[JonPR]

Originally Posted by BFD

In my personal experience these folks often don't have the same kinds of mental barriers and inhibitions that your average player has.

I agree.

Originally Posted by BFD

Sure they're absorbing ideas all the time from other musicians, as well as being naturally inventive and experimental. But the breadth and volume of that knowledge and the ease with which they can assimilate is often times well beyond what many of us can do with the same amount of time and effort.

Except you don't know how much time and effort they've put in. When we see someone so far ahead of where we are (especially if they're younger, which they often are ), it's hard to imagine they could have put more time into it than we have.
But - in my experience - they always have. Typically by starting a lot younger, and/or by spending more hours per day on it.

That is, the point about attitude is crucial. The "mental barriers and inhibitions that your average player has" are things that we learn, not things we're born with.
Too many people start out learning music as a system of rules, as things you can do and things you can't do. Obviously we can get inhibited about the latter, because as beginners we do those things by accident all the time!
But if you start as a kid and treat music as a game - something that's fun to explore, where "mistakes" are simply an irrelevant concept (there are cool sounds and crazy sounds, but no "bad" sounds) - then you learn fast and easy.

The science of the genetic aspects of "talent" is not yet fixed, but it's too easy a knee-jerk assumption that a virtuoso is someone who has some inborn advantage. The more you learn about most virtuosos, the more you discover just how much time and effort they've put into it. Maybe they were born with some advantage - maybe that advantage is simply the kind of personality that is able to focus so obsessively on one pursuit (nothing specifically "musical")? - or maybe the advantage is just a lucky childhood, with the accidentally correct set of circumstances?
In one sense it doesn't matter. By the time we all reach adulthood (or even late teens), the difference are pretty much fixed. If the groundwork is not innate, it's in childhood. We can start as adults and get pretty good (and continue to improve throughout our lifetime) - but we'll likely never be world-class.
But then who cares? Music is the birthright of all humans (all human societies are and have been musical, we all like and understand music when we hear it) - we can all learn to sing or play an instrument, to at least a satisfactory level; provided we can unlearn those stupid mental barriers!

IOW, the culture of virtuosity is a somewhat artificial one. It proves that some people can get extremely good given certain circumstances (genetic or not). So what? It doesn't mean those of us who lack those circumstances shouldn't bother! Music is fun, right? It's recreation. We can all get to a level where we can enjoy doing it, even find it spiritually or emotionally rewarding. That's plenty.