At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus decided he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of the country's best-known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a position running New York University's Center for Language and Music.

And he wanted to play the guitar.

For any adult, learning an instrument or a new language is terrifying. For a cognitive scientist, it can also be downright depressing. Humans have an early childhood window to acquire such skills easily, according to a long-held tenet in his profession, and it's a window that closes quickly. Then there is the issue of innate ability. While no single gene can explain Beethoven, Yo-Yo Ma or "Waterloo Sunset," Marcus does believe in natural talent, he said, or at least in the certainty he doesn't have any.


Three years later he has chronicled his journey in a new book, "Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning" (Penguin). Like Daniel J. Levitin's "World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature" and Oliver Sacks' "Musicophilia," "Guitar Zero" investigates the intersection between neuroscience and music. But the thread here is Marcus' own often frustrating attempts to learn guitar. It's the sort of book where Steven Pinker (Marcus' mentor and collaborator) mixes with K. Anders Ericsson (the psychologist most associated with the "10,000 hours" theory of expertise) and Tom Morello (the lead guitarist from Rage Against the Machine).

"You could ask from an evolutionary perspective why anyone plays music in the first place," he said, although in fact you have to ask very few questions in conversation with Marcus because he poses so many himself -- then answers them.

"I don't think music is innately wired in the brain. It's a difficult skill. So why do we do it?"

Five years ago he asked a fellow scientist, Levitin, to show him a few chords.

"His timing was off," Levitin said. "I told him to practice with a metronome."

What finally pushed him wasn't seeing Springsteen in concert or listening to the "Goldberg" Variations. It was a video game, "Guitar Hero," that rewards players who can press the correct buttons in time with recorded music. He was terrible at first, but through sheer repetition he improved just enough to think that maybe rhythm could be learned after all. But real guitars, he was frustrated to learn, weren't designed by computer engineers.

Compared to his "Guitar Hero" controller, his Yamaha felt heavy and awkward. The musical scale isn't perfectly linear. And the guitar has the same notes at different frets along different strings.



"It was gradual and piecemeal," his wife, Athena Vouloumanos, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at NYU, remembered. "He had to think about the beat and figure it out in an analytical way."

Three years later his practice is now aimed almost purely at improvisation. At the book party/mini-concert for "Guitar Zero," held in front of students and friends at an NYU lecture hall last week, he was joined on stage by Terre Roche, a longtime music teacher and part of the singing group the Roches, to improvise in a scale he had learned that morning.

But he had no interest in learning particular songs. Nor has he tried to acquire the tricks that most fledgling players rely on by reading transcriptions of Chuck Berry or Eric Clapton licks, and he may be the only amateur guitarist alive who doesn't spontaneously play "Blackbird" over and over.

"I have a lot of need for cognition," he said. "I want to know how the guitar works. Some people are 'show me this riff in "Hey Joe."' I'm not that kind of player."

Those two approaches -- learning the scales or learning "Hey Joe" -- illustrate different modes of mental processing that are at the heart of "Guitar Zero." On the one hand is abstract thinking, basically a tool kit of rules that can be applied in new situations. Atonal music, which relies on a strict sequence of notes, might be the best example.

The other is data mining, that is, dredging up material from a vast store of knowledge. Paul McCartney can't read notation, but he has a vast store of music to draw on and could, for example, compose "Blackbird" based on a Bach lute piece he learned as a child.


Like most musicians he wants to move beyond both and play from emotion or, as he said, "from the brain stem."

"I'm still analytical at most moments," he said. "I'm not sure if that's a limitation of me as a musician or as a human being."