Some suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous training
The example with the musician (the case of K.A) in the article doesn&#x27;t support the &quot;suddenly&quot; part of the title.<p>Specifically, that person knew how to play a bunch of songs on the piano - it just didn&#x27;t click for him until a certain point in life.<p>If anything, that seems like something was missing from his picture that <i>should have already been there</i>. As in - not seeing the forest behind the tree for a while. It&#x27;s not a <i>sudden</i> development, it&#x27;s the opposite.<p><i>Of course</i> someone who can play popular music has some form of understanding of basic music theory (chords, harmony, voicing, structure - etc). Just like someone who has been coding for a while has some form of understanding of things like data structures, loop invariants, computational complexity, etc. even if they haven&#x27;t formally learned them first.<p>&quot;Whereas he could play simple popular songs from rote memory before&quot;, the article says - well, at that point <i>he already was a musician</i>, even if he didn&#x27;t know what the hell he was doing.<p>But that&#x27;s how anybody learns - you do some activity quite a few times, then you start seeing the patterns, then it clicks and becomes your nature. That&#x27;s why you have <i>exercises</i> - in music, math, science, dance, sport, languag - anything that people <i>learn</i>.<p>The surprising part is not how <i>sudden</i> the epiphany of seeing the structure came, but rather how <i>awfully long</i> it took and <i>how far</i> he got without seeing the structure.<p>It&#x27;s like being able to write down the first 50 terms of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, ...) from <i>sheer memorization only</i>, and only seeing the pattern that makes everything simple after doing it for <i>years</i> for <i>fun</i>.<p>Must&#x27;ve been awfully difficult.<p>------------------------<p>TL;DR: the K.A. example doesn&#x27;t seem unusual or &quot;sudden&quot; - more like connecting the dots one day.