 a big hand for Alexander in the green shirt over there, our youngest member who has come all the way from New York to see for the first time his father speak. He cried last time. We'll see if he heckles me once again. So I want you to imagine that you're about his age. The room is even darker than it is and that all you have in front of you are a couple of flashing lights and the set of syllables like these uttered by a speech synthesizer and a complete dull monotone. I can't be quite as dull, but I'll try. P, go, la, pa, bi, ku, tu, bi, bo, do, go, la, tu, bi, no, and so forth. So you hear all these syllables for about two minutes and I'm basing this on an experiment by Jenny Safran, Alyssa Newport, and Dick Aslin in science. So they had kids listen to these syllables for two minutes. They didn't pay them for participation in an experiment like we pay our undergraduates. They didn't get any credit or anything like that but what the kids picked up on was that the syllables had a pattern to them. So I'm talking about learning today, learning is something that starts very early in life and this is one example of a sophisticated thing that children exactly Alexander's age, eight months old, are able to do. So you hear these syllables. Not only were children able to recognize when they'd heard a syllable like pa, bi, ku or a string of syllables, I should say, but they could tell the difference between pa, bi, ku and do, go, la. Pa, bi, ku is something that every time it occurred it occurred as a full unit. Whereas do, go, la, if you look, I don't know if I have a pointer or if this is showing up, but do, go, la in the second box there, that occurs sometimes, but sometimes the syllable do would be followed by something else. If you think about it, when you're trying to learn the words in a language, some syllables follow one another regularly, I got it, and some don't. So the kids were able to tell the difference between a string like this that occurred 100% of the time so it's a possible word in the language and something like this, there's do, go, la but there's also do, pa and do, pi and so forth. So kids are intuitive statisticians and you are an intuitive statistician but that intuitive statistic started very, very early in your life. Here's another experiment from my own lab, similar age children, seven month old, and we played a series of artificial sentences for them. So we're looking at the roots of grammar. You can think about Noam Chomsky's idea that we're born with the ability to recognize grammar. We made up in my lab an artificial grammar, made up a series of sentences that came from those. So let's say la, ta, la, ga, na, ga, mi, ta, mi. And again it was two minutes of tedium in a dark room with nothing else to do. And the kids were again able to do something very clever which is that they could tell the difference between wo fe wo which follows the same abstract grammar as these guys up here and wo fe fe. They were actually more interested in the thing that was different from what they already heard. So what happens is they hear the same thing over and over again and by the end of two minutes they're bored which is why Alexander will probably eventually start weeping. And when you change it up they become interested again. So this is as Chomsky might have predicted the roots of grammar very, very early in life. So the first lesson, I'm gonna have four lessons about how we learn today. The first one is simply this. Learning starts very early in life and it's very, very powerful. Second lesson is that I want you to forget this phrase. That's why I've crossed it out of nature versus nurture. When people talk about learning it's often the first thing that they think about is nature versus nurture and they imagine these two to be a competition. So the more learning there is they say the less nature matters and maybe the more nature matters, the more learning matters. I want you to stop having that habit but before I break you out of it I wanna tell you why some people believe in this sort of thing which is learning is really quite powerful. So there's a famous experiment done by Murganka Sir at MIT where he took ferrets and he removed their visual cortex. The input from their eyes was rerouted into their auditory cortex. There's an old song in the States about connecting your ear bone to your hip bone or something like that. Basically that's what they did in this experiment and people got very excited and they said there's a lot of plasticity in the brain. Well plasticity just means that the brain is rewired but some people took away from that notion the idea that genes don't matter and I don't want you to take that away even though I'm gonna tell you a lot about why I think learning is important and how we do it and so forth I don't want you to walk away think biology is unimportant and in fact the opposite. So for example you can do experiments where you put rats and mazes, teach them the mazes and shut down the process of protein synthesis. You turn off the very process of switching on genes on and off, well that prevents the mice from learning anything. So it's not that nature and nurture are in opposition it's that they actually work together. So gene expression is part of learning. Biology is part of learning. It's not nature versus nurture. They're working together. Another example of this is looking at I think it's cichlidfish or chicklidfish these fish can change their entire body shape their entire behavior depending on how successful they are basically in a duel with someone else. So if they're doing well, they're shiny and they have certain kinds of genes expressed and certain receptors expressed all through their brain if they lose then they become drab and you can do this in an experiment you can rig things so that the dominant fish leaves and eventually one of the subordinates takes place and I won't go through all the detail of the slide but the point of the slide is all kinds of genes are implicated in changing the behavior as the animal learns something many, many genes are switching on and they're doing it at particular times a half hour after the change six hours, five days and so forth. So as you learn something biology is a major participant. So the second lesson from today is simply that learning is biological. So instead of thinking about nature and nurture think about nature sorry think of nurture via nature that the two are partners in everything that we learn. The next thing I wanna talk about is a number and that number is 10,000 hours. I don't know for sure that it's made it to this side of the Atlantic but I suspect that it has. Certainly it's very popular in the States there's been a whole bunch of books written about this magical idea of 10,000 hours of practice and the idea is that if you practice anything for 10,000 hours you will be an expert at it and I guess if you don't practice it for 10,000 hours you're wasting your time. I'm not quite sure what the implication is. And if you read these books there are lots of examples like Bill Joy was a programmer at Sun Microsystems. Many of you here probably know who he is and it so happens that he practiced about 10 hours sorry 10,000 hours before making his big breakthrough. So it's easy to tell these stories. You go out and collect people that practice for 10,000 hours. You can even collect people that didn't really practice for 10,000 hours and tell the same story about them. So the Beatles didn't actually play in the Cavern Club for 10,000 hours but more like 5,000 and then they got really good. So people have these wonderful lyrical stories about practice 10,000 hours and you'll be a genius. And there's data that superficially seem to appear to fit. So everybody points to the same data by Anders Erickson and he looked at violinists of different ages and how long the best people had practiced and he came up with this number that the best violinists had practiced and now I'm gonna say the most important word an average of 10,000 hours but that's what's critical is an average of 10,000 hours which means in my culture the way we put this is your mileage might vary. So 10,000 hours doesn't mean the same thing for everybody. Here is a band about which there was a documentary a few years ago, I don't know if it came overseas but the band is called Anvil, they're a heavy metal band. How many people have heard of them? A few. So they're doing better than they used to but the point is but they're still not doing that well right, the documentary is why probably most of you have heard of them. They practiced a lot more than 10,000 hours something like 30,000 hours. They've been practicing since the early 70s and the only reason anybody's heard of them is the documentary. It's a mean point but you know science is mean sometimes. On the opposite end of the spectrum are people like the Ramones. They practice for a couple of weeks basically but they figured out something new and something original, a different way of making music. They launched the punk music revolution with very little practice. Of course music is notoriously subjective so how do you measure what's good music and what's bad music? Like do you wanna do it by popularity and then you come up with the conclusion that Kenny G is the greatest musician of all time and not everybody would agree with that fact. So let us turn instead to chess which is a little bit more objective. You can actually collect systematic statistical data about how long it takes to acquire expertise and if you're a fan of 10,000 hours you can notice that the average is about 10,000 hours but if you wanna take a broader view of the science that's involved you see that some people become chess masters or grandmasters if you get what it is after only 3,000 hours, some take 23,000 hours and those people were I think primed with the wrong stereotype and they're still working on it. I know what you really all came for here was to learn about the art of chick sexing because it's a classic example of expertise. You hold up a newborn chick and you decide if it's a boy or a girl and this has implications for farming that as a city boy I don't quite understand but the idea is that you screen them out and the classic result, whoops, after you decide whether it's a boy or not is that experts are much more correct than novices and they don't have any idea how they do it. So they were like 60, 65% correct and novices aren't really very good but nobody seems to know this old study by Shrifar and Biederman where they actually figured out what's going on and the experts and then they wrote it down on a piece of paper and in a couple of hours the trainees who were taught this thing that supposedly took years and years and years to learn were able to do it as well as the expert. So sometimes it takes 10,000 hours because we don't know how to learn something efficiently. We don't know what the right rules are then somebody else can figure them out, codify them and you can learn them a lot faster. Same thing has happened to some extent in chess. People have learned some of the skills that are involved and so it's easier to attain a certain level than it would have been a long time ago. So the third lesson is forget that number 10,000 hours. It's just an average you might be able to do better. As Kaisa mentioned, my last book was called Guitar Zero which was about learning to play guitar at the age of 40. If learning a new skill doesn't necessarily learn 10,000 hours, does it require that you start before you're 10 years old or maybe 10 months old? I do have my little guy learning to play guitar a little, tiny bit. The classic idea is that there are lots of things that you must learn early in life if you're gonna learn them at all. So if you're gonna learn to talk, if you're gonna recover from ambliopia where your two eyes are not coordinated, if you're gonna learn to play golf, you have to do these things early in life. And it's presented in a way that I think is needlessly discouraging to adults. Not everybody listens to this legend that you can't learn something later in life. On the left I have Tom Morello who's from the band Rage Against the Machine which I think is probably more famous than Anvil. He didn't start playing guitar until the age of 16. Grandma Moses didn't start painting I think until she was in her 70s. So there are certainly exceptions. And more recently there's empirical data, experimental data to look at this idea of the critical period that you have to learn something in life. One of my favorite examples of the critical period was looking at ambliopia, this idea that you have to wear this eye patch early in life in order to be able to overcome it. Well it turns out that you can have significant improvements in adults. I won't say that they get as good as children but you can have significant improvements in adults that everybody had written off. All the medical textbooks said forget it if you haven't done something early in life. You just get people to play a video game, Metal of Honor, it's one of these first person shooters. You put an eye patch on their good eye and they have better visual acuity, better spatial attention, better stereopsis, coordination between the eyes just by playing this video game for a little while. So there's a whole idea of a critical period that you can't learn something later in life is starting to fall apart. One of my favorite studies, and it was kind of my poster as I was trying to learn, guitar looked at barn owls. So there's a classic study with barn owls in which you put a prism on their eye. It's sort of like a virtual reality experiment. It was done a few years ago before you could do this with a video camera. And the effect of the prism is to distort your field of view so everything gets shifted. And you can take a young barn owl, you put the prism on their eyes and they eventually learn to adapt to this large prism that distorts the entire world by 23 degrees to coordinate their ears with the altered vision. And in the classic experiment, adults couldn't do that. So you've heard this experiment before, he's getting a little tired. Children or young baby owls could do this 23 degree distortion automatically, pretty much effortlessly. The older owls couldn't, but then the same person who did the original experiment did a much less heralded experiment that's not in all the textbooks unlike the first one, which he said, well, what if we just did it more slowly for the adults? What if we put a three degree prism the first day and a six degree prism the second day, or actually the second week and then nine degree prism the third week and so forth? So that's the incremental condition here. And basically the results is the adult owls were able to do something almost as well as the baby owls just by doing things step by step and incrementally. If you do think about taking up something new or you think about the 10,000 hours, I want you to also think about Michelle Steele who took up a sport called downhill skeleton which is now in the Olympics at the age of 18. And six weeks later, she came in sixth in the Calgary World Cup. She made the Olympics just 14 months later. And that's telling you a lot of different things. Some of it is about natural talent which is left out of the 10,000 hours. So she was a gymnast, she had some natural talent from that. Some of it is about having the right sort of training. So if you want to learn something new, one of the best reasons to get a teacher is they can help you practice deliberately. They can say what you're doing well, what you're not doing well, have you target your weaknesses. But the point is it doesn't have to be anything like 10,000 hours. So in the spirit of learning new things, I went out and tried to learn to play guitar which was something I just learned while riding a eudicycle which is something that I knew for a little while. So if I may sum up, if you want to learn something new, don't give up just because you're past puberty. Adults can learn new things and how fast you learn is not just a matter of how many hours you put in but how efficiently you practice. Thank you very much.