Scientific American has a recent article titled The Expert mind exploring the differences between experts and amateurs in their fields of expertise. The article primarily uses chess ("the drosophila of cognitive science") as a way of understanding the subject, since it's relatively to determine who and how good the chess experts are, and then perform experiments on them. It's long been known that experts see things differently. In chess, for example, it's not that they can look ahead more moves or are better at memorizing the board, but that they see the structure of the game, which makes it easy to understand where the pieces are and what they could be doing. While it's not clear exactly what's going on in the expert brain, the author does show some evidence to suggest an interesting conclusion: that experts are made, not born. For example, a guy decided to make his three daughters chess masters, so he home-schooled them, training them in chess for six hours a day and, lo and behold, they are all chess masters. The implication: you can become an expert in whatever you want, if you put your mind to it!