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Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area. The title of one study of athletes in individual sports
that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge,
That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.
“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
It was a wide-ranging review of research that rocked psychology because it showed experience simply did not create skill in a wide range of real-world scenarios, from college administrators assessing student potential to psychiatrists predicting patient
That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training.
machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
single-loop learning, the kind that favors the first familiar solution that comes to mind.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in sequence, and that they could play over and over.
a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions. Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all seventy solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did.
In research in the game of bridge where the order of play was altered, experts had a more difficult time adapting to new rules than did nonexperts.
The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area.
As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.”
There he recognized that he could combine telephone call-routing technology with Boole’s logic system to encode and transmit any type of information electronically. It was the fundamental insight on which computers rely. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time,” Shannon said.
Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty.
and scientists have suggested it may reflect the fact that premodern people are not as drawn to the holistic context—the relationship of the various circles to one another—so their perception is not changed by the presence of extra circles.
He means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another.
Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.
Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.
Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.
Students Flynn tested often mistook subtle value judgments for scientific conclusions, and in a question that presented a tricky scenario and required students not to mistake a correlation for evidence of causation, they performed worse than random. Almost
Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems.*
Remote Uzbek villagers would not perform well on Fermi problems, but neither did I before taking that class.
Leisure activities like horseback riding and field sports were scarce in the floating city, so music bore the full weight of entertainment for its citizens.
music. It certainly goes against the deliberate practice framework, which only counts highly focused attempts at exactly the skill
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,
He had learned to learn, and his multi-instrument and poly-genre skill became so renowned that it got him into a tricky spot.
Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self-censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.
In totality, the picture is in line with a classic research finding that is not specific to music: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.
found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.
“using procedures”
The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, expedience can backfire.
Teachers in every country fell into the same trap at times, but in the higher-performing countries plenty of making-connections problems remained that way as the class struggled to figure them out.
But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.
Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term.
subverted all of them in the well-intended
interest of before-your-eyes progress.
One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wro...
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It requires the learner to intentionally sacrifice current performance for future benefit.
Being forced to generate answers improves subsequent learning even if the generated answer is wrong. It can even help to be wildly wrong. Metcalfe and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated a “hypercorrection effect.”
The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.*
Halle Berry,
“training with hints did not produce any lasting learning.”
That structure makes intuitive sense, but it forgoes another important desirable difficulty: “spacing,” or distributed practice. It is what it
Struggling to hold on to information and then recall it had helped the group distracted by math problems transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory.
Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle.
For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.
Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.
As with the making-connections questions Richland studied, it is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later.
