The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

by Ken Robinson

If you watch athletes, dancers, musicians, and other performers of their class at work, you can see that they are thinking, as well as performing, in extraordinary ways. As they practice, they engage their whole bodies in developing and memorizing the routines they are shaping up. In the process, they are relying on what some call “muscle memory.” In performance, they are usually moving too quickly and in ways that are simply too complex to rely on the ordinary conscious processes of thinking and decision-making. They draw from the deep reserves of feeling and intuition and of physical reflex and coordination that use the whole brain and not only the parts at the front that we associate with rational thinking. If they did that, their careers would never get off the ground, and neither would they. In these ways, athletes and all sorts of other performers help to challenge something else about human capacity that too many people take for granted and also get wrong—our ideas about intelligence.