Susan, thank you so much for your feedback.  With effective practice, babies and their mothers also reach levels of automaticity in feeding skills, where the baby has not only become the Insta-Latch Baby, but the mother has also reached a high level of skill in holding her baby for feeding as well as diapering, bathing, dressing, and general cuddling.  

During early learning, there is much attention necessarily focused on performing the task that's being learned, but with much effective practice, a display of automaticity for a task is seen, where less attention is needed to perform the skill.  The creativity you cite in the advanced martial arts performer is also seen in the highly skilled nursing dyad some months after the birth, where the mother can hold the nursling in one arm and perform additional tasks with her other hand and arm, even while walking about.  But imagine the difficulty for the Day 1 primiparous mother who would be asked to learn how to hold her infant for feeding at the breast while also walking around her room - - so difficult as to be impossible!  For the novice lactation clinician to learn how to assist the dyad with tube-feeding at the breast, before the novice clinician has yet learned how to assist the dyad with any nursing whatsoever - - too difficult! With trial and error learning as well as effective practice, we build on our earlier successes toward more advanced skill performances.  

The older, highly skilled nursling becomes creative at the breast by displaying his/her ability to nurse while also grabbing mother's finger, or patting her breast, or playing with a button on mother's shirt while nursing, and can even sustain a lengthy grin without losing the latch.  The nursing toddler also displays creativity in his/her feeding skills at the breast with the ability to stand, move about to a certain extent and look around, all whilst feeding at the breast.        

It's so interesting to think of the various roads to automaticity, such as the novice knitter who is focused on each step of the process while learning how to cast on, knit, purl, and cast off, versus the expert knitter who can carry on a conversation without constantly looking at his/her active and ongoing knitting process.  Regarding Brazilian jiu-jitsu, have you read former chess champion Josh Waitzkin's 2007 book, The Art of Learning?  After he stopped competing in chess (the film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" was about his early life in chess, from the book of the same name authored by his father), he became interested in T'ai chi, developed into a world champion in T'ai chi ch'uan, and also became a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.  

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