that if you’ve taken up guitar or any musical instrument at some point, you probably wouldn’t describe it as he did. You’d more than likely remember hours of struggle punctuated by the occasional win rather than smooth sailing down the river to virtuosity.

The reasonable conclusion? That naturals were born with something you weren’t. A gift written into their genetic code, waiting for the right moment to show itself.

If you’re born with the gift for music, then music comes easily. If you aren’t, your fate is struggle and toil.

Moreover, that’s how it felt to Bryan, too.

“Learning, I don’t say was easy, but it was just natural.”

It all seems to fit a tidy narrative. A story we’ve told for ages.

But there’s a problem with that story.

What’s Wrong with the Natural?

What precisely is the problem with the story of the natural? With the idea of innate ability inherited through your DNA.

We can’t find evidence for it.

The first issue is that, in the literal sense, nobody is born knowing how to do much of anything. At birth, we humans are notoriously among the most unskilled and inept creatures in all the animal kingdom.

Yes, we are also notorious for having some of the most impressive cognitive gifts in the animal kingdom, chief among them our linguistic abilities.

But those gifts, like every other impressive human ability, are built.

Which means that when we talk of being born with a gift for music, we really mean that we think someone was born with some type of genetic predisposition for music. A gene that paves the way for it.

Which brings us to the second problem.

It wasn’t that long ago that we expected genetics to explain most of who we become. It was thought that once we sequenced the human genome, we’d soon find the math gene, the music gene, the funny gene, the chess gene, the unicycling gene, the thumb wrestling gene.

But none of that panned out. The central lesson of the post-genome era is that genes account for far less of the variability in our abilities and traits than we thought.

Environment and experience account for much more than we were expecting. That includes the research on musical expertise, which shows that it is predicted largely by environment and training.

So, if it’s not in the genes, if it’s not something we’re born with, where does it come from? Why was it easier for Bryan?

To answer that, you only need to look at something your own brain already pulled off, before you turned three.

Something Hidden

Our brain’s superpower is its ability to identify patterns, or “regularities,” in the information that it processes. That ability underwrites every cognitive skill we have.

Our brain does this with anything we pay close attention to.

And that system starts working the moment we’re born. We find patterns in visual information that allow us to identify shapes, colors, faces, trees, cats and dogs. We find patterns in auditory information that allow us to identify barks, moos, wind, and rain.

And of course we train that system on the sounds of our native language to start extracting its many patterns.

Now, think of a child learning language. What always comes first? Comprehension.

We must know what we want to say before learning how to say it.

When we’re born, the sounds of our native tongue are meaningless, undifferentiated noise. No different than the sounds of any language you don’t speak today.

This was a monumental perceptual and conceptual task. You had to first identify the sonic building blocks, or “phonemes.” In the English language, that means about 44 phonemes. Then all the words. Then the rules for how those words are put together. Not only what the words mean, but how changing the order changes the meaning.

Your brain had to reverse engineer all of it, without instruction, from the inputs you received, which was language in its final form. There was no manual telling you where one word ended and another began. Or one phoneme from the next. Or how the order of words changed their meaning.

Your brain built all of that on its own, using its pattern finding superpowers.

And THEN you started trying to produce the sounds. Then, with those networks for decoding and comprehension in place, you began building the motor skills.

You knew what you wanted to say, and then began the project of figuring out how to say it.

And what did it take for your brain to perform that ridiculous feat of reverse engineering to build those insanely complex cognitive networks? Why did you learn your native language and not another one?

Because that’s what everyone around you was using to communicate. You had a burning need to learn to communicate, so you started paying close attention.

And you had a rich stream of data to learn from. You were surrounded by those sounds, all the time. Plus, you were surrounded by other humans who wanted to help you learn.

Crucially, all of this happens passively. One day you simply notice your child understands what you're saying. Nobody sees the work that made it possible, so it feels like magic.

The brain just needs two things to build these advanced pattern detection systems: attention and data. Your Genius builds pattern detection systems for what it cares about. And the more data it gets, the better.

Bryan, Again

With that in mind, everything you hear about Bryan’s story (or any other natural you might hear about) suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

Here’s how he describes his childhood:

“I grew up literally immersed in the sort of musical culture of Western North Carolina, old-time mountain music. And it was in the house. It was outside the house. It’s what we did.”

His dad played guitar. His grandfather was a fiddler. His mother played piano.

Every Saturday night in the summer there was the Shindig on the Green, an open-air gathering of pickers and dancers in Asheville. The sounds of his native music were almost as ever-present as the sounds of his native language. A rich stream of data, day in and day out.

“Just a complete, steady, nonstop diet of that.”

Attention and data. The two necessary ingredients. Both turned all the way up, for years.

And when Bryan reflects on what was happening during those years, he describes the process about as well as any neuroscientist could:

“Whether I knew I was learning or not, I was paying attention, and I had a sense of how that music should go.”

In those early years, he wasn’t practicing, he wasn’t studying. But, in the background, his brain was undoubtedly busy weaving the complex networks for decoding and understanding the music around him. Building both his “ear” for music and his understanding of how it worked.

By the time he was around eight years old, he understood it so well he could predict what would happen next:

“I had at least a way to predict, or see a certain inevitability. Like, well, if I’m gonna do this, it needs to be this way.”

Comprehension before production. The exact same order in which you learned to speak.

Like the child uttering its first words, by the time Bryan began the project of learning how to control his hands to make music on the guitar, his brain had built complex systems for perceiving and understanding the musical tradition he was learning.

And that machinery never stops growing as long as the conditions remain. Ask Bryan what it’s like now, improvising at the highest level with other master musicians, and here’s what he says:

“To use the language analogy, I know how you’re gonna finish your sentence before you finish it.”

It’s the same predictive model he started building on the floor of his living room at three. Just all grown up. That’s what fluency looks like, in any language.

Why Nobody Sees It

But all of that network building is entirely invisible. Most of the work your brain has done to build the skills and abilities you care about was invisible. It happened through care and attention, but not by specific practice.

And our brain starts doing it day one.

Now take a seven year old who’s been surrounded by music and one who hasn’t, and hand each of them a guitar. One will look like a natural and the other won’t.

Because nobody saw the learning that happened behind the scenes. And we don’t appreciate the broad cognitive skillset that supports musical ability. On the outside, we think it’s just a finger coordination challenge. But that's the most trivial part of it. As Anders Ericsson’s research showed, what separates an expert from an amateur isn't the fingers, it's the richness of the musical model in their head.

Look behind every story of a “natural,” or a “prodigy,” and you’ll find a similar story. Unusual interest and the immersion to feed it.

Almost all of the learning our brain does happens without our knowledge. Others don’t see it. We don’t see it. Or feel it. Our brain builds “gifts” behind the scenes. When they emerge as if from nowhere, we all reasonably assume they must’ve been wired in.

And we end up with the compelling myth of the “natural.”

We mistake differences in inputs and attention for differences in nucleotide sequences.

Erasing The Work

The groundwork only explains the head start. It explains why picking up the guitar felt natural at eight. It eases the friction of learning right where the friction is usually highest.

What it doesn’t explain is how a kid with a good ear became one of the best flatpickers alive. That took thousands of hours. It took a young man who turned down college and decided there was no plan B. It took, in his own words, a nose-to-the-grindstone streak that ran “to a fault.”

None of that came for free. And none of it is what we picture when we call someone a natural. This is the other thing the myth does: it erases all the work. Naturals themselves often bristle at the label for exactly this reason, because it writes the blood, sweat, and tears out of their story.

And Bryan didn’t just put in the hours, he obsessed over how to make those hours count. He learned how to learn.

“To really do what people see at a really high professional level, it is engaging in this kind of stuff. Truly digging back into myself and understanding what my brain is doing... reading books... I wouldn’t be where I am without it.”

Natural Consequences

The problem with that myth, beyond it being wrong, is its consequences. Take the example of music.

You decide to learn an instrument as an adult. You sit down, and none of what Bryan had is there. Your ear doesn’t automatically pick out the chord changes. You don’t know what’s supposed to come next. The cognitive structures for music that reduce the friction don’t exist.

Everything is slow, everything takes effort, and nothing is obvious. You compare your experience with someone for whom it came naturally and you think they got something you didn’t.

But they didn’t get something you didn’t. They built something you haven’t built yet.

And the part of your brain that can build it never goes away. But it needs the right conditions.

In the case of music, we know exactly what those conditions look like, because the recipe is found in the background of every “natural.” Immersion in the music you want to play. Not as background noise, but as something you’re giving your undivided attention because you love it and can’t get enough. Playing along, playing with others, going where the music is. Jumping into every musical opportunity with both feet. Letting your ear feed on the real thing, in quantity, the way a child feeds on speech. The training extends far beyond the practice studio.

Most adults skip straight to the fingers, put in their twenty minutes of drills, and wonder why it feels like pushing a rock uphill. They’re trying to build the last step of the chain first, because it’s the step that’s visible. Do the same, and you’ll starve the Genius of attention and data it needs to build the cognitive machinery that paves the way, and wonder why you’re stuck.

And you’ll think to yourself, “if only I’d been born a natural.”

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Now Available for Pre-Order: The Genius and the Impostor

The invisible builder that reverse-engineered your native language and Bryan’s local music is one of the two main characters in my new book, The Genius and the Impostor.

The other main character is the one who all too often shuts the Genius down.

The book is the full story of how extraordinary minds are built from ordinary brains. It comes out August 25, and is now available for pre-order at GeniusAndImpostor.com.