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our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.
myelin is important because it provides us with a vivid new model for understanding skill. Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice—the longer you stay in the Clarissa zone, firing the right signals through your circuits—the more skill you get, or, to put it a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn.
let’s say you’re at a party and you’re struggling to remember someone’s name. If someone else gives you that name, the odds of your forgetting it again are high. But if you manage to retrieve the name on your own—to fire the signal yourself, as opposed to passively receiving the information—you’ll engrave it into your memory.
NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, who is notoriously terrible at shooting free throws, should practice them from odd distances—14 feet and 16 feet, instead of the standard 15 feet. (Bjork’s diagnosis: “Shaq needs to develop the ability to modulate his motor programs. Until then he’ll keep being awful.”)
“We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that’s wrong,” he said. “It’s a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.”
The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle.
“It’s all about finding the sweet spot,” Bjork said. “There’s an optimal gap between what you know and what you’re trying to do.
A top Brazilian player spends thousands of hours at the game. The great Juninho, for instance, said he never kicked a full-size ball on grass until he was fourteen. Until he was twelve, Robinho spent half his training time playing futsal.fn5
great players don’t come from the beach. They come from the futsal court.”
Futsal players touch the ball far more often than soccer players—six times more often per minute,
“No time plus no space equals better skills.
When Simon Clifford saw futsal, he got excited. He returned home, quit his teaching job, and founded the International Confederation of Futebol de Salão in a spare room of his house, developing a soccer program for elementary- and high-school-age kids that he called the Brazilian Soccer School. He constructed an elaborate series of drills based on futsal moves. His players, who mostly hailed from a rough, impoverished area of Leeds, started imitating the Zicos and Ronaldinhos. To create the proper ambience, Clifford played samba music on a boom box.
Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.
lots of bandwidth,
Tiger Woods,” Fields said. “That guy’s got a lot of myelin.”
One of the first clues to myelin’s role was uncovered in the mid-1980s
Until the 1970s relatively few people ran marathons or pursued bodybuilding;
That worldview flipped when we learned how the human cardiovascular system actually works: that we can improve it by targeting our aerobic or anaerobic systems,
ideal start of training: for example, in tennis girls peak physically at seventeen, so they ought to start at seven; boys peak later, so nine is okay. But the Ten-Year, Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule has more universal implications.
“There’s no cell type that geniuses have that the rest of us don’t.”
minuscule percentage of people don’t possess an innate, obsessive desire to improve—
Geniuses are not scattered uniformly through time and space, he pointed out; to the contrary, they tend to appear in clusters.
weavers, painters, goldsmiths,
people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery,” Michelangelo later said, “it would not seem so wonderful at all.”
George Bartzokis is a professor of neurology at UCLA.
Around UCLA, he is known as “Mr. Myelin.”
The volume of myelin in the brain continues to increase until around fifty,
Why do breast-fed babies have higher IQs? Because the fatty acids in breast milk are the building blocks of myelin. This is why the FDA recently approved the addition of omega-3 fatty acids to infant formula, and also why eating fish, which is rich in fatty acids, has been linked to lowered risk of memory loss,
De Groot went on to show that in the first test, the masters were not seeing individual chess pieces but recognizing patterns. Where novices saw a scattered alphabet of individual pieces, masters were grouping those “letters” into the chess equivalent of words, sentences, and paragraphs. When the pieces became random, the masters were lost—not because they suddenly became dumber but because their grouping strategy was suddenly useless. The HSE vanished. The difference between chess T. Rexes and ordinary players was not the difference between a cannon and a popgun. It was a difference of
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Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.
“It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly.” Second, going slow helps the practicer to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill’s internal blueprints—the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.
