1 So your mom made both you and your brother take piano lessons. After just a few months, your brother is playing really hard pieces of music. You, on the other hand, can’t seem to get out of the beginner music book. You decide that your brother just has musical talent and you don’t, and that no matter how hard you practice, you’ll never be as good as he is. But is that really true? Or are you just looking for an excuse to stop playing the piano?

2 This is an argument that musicians and scientists love to revisit: Is musical ability an innate talent, or is it just the result of practice and determination? “When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?” asks Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University. Ericsson led a group of researchers in one of the most important studies about talent versus practice. Ericsson believes that two people can have the same ability to do something, such as play the piano, but the one who can engage in something called deliberate practice will be the one who becomes the most proficient.

3 Deliberate practice isn’t just logging in so many hours of practice time, but involves setting specific goals of skills the person needs to work on, getting immediate feedback, and concentrating on technique. Ericsson and his colleagues published a 900-page book called the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, in which they say that talent is overrated. They write that expert performers are made through practice and hard work, not simply born with amazing talent. They also suggest that if people pursue something that they love, they are more likely to work hard at it and be successful. Many people avoid doing things that they don’t think they’re “good” at. They give up and tell themselves that they just don’t have the talent. Instead, what they really don’t have is the desire to be really good and the dedication to regularly practice to reach their goal.

4 “A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with,” Ericsson says. “But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.”

5 In his 2008 book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell summed up Ericsson’s work and repeatedly stated that anyone could become proficient and successful in his or her field—including music—if they practiced for 10,000 hours, which he called the 10,000 Hour Rule. He writes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good,” but rather, “the thing you do that makes you good.” Even for those people who seem to have talent to start with, this amount of practice can make the difference between being average and being elite.

6 Many scientists are questioning the entire idea of talent, calling it a myth. Folk psychology—the beliefs that people have about human behavior, usually handed down over generations as well as coming from individual experience—teaches us that talents are present at birth and only certain people are born with these special abilities. But scientists have studied successful musicians and found that many of them did not show any particular signs of talent at a very early age. Those who did were usually a part of a household where a parent was musical or encouraged musical activities. A child might show interest in music, and the parent then provides the musical training that helps the child become a good musician.
8 Some psychologists believe that, while practice is extremely important, there is a component of intellectual ability that helps determine whether someone will be good at something like playing the piano. According to a study by psychologists David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, “working memory capacity,” which is a core part of overall intellectual ability, can predict success in something like playing an instrument. They measured the sight-reading ability of pianists, which is the ability to successfully play a piece of music that they have never seen before. They studied two pianists who had accumulated the same number of practice hours, but had different levels of working memory capacity. The pianist with the higher working memory capacity performed better on the sight-reading task.
Part A
What is the best definition of the phrase working memory capacity as it is used in paragraph 8?
the power of the brain to process information
the ability of the brain to focus on a task or ideas
the length of time a useful piece of memory lasts
the ability to commit ideas or routines to memory