I flipped through Ralph Koster’s A Theory of fun recently, and he mentions that in the process of playing guitar for 10-odd years, he has learned a number of more broad skills pertaining to stringed instruments: “knowledge of the intervals between notes, mastering rhythm, understanding harmonic progression.” His argument is essentially that the lessons he has learned can apply more broadly to musical instruments in general. I started thinking about how to visualize this, and decided on a graph showing how many years worth of training a person has on an instrument. Take the first row to be the first year, the second row to be the second and so on.
I think what Koster is talking about is this: After concentrating on the electric guitar for four years, a person may have developed the equivalent of two years of xylophone training, one year of drums and so on.
This model is suggested in most physical fitness plans (so I am told,) although after a certain amount of specialization, it’s often suggested that a person’s more general fitness actually decreases, given the finite resources that the human body has.
We need to be cautious about suggesting that training for one thing will result in losing skill in another, since it gives us an excuse not to perfect one particular skill set. The way in which a human being can incorporate a variety of different skills is what makes us great, and in particular, the incorporation of a diverse (and seemingly conflicting) set of mental skills is probably the coolest part.
I also think that the breadth of knowledge that people get from learning a single thing is very different. Someone learning the guitar for 10 years may only have the equivalent of 5 years’ skill by the end of it, but may end up equally skilled on trumpet, vibraphone, violin and the drums. Conversely, someone may end up with 15 years’ worth of skill on the guitar, but be completely useless on everything else.
With musical instruments, it’s easy to see that an accoustic guitar would be closely related to an electric, where a banjo or a ukelele would be slightly less related. If we look at sports and take baseball as the central sport, then it would make sense that softball and cricket would be closely related, and that soccer and football may come into the mix too, but to a lesser extent. Somewhere in the distance, someone’s snooker skill may improve too.
What about quadratic equations? Very few people will ever use quadratic equations for any reason other than to pass the test on quadratic equations, but we learn them anyway. If we think about this breadth of knowledge, though, we can see that we aren’t just learning about quadratics as we stare at the graph paper and crunch the numbers. We might learn a little about algebra, graphing, calculus, and possibly things outside the realm of mathematics altogether.
Basically, everything that we do has unintended consequences. Destroying an enemy base tends to damage civilian infrastructure, and we call that Collateral Damage. It’s terrible, but it’s taken largely for granted. What isn’t taken for granted, though, is that learning about one thing tends to make us think about other things. I like to call it Incidental Learning, and I like to talk about it a lot.