Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

by K. Anders Ericsson

The technical term for this is “homeostasis,” which simply refers to the tendency of a system—any sort of system, but most often a living creature or some part of a living creature—to act in a way that maintains its own stability.

This is the general pattern for how physical activity creates changes in the body: when a body system—certain muscles, the cardiovascular system, or something else—is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis.

This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. You will have gotten a little stronger, built a little more endurance, developed a little more coordination. But there is a catch: once the compensatory changes have occurred—new muscle fibers have grown and become more efficient, new capillaries have grown, and so on—the body can handle the physical activity that had previously stressed it. It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.

This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.

This, at least, is the way the body responds to physical activity. Scientists know much less about how the brain changes in response to mental challenges. One major difference between the body and the brain is that the cells in the adult brain do not generally divide and form new brain cells. There are a few exceptions, such as in the hippocampus, where new neurons can grow, but in most parts of the brain the changes that occur in response to a mental...

Instead, the brain rewires those networks in various ways—by strengthening or weakening the various connections between neurons and also by adding ne...

There can also be an increase in the amount of myelin, the insulating sheath that forms around nerve cells and allows nerve signals to travel more quickly; myelination can increase th...

In the brain, the greater the challenge, the greater the changes—up to a point. Recent studies have shown that learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned. On the other hand, pushing too hard for too long can lead to burnout and ineffective learning. The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.

The fact that the human brain and body respond to challenges by developing new abilities underlies the effectiveness of purposeful and deliberate practice.

The details of exactly what happens to which region of the brain can be daunting to anyone who is not trained in neuroscience, but the big picture is clear: musical training modifies the structure and function of the brain in various ways that result in an increased capacity for playing music. In other words, the most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they are actually increasing your ability to play. With such practice you are modifying the parts of the brain you use when playing music and, in a sense, increasing your own musical “talent.”

Although less of this sort of research has been done in areas other than music, in every area that scientists have studied, the findings are the same: long-term training results in changes in those parts of the brain that are relevant to the particular skill being developed.

Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.

Finally, the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away. Astronauts who spend months in space without gravity to work against come back to Earth and find it difficult to walk. Athletes who have to stop training because of a broken bone or torn ligament lose much of their strength and endurance in the limbs they cannot exercise. Similar things have been seen with athletes who have volunteered for studies in which they must lie in bed for a month or so. Strength fades. Speed diminishes. Endurance wilts.

And something similar is true with the brain. When Maguire studied a group of retired London taxi drivers, she found that they had less gray matter in their posterior hippocampi than did active taxi drivers, although they still had more than retired subjects who had never been taxi drivers. Once these taxi drivers had stopped using their navigational memory every day, the brain changes that had been the result of that work started to disappear.

but—and this is important—they are also the sorts of abilities that can be developed because the human body is so adaptable and responsive to training. The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.”

But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

And here is the key difference between the traditional approach to learning and the purposeful-practice or deliberate-practice approaches: The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone. In this view, all that you are doing with practice—indeed, all that you can do—is to reach a fixed potential.

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your c...

But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shapi...

The obvious next question is, What is the best way to challenge homeostasis and...

What exactly are we trying to improve about our brains? It’s pretty obvious what leads to improved physical abilities. If you build more and larger muscle fibers, you get stronger. If you improve your muscles’ energy reserves, your lung capacity, your heart’s pumping capacity, and the capacity of your circulatory system, you build your endurance. But what changes are you making in your brain as you train to be a musician, a mathematician, a taxi driver, or a surgeon? Surprisingly, there is a common theme to the changes in all of these areas, and understanding that is the key to understanding how people develop extraordinary abilities in any area of human performance with a mental component—which, when you think about it, is just about all of them. We discuss that next.

The ability to recognize and remember meaningful patterns arises from the way chess players develop their abilities. Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters.

These years of practice make it possible for chess players to recognize patterns of chess pieces—not just their positions, but the interactions among them—at a glance. They are old friends. Bill Chase and Herb Simon called these patterns “chunks,” and the important thing about them is that they are held in long-term memory.

Research has shown that these chunks are organized hierarchically, with groups of chunks arranged into higher-level patterns.

The hierarchy is analogous to the organizational structure of a business or other large institution, with individuals organized into teams, which are organized into units, which are organized into departments, and so on, with the higher-level pieces being more abstracted and further from the bottom level where the real action takes place (which, in the case of the chess example, is the level of the individual chess pieces).

The way that grandmasters process and make sense of chess positions is an example of a mental representation. It is their way of “seeing” the board, and it’s quite differ...

key thing about these representations is that they allow a chess player to encode the positions of pieces on the board in a much more efficient way than simply remembering which piece is on which square. This efficient encoding underlies a master’s ability to glance at a chessboard and remember the positions of most of the pieces and, in particular, the ability to play blindfold chess.

First, the mental representations are more than just ways of encoding positions. They allow a chess master to glance at a game in progress and get an immediate sense of which side has the advantage, which directions the game might take, and what a good move or moves might be.

The second notable characteristic of these mental representations is that while a chess master will initially analyze a position in terms of general patterns—which is enough when playing a lesser opponent—the representations also allow the master to zero in on individual pieces and mentally move them around the board to see how such moves would change the patterns. So the master can quickly examine strings of possible moves and countermoves in great detail, looking for the particular move that will offer the best chance of winning. In short, while the mental representations give masters a view of the forest that novices lack, they also allow masters to zero in on the trees when necessary.

A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. A simple example is a visual image. Mention the Mona Lisa, for instance, and many people will immediately “see” an image of the painting in their minds; that image is their mental representation of the Mona Lisa.

Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.

When Steve Faloon was training to improve his ability to remember long strings of digits, he developed increasingly sophisticated ways to encode those digits mentally—that is, he created mental representations. When London taxi trainees are learning to navigate efficiently from every point A to every point B in the city, they do it by developing increasingly sophisticated mental maps of the city—that is, by making mental representations.

Even when the skill being practiced is primarily physical, a major factor is the development of the proper mental representations. Consider a ...

A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed.

This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon. Of course, some people do become overall memory experts or athletes in a number of sports or doctors with a general set of skills, but they do so by training in a number of different areas.

Because the details of mental representations can differ dramatically from field to field, it’s hard to offer an overarching definition that is not too vague, but in essence these representations are preexisting patterns of information—facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on—that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations.

The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory. Indeed, one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep t...

These representations allow them to make faster, more accurate decisions and respond more quickly and effectively in a given situation. This, more than anything else, explains the difference in performance between novices and experts.

So here is a major part of the answer to the question we asked at the end of the last chapter: What exactly is being changed in the brain with deliberate practice? The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.

In pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well developed mental representations. In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees.

better mental representations lead to better performance.

For the experts we just described, the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it. The same is true for all experts—and most of us are experts at something, whether we realize it or not.

But if you understand the sport, you’ve already established a mental structure for making sense of it, organized the information, and combined it with all the other relevant information you’ve already assimilated. The new information becomes part of an ongoing story, and as such it moves quickly and easily into your long-term memory, allowing you to remember far more of the information in an article than you could if you were unfamiliar with the game it describes.

The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.

Either way, reading this book and thinking about the topics I’m discussing will help you create new mental representations, which will in turn make it easier for you to read and learn more about this subject in the future.

This doctor must do at least three different things: assimilate facts about the patient, recall relevant medical knowledge, and use the facts and medical knowledge to identify possible diagnoses and choose the right one. For all of these activities, a more sophisticated mental representation makes the process faster and more efficient—and sometimes makes it possible, period.

Research on expert diagnosticians has found that they tend to see symptoms and other relevant data not as isolated bits of information but as pieces of larger patterns—in much the same way that grandmasters see patterns among chess pieces rather than a random assortment of pieces.

The superior organization of information is a theme that appears over and over again in the study of expert performers.

Not surprisingly, the highly successful agents—as determined by their sales volumes—knew more about the various insurance products than the less successful agents. But more to the point, researchers found that the highly successful agents had much more complex and integrated “knowledge structures”—what we’re calling mental representations—than the less successful agents. In particular, the better agents had much more highly developed “if . . . then” structures: if these things are true about a client, then say this or do that.

More generally, mental representations can be used to plan a wide variety of areas, and the better the representation, the more effective the planning.