Working Memory Capacity and Musical Skill

Abstract

How people acquire and maintain elite levels of performance in complexdomains has long been a topic of debate in psychology. Sir Francis Galton,the Victorian polymath, conducted the first scientific research on the topic in the mid-1800s. Inspired by the work of his illustrious cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton believed that intellectual ability is heritable in the same way that physical characteristics such as body size are heritable. To test this idea, Galton studied genealogical records for hundreds of Englishmen of “high reputation”— judges, scientists, poets, musicians, artists, and so on-and asked a straightforward question: Do they tend to be related to one another? As he summarized in his book Hereditary Genius (1869), the answer was yes. For example, the 26 musicians in Galton’s sample represented just 14 families. Here was his entry for the Bach family:The Bachs were a musical family, comprising a vast number of individuals, and extending through eight generations. It began in 1550, it culminated in Sebastian . . . and its last known member was Regina Susanna, who was alive in 1800, but in indigent circumstances. There are far more than twenty eminent musicians among the Bachs; the biographical collections of musicians give the lives of no less than fifty-seven of them.