by Joshua Foer
In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stage seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before. And so, once we’re just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind’s filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do. We learn how to drive when we’re in our teens and then once we’re good enough to avoid tickets and major accidents, we get only incrementally better. My father has been playing golf for forty years, and he’s still—though it will hurt him to read this—a duffer. In four decades his handicap hasn’t fallen even a point. How come? He reached an OK plateau.
Psychologists used to think that OK plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate ability. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could only improve at physical and mental activities up until he reached a certain wall, which “he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” According to this view, the best we can do is simply the best we can do.
But Ericsson and his fellow expert performance psychologists have found over and over again that with the right kind of concerted effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance.
What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.”
Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance. My dad may consider putting into a tin cup in his basement a good form of practice, but unless he’s consciously challenging himself and monitoring his performance—reviewing, responding, rethinking, rejiggering—it’s never going to make him appreciably better. Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.
The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. Benjamin Franklin was apparently an early practitioner of this technique. In his autobiography, he describes how he used to read essays by the great thinkers and try to reconstruct the author’s arguments according to Franklin’s own logic. He’d then open up the essay and compare his reconstruction to the original words to see how his own chain of thinking stacked up against the master’s. The best chess players follow a similar strategy. They will often spend several hours a day replaying the games of grand masters one move at a time, trying to understand the expert’s thinking at each step. Indeed, the single best predictor of an individual’s chess skill is not the amount of chess he’s played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he’s spent sitting alone working through old games.
The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot. With typing, it’s relatively easy to get past the OK plateau. Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type faster than feels comfortable, and to allow yourself to make mistakes. In one noted experiment, typists were repeatedly flashed words 10 to 15 percent faster than their fingers were able to translate them onto the keyboard. At first they weren’t able to keep up, but over a period of days they figured out the obstacles that were slowing them down, and overcame them, and then continued to type at the faster speed. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under their conscious control, they had conquered the OK plateau.
Ericsson suggested I try the same thing with cards. He told me to find a metronome and to try to memorize a card every time it clicked. Once I figured out my limits, he instructed me to set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster than that and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Whenever I came across a card that was particularly troublesome, I was supposed to make a note of it, and see if I could figure out why it was giving me problems. It worked, and within a couple days I was off the OK plateau and my card times began falling again at a steady clip.
If they’re not practicing deliberately, even experts can see their skills backslide. Ericsson shared with me an incredible example of this. Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing. The diagnoses of professional mammographers, for example, have a tendency to get less and less accurate over the years. Why would that be?
For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson. It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach. That’s because mammographers usually only find out about the accuracy of their diagnoses weeks or months later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten the details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes.
One field of medicine in which this is definitively not the case is surgery. Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time. What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance. They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better. This finding leads to a practical application of expertise theory: Ericsson suggests that mammographers regularly be asked to evaluate old cases for which the outcome is already known. That way they can get immediat
e feedback on their performance.
Through this kind of immediate feedback, experts discover new ways to perform ever better and push our collective OK plateaus ever higher. People have been swimming for as long as people have been getting neck-deep in water. You’d think that as a species, we’d have maxed out how fast we could swim long ago. And yet new swimming records are set every year. Humans keep getting faster and faster. “Olympic swimmers from early this century would not even qualify for swim teams at competitive high schools,” notes Ericsson. Likewise, “the gold medal performance at the original Olympic marathon is regularly attained by amateurs just to qualify as a participant in the Boston Marathon.” And the same is true not just of athletic pursuits, but in virtually every field. The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon claimed that “nobody can obtain to proficiency in the science of mathematics by the method hitherto known unless he devotes to its study thirty or forty years.” Today, the entire body of mathematics known to Bacon is now acquired by your average high school junior.
There’s no reason to think that the most talented athletes alive today possess that much more innate talent than the most talented athletes of the past. And there’s also no reason to believe that improvements in running shoes or swimwear—while certainly of some significance—could be responsible for the totality of these dramatic improvements. What’s changed is the amount and quality of training that athletes must endure to achieve world-class status. The same is true not just of running and swimming, but of javelin throwing, ice skating, and every other athletic pursuit. There is not a single sport in which records don’t regularly fall. If there are plateaus out there, collectively we have not reached them yet.
How is it that we continue to surpass ourselves? Part of Ericsson’s answer is that the barriers we collectively set are as much psychological as innate. Once a benchmark is deemed breakable, it usually doesn’t take long before someone breaks it. For a long time, people thought that no one would ever run a mile in under four minutes. It was considered an immovable barrier, like the speed of light. When Roger Bannister, a twenty-year-old British medical student, finally broke the four-minute mile in 1954, his accomplishment was splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world and hailed as one of the greatest athletic achievements of all time. But the barrier turned out to be more like a floodgate. It took only six weeks before an Australian named John Landy ran the mile a second and a half faster than Bannister, and within a few years four-minute miles were commonplace. Today, all professional middle-distance runners are expected to clock four-minute miles and the world record has fallen to 3 minutes and 43.13 seconds. At the World Memory Championship, at least half the existing world records fall each year.
Instead of thinking of enhancing my memory as analogous to stretching my height or improving my vision or tweaking some other fundamental attribute of my body, Ericsson encouraged me to think of it more like improving a skill—more like learning to play an instrument.
We usually think about our memory as a single, monolithic thing. It’s not. Memory is more like a collection of independent modules and systems, each relying on its own networks of neurons. Some people have good memories for numbers but are always forgetting words; some people remember names but not to-do lists. SF, Ericsson’s work-study undergraduate who expanded his digit span tenfold, had not increased some generalized memory capacity. Rather, he’d simply become an expert at digit memorization. When he tried to memorize lists of random consonants, he could still only remember about seven of them.
This, more than anything, is what differentiates the top memorizers from the second tier: They approach memorization like a science. They develop hypotheses about their limitations; they conduct experiments and track data. “It’s like you’re developing a piece of technology, or working on a scientific theory,” the two-time world champ Andi Bell once told me. “You have to analyze what you’re doing.”
If I would have any chance at catapulting myself to the top tier of the competitive memorization circuit, my practice would have to be focused and deliberate. That meant I needed to collect data and analyze it for feedback. And that meant this whole operation was about to get ratcheted up.
I set up a spreadsheet on my laptop to keep track of how long I was practicing and of any difficulties I was having along the way. I made graphs of everything, and tracked the steady upticks in my scores in a journal:
August 19: Did 28 cards in 2:57.
August 20: Did 28 cards in 2:39. Solid time.
August 24: Did 38 cards in 4:40. Not so good.
September 8: Sitting in a Starbucks procrastinating instead of working on an overdue article. Memorized 46 digits in five minutes ... Pathetic. Then did 48 cards in 3:32. Decided finally to change my images for the fours. Goodbye female actresses, hello mental athletes. Clubs = Ed Cooke, diamonds = Gunther Karsten, hearts = Ben Pridmore, spades = me.
October 2: Did 70 random words in fifteen minutes. Not good! Lost points because I confused the words “grow” with “growth” and “bicycle” with “bike.” From now on, when a word has multiple close variations, make a careful mental note in palace next to the confusing image!
October 16: Just did 87 random words. I’m doing too much eyeing of the clock and glancing around the room instead of memorizing. I’m losing time. Concentrate man, concentrate!
Attention, of course, is a prerequisite to remembering. Generally when we forget the name of a new acquaintance, it’s because we’re too busy thinking about what we’re going to say next, instead of paying attention. Part of the reason techniques like visual imagery and the memory palace work so well is that they enforce a degree of attention and mindfulness that is normally lacking. You can’t create an image of a word, a number, or a person’s name without dwelling on it. And you can’t dwell on something without making it more memorable. The problem I was running into in my training was that I was simply getting bored by it, and allowing my mind’s eye to wander. No matter how crude, colorful, and explicit the images one paints in one’s memory palaces, one can only look at pages of random numbers for so long before beginning to wonder if there isn’t something more interesting going on in another room. Like the sound of putting.
Ed, who had taken to referring to me as “son,” “young man,” and “Herr Foer,” insisted that the cure for my distractibility lay in an equipment upgrade. All serious mnemonists wear earmuffs. A few of the most serious competitors wear blinders to constrict their field of view and shut out peripheral distractions. “I find them ridiculous, but in your case, they may be a sound investment,” said Ed on one of our regular twice-weekly phone check-ins. That afternoon, I went out to the hardware store and bought a pair of industrial-grade earmuffs and a pair of plastic laboratory safety goggles. I spray-painted them black and then drilled a small eyehole through each lens. Henceforth I would always wear them to practice.
It was easy enough to explain to people that I was living with my parents to save a few bucks while I cut my teeth as a writer. But what I was doing in their basement, with pages of random numbers taped to the walls and old high school yearbooks (purchased at flea markets) cracked open on the floor, was, if not downright shameful, at least something to lie about.
When my father would visit me in the basement to ask if I’d like to putt with him for a few minutes, I’d quickly hide the page of numbers I was memorizing and pretend to be diligently at work on something else, like an article that some publication might compensate me for with a check that might in turn be handed over to a landlord. Sometimes I’d take off my earmuffs and memory goggles and turn around to discover that my father had been standing in the doorway, just watching me.
If Ericsson was my professor, Ed had taken on the role of yogi and manager. He set a schedule for me for the next four months, with benchmarks I was supposed to meet along the way, and a strict regimen of half an hour of practice each morning, plus two five-minute booster sessions in the afternoon. A computer program tested me an
d kept detailed records of my mistakes, so that we could analyze them later. I e-mailed my times to Ed every few days, and he would write back with suggestions about how I could improve.
Eventually, I decided I needed to go back to the Mill Farm to get some more face time with my coach. I scheduled my return trip to England to coincide with Ed’s twenty-fifth birthday party, an epic affair that he had been talking up since I had first visited England for the World Memory Championship.
Ed’s party was held in the Milf’s old stone barn, which Ed had spent the better part of a week converting into an experimental vessel for his philosophy of parties. “I’m trying to find a framework for manipulating conversation, space, movement, mood, and expectation so that I can see how they influence one another,” he told me. “In order to track all these parameters, I treat people not as volitional entities but as automata—particles really—which bounce around the party. And as host of the party, I take seriously my responsibility of bouncing them around in the best possible manner.”
Glittery textiles hung from the rafters to the floor, dividing the barn into a collection of small rooms. The only way in or out was through a network of tunnels, which could be navigated only by slithering on one’s belly. The space under the grand piano was turned into a fort, and a circle was formed around the fireplace out of a collection of raggedy couches that had been stacked on top of tables.
