How Do You Learn?

Getting back to the original intent, this hobby is is infiltrated by people with agendas.  I like Robert Harley’s books, probably as reasonable a single source as any, but I am very suspicious of him ever since he went whole hog on MQA.  Forget Trump’s tax returns, I would love to see if RH gets any income Bob Stuart.  I learn a lot from these forums, but when something interests me that I encounter here I try to read up on it elsewhere.    Why does the OP want to restrict himself to a single source?  Would you want a Doctor operating on you who has only read a single journal article?

 I like millercarbon’s post above and would extend it to music.  Did anyone see the recent Tony Bennet segment on 60 Minutes?  He is deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s but start playing music or put him in front of an audience and a different person emerges.  I have seen stroke patients who have been aplastic for years suddenly belt out Christmas Carols when the music comes on.  We learn music in different areas of the brain than other language skills.  Do we therefore learn to hear differences in the reproduction of musical sounds in a similar way?  I have no idea.  This is also different from what the OP intended, but a lot more interesting.

Well, sorry mc, i must of missed your previous threads.  At any rate, I think there must be some differences between how people learn a motor skill and how they assimilate music.  Many people will lose previously acquired motor skills (my 93 year old mother, who lives in another state but with who i talk with every morning, has frequently told me that she can't figure out how to get dressed).  We call these motor apraxias, but as the examples cited earlier there has to be an awful lot of brain deterioration before the ability to recognize and make music occurs.  I do think the skills that are acquired at a very young age, such as music, are more durable than those created during the teens and adulthood.  However, I think that your basic points are correct, that the brain, and the hearing apparatus, has a lot of redundant capacity, and that capacity can be retrained and utilized