I experienced the periphery of a kind of fun, non-weapons / musical example of this as a teenager.
I took a semester of guitar class in high school. Me and one specific other girl both really, really sucked at it. We tried our hardest in different ways, we scraped by passing grades, but not much else. This class was fun but it didn't teach us guitars so much as it taught us something about ourselves (namely the fact we couldn't play guitars). Notably, the teacher didn't seem to have his own office so his computer was just set up in the back of the music room this class took place in; the music room also had a piano, but that was typically covered by the time guitar class started.
Now, my teacher was nebulously aware that I was "good with computers" and one day had a hand-written letter that apparently needed to be an e-mail, and for whatever reason he didn't want to type it up himself so he asked me to help him with it. He was trying to be helpful and read out the words slowly, one by one for me, to give me enough time to type them out for him. However, upon checking that I could read most of his handwriting just fine, I told him to simply set it down where I could see it because it would go much faster. He was absolutely flabbergasted that not only did it go faster, but that I could type up the whole letter without looking at the keyboard, and in a fraction of the time he could. It took me like a minute, I think? I just remember him having functionally ended the lesson part of the class early and giving us a generous open practice period for that day's class to make sure there was enough time for this task, and being surprised that I wouldn't need it. He thought this kind of fast touch-typing was something only trained secretaries or "court document people" could do and was stunned that a teenager achieved the same skill just from dicking around on the Internet in most of my free time.
About a week(?) later, the piano happened to be uncovered by the time guitar class started. That other girl was joking around with our classmates before she sat down at the bench and started pounding out a song with no sheet music, no preparation, and seemingly no effort. Like, it turns out she'd been mastering piano for YEARS, and this guitar class was just her branching out and trying out new instruments for shits and giggles once she'd maxed out the piano lessons available to her.
I have a very vivid and very vindicating memory of my guitar teacher looking between her, me, and my hands, and saying, "You know, this actually explains a lot."
Because it turns out our hands are engaging in almost exactly the opposite muscles (or rather, muscle motions? kinetic operations? There's a word for this but I don't remember it) when they are "pressing (keys)" versus when they are "plucking (strings)".
Most of the students in that class came in as blank slates, but that classmate and I both came in with our muscle memories over-developed in the "wrong" direction. Even though we both years of experience using our hands for small multimodal movements (theoretically ideal for starting a musical instrument), we still had to "unlearn" things which none of our other classmates needed to -- turning our preexisting expertise into another obstacle for our current goal.
snowghoul
gracieabrams
vaporwave
2087
