Expertise is ‘Just’ Pattern Matching

The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a conse

Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal.

This Pattern Matching process happens automatically, without conscious effort. Simply by paying attention to the world around you, your brain is collecting new patterns and adding them to memory. Humans learn patterns primarily via Experimentation. If a small child wants to be held by its mother, it doesn’t take long to try several different approa

Expertise is formed in any area by repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause the learners to have to think again and learn anew. Then they practice this new skill set to an automatic level of mastery only to see it, too, eventually be challenged.

The key difference is how the essence is captured. Patterns are absorbed and refined over time, stored away in the deep, nonverbal recesses of your mind, and conveyed to you in the form of hunches. The hunch that a particular ballcarrier is about to dart left, or that your spouse is ready to explode in anger, is the result of recognized patterns fr

If the principles-first way of thinking of problems is so much more effective, why don’t students start there instead of attending to superficial characteristics? The simple answer may be that they can’t. Only by developing enough experience with problem solving can you build up a deep mental model of how other problems work. Intuition sounds magic