Are certain children prone to being child prodigies and musical geniuses? According to the musician and neurologist Daniel J. Levitin this is not the case but rather presents the 10,000 hour theory. This theory states that the logged hours of practice make up the musician rather than a special predisposition in ability to learn an instrument. He gives the stunning example of Mozart (whom everyone considers a child prodigy or genius). "The classical rebuttal to the ten-thousand-hours argument goes something like this: 'Well, what about Mozart? I hear that he was composing symphonies at the age of four! And even if he was practicing forty hours a week since the day he was born, that doesn't make ten thousand hours.' First, there are factual errors in this account: Mozart didn't begin composing until he was six, and he didn't write his first symphony until he was eight. Still, writing a symphony at age eight is unusual, to say the least. Mozart demonstrated precociousness early in his life. But that is not the same as being an expert. Many children write music, and some even large-scale works when they're as young as eight. And Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered to be the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time. We don't know much about how Mozart practiced, but if he started at age two and worked thirty-two hours a week at it (quite possible, given his father's reputation as a stern taskmaster) he would have made his ten thousand hours by the age of eight. Even if Mozart hadn't practiced that much, the ten-thousand-hours argument doesn't say that it takes ten thousand hours to write a symphony."