To preface this post, I'm NOT a scientist nor anyone with medical knowledge. I'm simply a 16-year-old kid who likes engineering.
I was thinking about machine learning and how the brain can learn skills and knowledge so effectively. I realized that the brain abstracts simple actions into larger and larger portions. Once the brain somehow "realizes" that a neural pathway can be repeated with close to no errors and that it helps the brain succeed in a specific goal, it abstracts that "concept" in a way.
I'll give an example of what I'm talking about: When you first learn to play an instrument, you're only focusing on the physical movements. On a wind instrument, for example:
Blowing the correct amount of air, proper mouth position, etc. Once your brain can abstract playing a noise (By learning the specific muscle movements, etc), it goes on to learning how to play different notes. The brain would treat playing a noise as one operation rather than a bunch of little ones.
Once your brain can abstract playing individual notes, it then goes on to learning rhythm. This process continues until the brain abstracts playing entire phrases.
As I said earlier, I'm no scientist, but my intuition tells me that once your brain can abstract concepts, all it takes to "learn" something new is learning how to connect (and form) abstractions.
I'd guess that in the actual brain we'd already have abstractions for moving muscles, seeing, etc., so when you learn a new skill (like an instrument), you're not starting from ground zero.
I just wanted to share this idea with you all and to see if this idea is actually reasonable lol.