ics and music -- Practice may not make perfect.doc

ics and music
Practice may not make perfect
Musical ability is in the DNA
Jul 5th 2014 | From the print edition
TO MASTER the violin takes 10,000 hours of practice. Put in that time and expertise will follow. This, at least, is what many music teachers—following Malcolm Gladwell’s prescription for achieving expertise in almost any field by applying the requisite amount of effort—tell their pupils. Psychologists are more sceptical. Some agree practice truly is the thing that separates experts from novices, but others suspect genes play a role, too, and that without the right ic make-up even 20,000 hours of practice would be pointless.
A study just published in Psychological Science, by Miriam Mosing of the Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, suggests that the sceptics are right. Practising music without the right genes to back that practice up is indeed useless.
Dr Mosing drew her conclusion in a time-honoured way—by studying twins. She and her colleagues surveyed 1,211 pairs of identical twins (who share all their genes) and 1,358 pairs of fraternal twins (who share half) born between 1959 and 1985. They asked each participant whether he or she played a musical instrument or actively engaged in singing. Those who did were asked to estimate how many hours a week they had practised at different ages. From this Dr Mosing was able to calculate a score for each individual’s lifet