Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training
I think the article makes &quot;epiphany&quot; sound rather extraordinary. But in the normal course of learning music there are plenty of them which we tend to ignore for some reason.<p>For example: if you learned to ride a bike as a kid, you&#x27;ll remember a moment where your balance just &quot;locked in&quot; and there you were riding for an arbitrary amount of time.<p>Now take twelve-bar blues on the piano: say you spend some weeks or months learning some bass patterns in your left hand. Maybe you learn a simple melody for the right hand. Then you put them together. Then you learn a few &quot;riffs&quot; for the right hand.<p>If you keep practicing consistently, at some point you develop your coordination in your left hand to the point that you&#x27;ve got a steady rhythm in the bass line. And you won&#x27;t stop playing that bass line <i>even if</i> you mess up in the right hand.<p>No longer are you merely practicing the parts that go into playing the blues, you are practicing playing the blues <i>by actually playing the blues</i>. And each time you play a chorus, you have aural feedback you can use to decide whether the things you played in your right hand are worthwhile or undesirable. You can even play a thing which you did not intend that turns out to work, and use it later.<p>Essentially, you can now cycle through the blues form an arbitrary number of times. That&#x27;s an epiphany, and it feels the same as the moment you learn to cycle an arbitrary number of times on a bicycle.<p>There are similar epiphanies when learning to construct a melody over a pentatonic scale, and an even stronger one when learning how to construct a melody over an octatonic scale. Those moments are so intense that a lot of musicians end up just stopping there because it&#x27;s so much fun.