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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Daniel Coyle
Read between
January 20 - January 20, 2023
“One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.”
The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.
I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. —Charles Darwin
Deep practice is a powerful idea because it seems magical. Clarissa begins as an average musician and, in six minutes, accomplishes a month's worth of work. A dangerously unskilled pilot climbs into a Link trainer and, within a few hours, emerges with new abilities.
Knowing about myelin changes the way they see the world.
“Revolutionary,” Dr. George Bartzokis, professor of neurology at UCLA, told me. Myelin is “the key to talking, reading, learning skills, being human.”
The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) 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.
Researchers like Fields are attracted to myelin because it promises to provide insights into the biological roots of learning and of cognitive disorders.
Myelination bears the same relationship to human skill as plate tectonics does to geology, or as natural selection does to evolution. It explains the world's complexity with a simple, elegant mechanism.
Clarissa couldn't feel it, but when she was deep-practicing “Golden Wedding,” she was firing and optimizing a neural circuit—and growing myelin. When Air Corps pilots deep-practiced inside Edwin Link's trainer, they were firing and optimizing neural circuits—and growing myelin.
Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.
A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it, you'll never work hard enough to be great.
It also creates a powerfully convincing illusion: a skill, once gained, feels utterly natural, as if it's something we've always possessed.
Given the seemingly obvious supremacy of neurons, the first brain researchers confidently named their new science neurology, even though myelin and its supporter cells, known as white matter, account for more than half of the brain's mass.
But there's a key question that neurons can't explain: why does it take people so long to learn complex skills?
In 2005 Fredrik Ullen scanned the brains of concert pianists and found a directly proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter.
In 2000 Torkel Klingberg linked reading skill to white matter increases,
Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts,”
They succeed because building myelin circuits requires both deep practice and ignition; they succeed because they are mirrors of the talent code itself.
“Great teachers focus on what the student is saying or doing,” he says, “and are able, by being so focused and by their deep knowledge of the subject matter, to see and recognize the inarticulate stumbling, fumbling effort of the student who's reaching toward mastery, and then connect to them with a targeted message.”
people are not born with this depth of knowledge. It's something they grow, over time, through the same combination of ignition and deep practice as any other skill.
Septien smiled ruefully. “Then they told me the truth: I was terrible. Awful. They didn't care about notes, they cared about feeling, and I sang with no feeling, no passion, no story. I was a classical singer. I had no idea how to sell a song.
on the micro level, they constantly monitored the student's reaction to their coaching, checking whether their message was being absorbed.
As Septien put it, “I'm always checking, because I need to know when they don't know.”
This isn't about math. I'm not teaching math. It's about life. It's about every single day being a new day, and each time you wake up, you look at the sky you've got as a gift. The day is here. What are you going to do with it?”
Skills like soccer, writing, and comedy are flexible-circuit skills, meaning that they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles. Playing violin, golf, gymnastics, and figure skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance. (This is why self-taught violinists, skaters, and gymnasts rarely reach world-class level and why self-taught novelists, comedians, and soccer players do all the
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ultimately to move closer toward the day that every coach desires, when the students become their own teachers.
“You've got to make the kid an independent thinker, a problem-solver. I don't need to see them every day, for chrissake. You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time. The point is, they've got to figure things out for themselves.”
