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by
Daniel Coyle
Read between
December 9 - December 10, 2017
Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.
(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. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.
Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent.
The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid—namely, mistakes—and turns them into skills.
The answer came from an unlikely source: Edwin Albert Link, Jr., the son of a piano and organ maker from Binghamton, New York, who grew up working at his father's factory.
They were just leaving the field when they heard a telltale drone overhead in the clouds, steadily descending. Link's plane appeared as a ghost, materializing only a few feet above the runway, kissed down with a perfect landing, and taxied up to the surprised generals. The skinny fellow did not look like Lindbergh, but he flew like him—and on instruments, no less.
Seven years later, World War II began, and with it the need to transform thousands of unskilled youth into pilots as quickly and safely as possible. That need was answered by ten thousand Link trainers; by the end of the war, a half-million airmen had logged millions of hours in what they fondly called “The Blue Box.”*4 In 1947 the Air Corps became the U.S. Air Force, and Link went on to build simulators for jets, bombers, and the lunar module for the Apollo mission.
In its rhythm and blinding speed, the game resembled basketball or hockey more than soccer: it consisted of an intricate series of quick, controlled passes and nonstop end-to-end action. The game was called futebol de salão, Portuguese for “soccer in the room.” Its modern incarnation was called futsal.
To be clear: futsal is not the only reason Brazilian soccer is great. The other factors so often cited—climate, passion, and poverty—really do matter. But futsal is the lever through which those other factors transfer their force.
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.
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.
Other researchers, like Dr. Fields, uncovered the mechanism by which these myelin increases happened. As he described in a 2006 paper in the journal Neuron, supporter cells called oligodendrocytes and astrocytes sense the nerve firing and respond by wrapping more myelin on the fiber that fires. The more the nerve fires, the more myelin wraps around it. The more myelin wraps around it, the faster the signals travel, increasing velocities up to one hundred times over signals sent through an uninsulated fiber.
within the vast metropolis of the brain, myelin quietly transforms narrow alleys into broad, lightning-fast superhighways. Neural traffic that once trundled along at two miles an hour can, with myelin's help, accelerate to two hundred miles an hour. The refractory time (the wait required between one signal and the next) decreases by a factor of 30. The increased speed and decreased refractory time combine to boost overall information-processing capability by 3,000 times—broadband indeed.
Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.
The firing of the circuit is paramount. Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition.
Myelin is universal. One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated.
Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap.
That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.
Age matters. In children, myelin arrives in a series of waves, some of them determined by genes, some dependent on activity. The waves last into our thirties, creating critical periods during which time the brain is extraordinarily receptive to learning new skills. Thereafter we continue to experience a net gain of myelin until around the age of fifty, when the balance tips toward loss. We retain the ability to myelinate throughout life—thankfully, 5 percent of our oligos remain immature, always ready to answer the call.
But the myelin model shows that certain hotbeds succeed not only because people there are trying harder but also because they are trying harder in the right way—practicing more deeply and earning more skill.
Along with his colleagues in this field, Ericsson established a remarkable foundation of work (documented in several books and most recently in the appropriately Bible-size Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance).
Along with researchers like Herbert Simon and Bill Chase, Ericsson validated hallmarks like the Ten-Year Rule, an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which says that world-class expertise in every domain (violin, math, chess, and so on) requires roughly a decade of committed practice.
what psychologist Ellen Winner calls “the rage to master.”
(A rule of thumb: if you have to ask whether your child possesses the rage to master, he doesn't.)
Banks singled out three main clusters of greatness: Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., Florence from 1440 to 1490, and London from 1570 to 1640.
All of these seem to be likely causes, Banks wrote, and it is superficially plausible that by remarkable good fortune they converged to spark the Renaissance. Unfortunately, he continued, the actual existence of most of these factors is contradicted by the historical record. While socially mobile, Florence in the 1400s wasn't unusually prosperous, peaceful, or free. In fact, the city was recovering from a disastrous plague, was divided by vigorous fighting among powerful families, and was ruled by the church's iron fist.
What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years.
This system created a chain of mentoring: da Vinci studied under Verrocchio, Verrocchio studied under Donatello, Donatello studied under Ghiberti; Michelangelo studied under Ghirlandaio, Ghirlandaio studied under Baldovinetti, and so on, all of them frequently visiting one another's studios in a cooperative-competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking.*3
We tend to think of the great Renaissance artists as a homogenous group, but the truth is that they were like any other randomly selected group of people. They came from rich and poor families alike; they had different personalities, different teachers, different motivations. But they had one thing in common: they all spent thousands of hours inside a deep-practice hothouse, firing and optimizing circuits, correcting errors, competing, and improving skills. They each took part in the greatest work of art anyone can construct: the architecture of their own talent.
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, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease.
Why did Michael Jordan retire? His muscles didn't change, but as with every other human being, his myelin started to break down with age—
Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.
In the talent hotbeds I visited, the chunking takes place in three dimensions. First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture.
LaMontagne had little musical experience and less money, so he took a simple approach to learning: he bought dozens of used albums by Stephen Stills, Otis Redding, Al Green, Etta James, and Ray Charles, and holed up in his apartment. For two years. Every day he spent hours training himself by singing along to the records.
At Spartak it's called imitatsiya—rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball.
Why does slowing down work so well? The myelin model offers two reasons. First, going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything. As football coach Tom Martinez likes to say, “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.
There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading, imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit.
What would be the surest method of ensuring that LeBron James started clanking jump shots, or that Yo-Yo Ma started fudging chords? The answer: don't let them practice for a month.
With conventional practice, more is always better: hitting two hundred forehands a day is presumed to be twice as good as hitting one hundred forehands a day. Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between
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Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it's about seeking out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions. Pick a target. Reach for it. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach. Return to step one.
According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state.
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ignition and deep practice work together to produce skill in exactly the same way that a gas tank combines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile. Ignition supplies the energy, while deep practice translates that energy over time into forward progress, a.k.a. wraps of myelin.
The differences were staggering. With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.
“It's all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.”
What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.
The answer is, each has to do with identity and groups, and the links that form between them. Each signal is the motivational equivalent of a flashing red light: those people over there are doing something terrifically worthwhile. Each signal, in short, is about future belonging. Future belonging is a primal cue: a simple, direct signal that activates our built-in motivational triggers, funneling our energy and attention toward a goal.
When the results came in, Cohen and Walton found that the birthday-matched group had significantly more positive attitudes about math, and persisted a whopping 65 percent longer on the insoluble problem. What's more, those students did not feel any conscious change. The coincidence of the birthday, in Walton's phrase, “got underneath them.”
