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I enjoyed this little report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13620058
In particular the part where the neuroscientist explains that the characteristic of an expert is less mental activity, not more.
You become an expert once you gain automaticity around the elements required for expertise.
This used to be called memory, but since ideology has piled a lot of polemic smear on this term in the educational domain, we now call it automaticity.
For the last few decades, teachers were taught that memorizing was "stupid" and that all students needed was to be allowed to apply critical and creative thinking. I'm all for critical and creative thinking, but you need a large foundation of underlying knowledge to be successful at it, and that foundation is built through review and repetitive processes that build automaticity.
You need a huge selection of building blocks, in storage and readily available, if you want to build a castle. All the materials have to "just be there" if you want the architecture and design to convince. If you're busy figuring finding the building blocks "as you go" and "in context" you will never move into the castle.
Unfortunately, this is what a large groups of ideologists have been preaching in education, and I'm happy that bit by bit we get scientific data from neuroscience that proves that the brain actually works quite differently:
Not logically, not rationally, and creatively only to a small degree: It becomes more and more evident that humans most effectively create skill through automaticity and forming subconscious patterns.
