The perceptual skills themselves are still there, however, and still trainable. We use them anytime we try to learn new material: say, different software for work, or differences in native trees and plants after moving across the country. Once our eyes — or other senses — have mastered these subtle perceptual differences, we can focus on putting the knowledge to work.

THE beauty of such learning is that it is automatic; there’s no thinking involved. “We don’t just see, we look; we don’t just hear, we listen,” wrote the field’s founder, Eleanor J. Gibson, in 1969. “Perceptual learning is self-regulated, in the sense that modification occurs without the necessity of external reinforcement. It is stimulus-oriented, with the goal of extracting and reducing” the information needed.

That comment is so packed with meaning that it helps to slow down the tape. Perceptual learning is active. Our eyes (or other senses) are searching for the right clues. Automatically, no extra effort is required. We have to pay attention, of course, but there’s no need to turn the system on or tune it. It’s self-correcting — it tunes itself. The brain works to find the most meaningful sights or sounds and filter out the rest.

How does this look in the real world?

Take learning to fly, a disorienting and sometimes terrifying experience that requires hundreds of hours in the air and in the classroom — many of them devoted to learning how to read an instrument panel. In the 1980s a cognitive scientist named Philip Kellman, who had studied Dr. Gibson’s work, wondered if there was a better — and quicker — way. The dials on the instrument panel are easy enough to read on their own, one at a time; but reading all of them at once, at a glance, is another skill altogether. It’s more about reflexes, and gut feeling, than reasoning.

Dr. Kellman designed a video-game-like lesson: The student sees a panel and decides quickly what the dials are saying, collectively (there are five or six of them, depending on the plane). Below the panel on the computer screen are seven choices, including “straight climb,” “descending turn” and “level turn.” A chime sounds if the answer is correct; if wrong, a burp, and the correct answer is highlighted. Then up comes the next screen, with another instrument panel, and then another: all fast-paced, with instant feedback.

In 1994, Dr. Kellman, now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tested this perceptual learning module, as he calls it, on amateur pilots. After one hour of training, novices could read the panel as accurately and quickly as pilots with an average of 1,000 flying hours, he found. They’d built the same reading skill, at least on the ground, in a fraction of the time. “You still have to fly the plane, of course,” Dr. Kellman said. “But it’s a lot less stressful when you can read that panel without stopping to think about it.”

Dr. Kellman and others have used variations on this method to quickly ramp up instincts in other complex fields, including dermatology, chemistry, cardiology and even surgery.