From my guitar playing of late, the idea of fluency just came to me. What is it really, and how do you get it? I understand the basic idea of fluency in expression, as in a language, in playing a musical instrument, and fluency connotes some things about mastery of whatever topic or skill in question.

So, how would you describe fluency on playing the guitar? Is it better stated that you might have some fluency of expression, especially in a musical situation where you could solo? What is fluency with regard to comping? Is fluency only a means of describing mechanical mastery of playing an instrument, or the ability to speak in a different language such that you can express ‘most’ of your ideas? What is fluency versus mastery of something?

When playing a guitar, fluency always seemed to me to be quite inextricably intertwined with technical mastery, in that fluency relates to expressing (cogently and clearly) what you know, and what you know relates to technical matters. You only play what you know…

This would seem to be the reason to practice an instrument, as well as a foreign language. This ultimately relates to some topics which in guitar playing are often lumped into the catch all phrase of ‘muscle memory’. In a similar manner, with language, the topics relating to ‘deeply embedded structures’ are about the same thing. I guess you can see this in (for most people) how unconsciously you can perform simple arithmetic exercises (e.g. 4+4=_), most of these things take place with little or no real conscious thought. Another exercise would be to try to hear you native language as if it were a foreign language which you don’t understand. I still try this, will little effect…this is one of my holy grails which remain untouchable for me…

Most of us are fluent in our native languages, many of us are effectively fluent in the use of some musical instruments, some basic arithmetic operations. All of these ‘operations’ seem to take place without any sort of conscious overview. From this assumption I could imagine that there are plenty of other types of relatively unconscious actions we undertake every day. Are you a ‘fluent’ driver? Do you express ‘fluency’ when interacting with people you know very well?

I suppose I could go on and on… But there are some other questions which relate to this idea of developing fluency. Are there people who cannot develop ‘fluency’ to the degree that these sorts of unconscious operations work? I can think of some that are quite obvious, such as the growing numbers of school children who don’t have mastery of the multiplication tables. For them, every operation with multiplication is a conscious effort (even when in the possession of the safety blanket of a calculator). From some of my experiences with students, I can see that this lack of deeply embedded structures in these student’s minds certainly creates some stress for them.

So far (as I wade further and further into the weeds…) I have been considering the idea of fluency as an adjunct to expression, is there something related to this which relates to perception? Are there developable skills and abilities in how we see things (this is catch all for all the ways we experience things…); I imagine that there is quite a lot of variability to this too. I great way to see that there may be something to this idea is to see how much variation there is in how people ‘get’ jokes (i.e. to perceive what the joke was about, and in context understand what the ‘punch line’ meant…).

Some people grasp the meaning of a movie more quickly than others, the same goes for almost any form of aesthetic output. Usually this is lumped into the overarching notion of ‘being smart’, but ‘being smart’ is a big basket filled with a rather wide variety of skills, and these contents vary widely from person to person. In any case, as I sit here in a coffee shop musing about some of these ideas, it strikes me that perhaps there is more to trying to quantify intelligence than the mere brute force of timed solutions to logical puzzles…

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