The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else

by Daniel Coyle

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.

Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.

The reason you can understand, recall, and manipulate the first sentence is that, like the chess masters or baseball fans, you have spent many hours learning and practicing a cognitive game known as reading. You've learned letter shapes and practiced chunking letters from left to right into discrete entities with deeper meanings—words—and you've learned how to group those into still bigger chunks—sentences—that you can handle, move around, understand, and remember.

Your skill at reading, at its essence, is the skill of packing and unpacking chunks—or to put it in myelin terms, of firing patterns of circuits—at lightning speed. Chunking is a strange concept. The idea that skill—which is graceful, fluid, and seemingly effortless—should be created by the nested accumulation of small, discrete circuits seems counterintuitive, to say the least. But a massive body of scientific research shows that this is precisely the way skills are built—and not just for cognitive pursuits like chess.

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.