The difference is the reward afterward. Learning to play a complex piece on an instrument is mentally taxing, but getting it right gives you that sense of acco

The difference is the reward afterward. Learning to play a complex piece on an instrument is mentally taxing, but getting it right gives you that sense of accomplishment that can't really be matched with anything else. Same with debugging a program you are writing, or solving other types of problems. Doing hours of arithmetic homework as a child didn't give me that reward signal, so for me that was torture back then.