"If you study people who are really good at things," says Phillip J. Kellman, "always the first thing that jumps out is these people are picking up information differently." This is the basis behind 'perceptual learning', the subject of an all-too-brief report here. The idea of perceptual learning is to practice picking out patterns in perception (for example, though the use of indicator words) rather than plodding through (and 'decoding') paragraphs and other presentations of problem sets. I definitely think there's something to this. Would I want to replace all of education with the exercises described here? No. But there's merit to the idea that expertise is as much a matter of how we perceive the world as it is (say) the acquisition of a bundle of facts and knowledge.
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