We all have been, at some time or the other, fascinated and spellbound by the very effortless manner in which an expert exhibits his/her special talent in public. [1]Ericsson argues that this apparently superior performance of experts is often very domain-specific, and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited. He further asserts that ‘systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training’.
In his book, [2] Arthur Reber suggests that phenomenological awareness is a recent arrival on phylogenetic scene, and hence thoughts independent of consciousness are much more basic and primitive. He further maintains that phylogenetically older structures show resilience and are more resistant to neurological disruption as verified by various memory task experiments performed on amnesic patients. Also, since such functions have been successful over long periods of time, they vary little among individuals. He concludes that there exists a very close relation between implicit learning and standard conditioning leading to improved performance.
Combining the views of [3] Michelene Chi with the Hebbian theory of learning, one can view the context of expertise not only in terms of amount and complexity of collected knowledge, but also as the mechanism of organization and of retrieval of acquired knowledge (pattern completion and separation).
As an example, a person learning guitar uses explicit learning to remember the position, order and pitch of chords. However, with deliberate practice he acquires tacit knowledge and gradually starts playing the chords implicitly without consciously thinking about it, thus shifting closer to expertise.