Experts

"It just came to me out of thin air," or "It was dictated to me by God." We all have heard quotes like these, spoken by writers, music composers, and others.

Experts thrive by transcribing the complex creations of their subconscious minds, a phenomenon dealing with the brain and about which we presently have little understanding.

An expert chess player rapidly chooses great chess moves in tough board situations due to this phenomenon (only the chess player is less likely to attribute this skill to God). How this comes about is that the chess player, over the course of a lifetime, sees so many chess moves that the player is literally trained only to consider good moves, ones that satisfy the demands of the current situation.

For a composer, the task is not to choose the best sequence of moves but rather to compose a melody that acheives a certain emotion, or to create a variation of a theme to serve as a bridge to the next musical idea, to name a couple of examples. Of course, the shadings of the composer's own inner self, which is a product of much more that just music, find their way into the composer's creations, too.

And so it is that Mozart, who is the archetypal child prodigy, achieved what he did. Surely, he lived and breathed music from the time he was born.

Said Mozart, "Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream."