Peak

by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child passes about six years old, so that if the rewiring necessary for perfect pitch has not occurred by then, it will never happen.

But we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills — such as perfect pitch — that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones.

In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives.

wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

Later, after finishing the memory work with Steve and a couple of other students, I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers. None of them ever quit on me.

The cells are not happy with this altered state of affairs, and they respond by calling up some different genes from the cells’ DNA. (Most of the genes in the DNA of a cell are inactive at any given time, and the cell will “switch on” and “switch off” various genes, depending on what it needs at the time.)

The exact details of what goes on inside a cell in response to such stresses are extremely complicated, and researchers are only just now beginning to unravel them. For example, in one study on rats the scientists conducting the study counted 112 different genes that were turned on when the workload on a particular muscle in the rear legs of the rats was sharply increased.

Suppose, for example, that you begin a program of aerobic exercise — say, jogging three times a week for half an hour each time, keeping your heart rate at the recommended level of 70 percent of your maximum heart rate (which works out to something over 140 beats per minute for younger adults).

Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training.

First, the effects of training on the brain can vary with age in several ways. The most important way is that younger brains — those of children and adolescents — are more adaptable than adult brains are, so training can have larger effects in younger people. Because the young brain is developing in various ways, training at early ages can actually shape the course of later development, leading to significant changes.

Consider this: Most people live lives that are not particularly physically challenging. They sit at a desk, or if they move around, it’s not a lot. They aren’t running and jumping, they aren’t lifting heavy objects or throwing things long distances, and they aren’t performing maneuvers that require tremendous balance and coordination. Thus they settle into a low level of physical capabilities — enough for day-to-day activities and maybe even hiking or biking or playing golf or tennis on the weekends, but far from the level of physical capabilities that a highly trained athlete possesses. These “normal” people cannot run a mile in under five minutes or ten miles in under an hour; they cannot throw a baseball three hundred feet or hit a golf ball three hundred yards; they cannot do triple gainers off the high board or triple axels on ice skates or triple backflips in a gymnastics floor routine. These are the sorts of things that require far more practice than most people are willing to devote, but — and this is important — they are also the sorts of abilities that can be developed because the human body is so adaptable and responsive to training. The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in, from writing a report to driving a car, from teaching a class to running an organization, from selling houses to performing brain surgery. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or white matter or to rewire entire sections in the way that an aspiring London taxi driver or violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.

mental representations. Even when the skill being practiced is primarily physical, a major factor is the development of the proper mental representations. Consider a competitive diver working on a new dive. Much of the practice is devoted to forming a clear mental picture of what the dive should look like at every moment and, more importantly, what it should feel like in terms of body positioning and momentum.

This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill.

What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.

The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.

This is an example of one way in which expert performers use mental representations to improve their performance: they monitor and evaluate their performance, and, when necessary, they modify their mental representations in order to make them more effective.