In the early 1990s, three psychologists visited Universitat der Kunste, the esteemed arts academy in West Berlin, to study a cohort of elite
violin students and see what made them so very good.
As a control group, they selected students from the education department training to be music teachers. Though this group were also serious about the violin, their playing ability was more average.
What the researchers wanted to understand was why. Was there a shared behaviour among the members of each group that made the excellent players better? Were they more