In fact, the ability to give one’s all out on the pitch is perhaps one of the elements most determined by genetic makeup. It is, in fact, an element of temperament, which refers to a vast term that defines personality traits including emotiveness and sensitivity, sociability, persistence and focus. In the mid-twentieth century, an American children’s psychiatrist, Stella Chess, and her husband, Alexander Thomas, began a tour de force study that would be a landmark in the science of personality. As in a film by Richard Linklater, they meticulously followed the development of hundreds of children from different families, from the day they were born through adulthood. They measured nine traits of their temperaments:
(1) Their activity levels and types.
(2) The degree of regularity in their diet, and sleeping and waking habits.
(3) Their willingness to try something new.
(4) Their adaptability to changes in the environment.
(5) Their sensitivity.
(6) The intensity and energy level of their responses.
(7) Their general mood–happy, weepy, pleasant, nasty or friendly.
(8) Their degree of distraction.
(9) Their persistence.
They found that while these traits were not immutable, they at least persisted to a striking extent throughout their development. And, what’s more, they were expressed clearly and precisely in the first days of life. Over the last fifty years, this foundational study by Chess and Thomas has been continued with a multitude of variations. The conclusion is always the same: a significant portion of the variance–between 20 and 60 per cent–in temperament is explained by the genetic package we are born with.
If genes explain more or less half of our temperament, the other half is explained by the environment and social petri dish in which we develop. But which specific elements of our environment? Of almost all cognitive variables, the most decisive factor is the home a child grows up in. Siblings are similar not only because they carry similar genes but also because they develop on the same playing field. But there are exceptions. Different studies on adoptions and twins show that the home contributes very little to the development of some aspects of temperament.
Searching for the nature of human altruism, an Austrian behavioural economist, Ernst Fehr, has shown this quite conclusively for one of the foundational traits of temperament: the predisposition to sharing. When children choose between keeping two toys or sharing them equally with a friend–throughout diverse cultures, different continents and different socioeconomic strata–the younger sibling is usually less predisposed to share. In retrospect, this seems natural; the younger one was raised according to ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get’. When the younger siblings get something, they keep it for themselves in their jungle filled with older predators. All parents with more than one child recognize that the anxiety, fragility and above all ignorance in which a first child is raised are not repeated. As a result of this, some social aspects of young children, such as their disposition to share, do not depend so much on the home experience but are rather learned on other playing fields of life.
Our excursion to the science of temperament sheds light on why Galton’s intuition–which persists today as a very popular myth–is wrong. It certainly feels as if we could all potentially attain the ability to give one’s all–as opposed to talent, which feels like a natural gift that only very few have. But in the list of temperament traits that vary little through our lives, we find the main ingredients for giving one’s all: the intensity and the energy of the responses, the general mood, the degree of distraction, the capacity to persist and the intensity of basal activity. And with this we can understand why the capacity of giving one’s all is an ability that varies widely across individuals and is quite difficult to change.
This explanation is mostly based on the work of Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, who have meticulously observed the persistence and malleability of different personality traits that make us what we are. We still need to understand what specific aspects of our biological constitution, of our genes and of our brains, regulate the ability to give one’s all. The answer to this question is, in my opinion, far from being complete. But we will see later in this chapter that it is closely related to aspects of the motivation and reward system that define temperament and are a gateway to learning.
Now we must topple the opposite myth. What we perceive as talent is not an innate gift but rather, almost always, the fruit born of hard work. Let’s use an emblematic case to defend this argument: perfect pitch, the ability to recognize or produce a musical note without any point of reference. Perfect pitch is one of the most widely recognized cases of a gift of talent. Somebody with this aptitude is usually considered a musical genius, so out of the ordinary as to be viewed as some sort of mutant, like an X-Man of music, gifted with a genetic package that gives them this unusual virtue. Once again, a lovely idea … but erroneous, a myth.
Perfect pitch can be trained, and almost everyone can achieve it. In fact, most children have almost perfect pitch, but without practice it atrophies. And children who begin training at a conservatory at a young age have a very high incidence of perfect pitch. Once again, this is not due to genius but to hard work. Diana Deutsch, one of the finest researchers on music and the brain, made an extraordinary discovery: people who live in China and Vietnam have a much higher predisposition to perfect pitch. What is the origin of this peculiarity? It turns out that in Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as in Vietnamese, words change their meaning based on tone. So, for example, in Mandarin the sound ‘ma’ pronounced in different tones can mean mother or horse and, if that weren’t confusing enough, it also means marijuana. So tone has an absolute value–as much as the musical note F is different from D or G–and there is a higher motivation for learning this relationship between a particular tone and the meaning it represents in China–to distinguish mother from horse, for example–but not as much in other parts of the world. Therefore, the motivation and pressure exerted by the language extend to music in something that ends up being much less sophisticated and less revealing of genetics and geniuses than it seems.
The fluorescent carrot
While I was completing my doctorate in New York, a group of friends and I played an absurd game. We tried to control the temperature of our fingertips, which isn’t the most exciting achievement in the world, but does demonstrate an important principle, namely that we can voluntarily regulate certain aspects of our physiology that are seemingly inaccessible. We were, in the fantasy of those moments, students of Charles Xavier at the school of young mutants.
With a thermometer on my fingertip, I observed that the temperature fluctuated between 31 and 36 degrees Celsius. Then I tried to raise that temperature. Sometimes I was successful and the temperature of my fingertip became raised and sometimes it didn’t. These variations were spontaneous and random and proved that in spite of my wish to do so I couldn’t control them. However, after two or three days of practice something astonishing happened. I managed to manipulate the thermometer at will, although imprecisely. Two days later, I had perfect control. I could control the temperature of my fingertip just by using my thoughts. Anyone can do it. This learning process is mysterious because it is not declarative. It is likely that I learned to relax my hand, thus changing the blood flow and controlling the temperature. But I couldn’t–and still can’t–precisely explain in words what exactly it was that I learned.
This innocent game reveals a fundamental concept for many of the brain’s learning mechanisms. For example, when trying to move the arm for the first time to reach something, an infant explores a large repertoire of neuronal commands. Some, coincidentally, turn out to be effective. And here is the first key point: in order to select efficient commands one must visualize their consequences. Later this mechanism becomes more refined and the baby has no need to rehearse all of the neuronal commands. For the ones that have been selected, the brain generates an expectation of success, which allows learners
to simulate the consequences of their actions without having to carry them out, like football players who don’t run after the ball because they know they can’t reach it.
And therein lies the second key point in learning, known as prediction error, which we have already touched on in Chapter 2. The brain calculates the difference between what is expected and what is in fact achieved. This algorithm allows us to refine the motor programme and, with that, achieve a much more precise control over our actions. That is how we learn to play tennis or an instrument. This learning mechanism is so efficient that it became common currency in the world of automatons and artificial intelligence. A drone literally learns to fly, and a robot to play ping-pong, using this procedure, which is as simple as it is effective.
In the same way, we can learn to control all sorts of devices with our thoughts. In a not-so-distant future, the projection of this principle will generate a landmark in the history of humanity. The body might no longer be necessary as an intermediary. It would be enough to want to call someone for a device to decode the gesture and carry it out without hands or voices, without a mediating body. In the same way, we can extend the sensory landscape. The human eye is not sensitive to colours beyond violet, but there is no essential limit to this. Bees, for example, get to see in the ultraviolet world. We can use photographic techniques to mimic that world, but the resulting colours are only approximations of what a bee might see. Bats and dolphins also hear sounds that are inaudible to our ears. Nothing stands in the way of us someday connecting electronic sensors capable of detecting this vast portion of the universe that today is opaque to our senses. We can also impregnate ourselves with new senses. For example, having a compass directly connected to the brain in order to allow us to feel the north in the same way we feel the cold. The mechanism for achieving it is essentially the same as the one I described in the innocuous game of the fingertip temperature. The only difference is the technology.
This learning procedure requires being able to visualize the consequences of each neuronal instruction. So by increasing the range of things we visualize, we also widen the number we learn to control. Not only in terms of external devices but also in our inner world, in our own body.
Controlling the temperature of your fingertip with your will is undoubtedly a trivial example of this principle, but it sets an extraordinary precedent. Is it possible for us to train the brain to control aspects of our bodies that seem completely detached from our consciousness and from the realm of things we can exert our will on? What if we could visualize the state of our immune system? What if we could visualize states of euphoria, happiness or love?
I would venture to say that we will be able to improve our health when we manage to visualize aspects of our physiology that are currently invisible to us. This already is the case in a few specific areas. For example, it is now possible to visualize the pattern of cerebral activity that corresponds to a state of chronic pain and, based on this visualization, control and lessen it. This could be taken much further, and we would be able to regulate our defence system in order to overcome diseases that now seem insurmountable. Research could be focused on this fertile territory for what today seems like miraculous healing but in the future could be visualized and made standard.
The geniuses of the future
The myth of genetic talent is based on rare cases and exceptions, on stories and photos that show precocious geniuses with their innocent youthful faces rubbing elbows with the big names of the world’s elite. The psychologists William Chase and Herbert Simon toppled this myth by closely investigating the progression of the great chess geniuses. None of them achieved an exceptionally high level of skill before having completed 10,000 hours of training. What was perceived as precocious genius was shown to be based, in fact, upon intensive and specialized training from a very young age.
The vicious circle functions more or less like that: the parents of little X convince themselves that their offspring is a violin virtuoso and they give the child the confidence and motivation to practise, and, therefore, X improves greatly, to the point of seeming talented. Acting as if someone has talent is an effective way to get them actually to have it. It seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it is much more subtle than the mere psychological configuration of ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The prophecy produces a series of processes that catalyse the more difficult aspect of learning: tolerating the tedium of the effort involved in deliberate practice.
All this comes up hard against the more extreme exceptions. What do we do with what seems obvious? For example, that Messi was already an indisputable football genius from a very young age. How do we match up the detailed analysis of development by experts with what our intuition tells us?
Firstly, the argument of effort does not rule out the existence of a certain innate condition.* But, in addition, believing that he wasn’t an expert at eight years old is the beginning of the wrongheaded thinking. At that age, Messi already had more football experience than most people on the planet. The second consideration is that there are hundreds–thousands–of children who do extraordinary things with a ball. But only one of them grew up to be Leo Messi. The error is in supposing that we can predict which children will be the geniuses of the future. The psychologist Anders Ericsson, with careful monitoring of the education of virtuosos in various disciplines, proved that it is almost impossible to predict how much an individual might achieve based on performance in the early stages. This final blow to what we think we know about nurturing talent and effort is very revealing.
The expert and the novice use completely different systems of resolution and cerebral circuits, as we will see. Learning how to do something skilfully is not about improving the cerebral machinery with which we would originally resolve it. The solution is much more radical: replacing it completely for one with different mechanisms and idiosyncrasies. This idea was first hinted at by the celebrated study that Chase and Simon made of expert chess players.
A circus trick that some great chess players practise from time to time is playing games with their eyes closed. Some are capable of extraordinary feats. Miguel Najdorf played on forty-five different boards simultaneously, with his eyes blindfolded. He won thirty-nine games, reached a draw in four, and lost two, breaking the world record for simultaneous games.
In 1939 Najdorf had travelled to Argentina to participate in a Chess Olympiad, representing Poland. Najdorf was Jewish, and as the Second World War had broken out while he was away, he decided not to come back to Europe. His wife, son, parents and four brothers died in a concentration camp. In 1972, Najdorf explained the personal reasons behind his remarkable deed of playing forty-five boards: ‘I didn’t do it for the fun of pulling it off. I had the hope that this news would reach Germany, Poland, and Russia, and that one of my family members would read it and get in touch with me.’ But no one did. The greatest human feats are, in the end, a struggle against loneliness.*
There were 1,440 pieces in play on 45 boards; 90 kings, 720 pawns. Najdorf followed them all in unison to lead his 45 armies, split between black and white, with his eyes covered. Of course, he must have had an extraordinary memory, and have been a very special, unique person with a true gift to be able to do this. Or was he?
A grandmaster, just by looking at a diagram of a chess match for a few seconds, can reproduce it perfectly. Without any effort, as if their hands were working on their own steam, the chess master can place the pieces exactly where the diagram indicates they should be. Yet a person who doesn’t know chess, when faced with this same exercise, would barely remember the position of four or five pieces. It would indeed seem that chess players have much better memories. But that is not the case.
Chase and Simon proved this by using diagrams with pieces spread out randomly on the table. Under those conditions, the masters only remembered, like everyone else, a few pieces. Chess players do not have extraordinary memories but rather the ability developed through practice to create a narrative–visual o
r spoken–for an abstract problem. This discovery does not only hold true for chess, but for any other form of human knowledge. For example, anyone can remember a Beatles song but will have difficulty recalling a sequence made up of the same words but presented randomly. Now try to remember this same sentence that is long but not complex. And this one: sentence but same long complex try now not remember this that. The song is easy to remember because the text and the music have a narrative. We do not remember it word by word but rather we remember the path the words comprise.
Heirs to Socrates and Menon, Chase and Simon hit upon the key to establishing the path to virtue and knowledge. And the secret, as we will see, consists in recycling old brain circuits to adapt themselves to new functions.
Memory palace
Mnemonic skill is often confused with genius. Someone who juggles with their hands is skilful, but someone who does so with their memory seems to be a genius. And yet, they are not really all that different. We learn to develop a prodigious memory the same way we learn to play tennis, with the recipe we’ve already discussed: practice, effort, motivation and visualization.
When books were rare objects, all stories were disseminated orally. To keep a story from vanishing, people had to use their brains as memory repositories. So, out of necessity, many were seasoned at learning by rote. The most popular mnemonic technique, called ‘the memory palace’, was created in that period. It is attributed to Simonides, the Greek lyric poet from the island of Ceos. The story goes that Simonides had the luck to be the only survivor of the collapse of a palace in Thessalia. The bodies were all mutilated, so it was almost impossible to recognize them and bury them properly. All they had was Simonides’ memory. And he realized, to his surprise, that he could vividly recall the exact place where each of the guests had been sitting when the building collapsed. As a result of this tragedy he had discovered a fantastic technique, the memory palace. He understood that he could remember any arbitrary list of objects if he visualized them in his palace. This was, in fact, the beginning of modern mnemotechnics.
The Secret Life of the Mind Page 19
