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The
Making of Genius
Michael
Colgan
Despite
numerous romantic stories of child prodigies, the hard evidence
shows that genius tends to be made, not born. Studies of elite
physical and mental performance confirm what is termed “the
Decade Rule”. You have to put in a decade at the very least
of the right focused work to even approach mastery in any field.
And you have to want to do it.
It helps a
little, but only a little, if you are born with great talent.
It seems to help more if you already have access to some of the
in-built software of the brain, but have difficulty learning by
conventional methods, as is the case with savants. Albert Einstein
for example, is cited as the most famous case of Asperger’s
syndrome, or high-functioning autism. Born in 1879, he was
reported to be below average at mathematics at school. His
mathematical brilliance did not show until age 26, when he worked
as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in 1905. None of the
people who tried to teach him mathematics achieved any prominence
themselves, yet, despite them, over 20 years he grew to
excel.
Putting in the
time occurs not only in science and in sport. The best concert
pianists take about 15 years to earn international recognition. Top
sculptors and mathematicians put in similar amounts of consistent
training. Recipients of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships,
popularly called the “Genius Awards” have typically
spent more than 20 years in their chosen fields. From 1900 to
2000, the Nobel Prize awards indicate a lifetime of learning.
In physics the median age of a Nobel laureate is 51, in literature
63.
A
representative example of the Decade Rule in action is the 1985
study of 120 elite athletes, performers, artists, biochemists and
mathematicians led by University of Chicago psychologist Benjamin
Bloom.1
Every subject
in the study took more than a decade of hard training before
achieving recognition.
From other
research, Olympic swimmers train for an average of 15 years before
making the team. Success seems to be only marginally related
to talent. The data indicate that the best way to make most
Olympic teams is to begin to practice the sport relentlessly -
shortly after birth.
The Decade Rule
applies even for those few who are born with supreme talent. Mozart
for example, was playing the violin at three years of age and
received brilliant instruction from the start. By age seven he was
writing his own symphonies. But he did not produce the music
that made him a genius until his teens.
The same is
true for Tiger Woods. He seems magical on the golf course, but was
swinging a golf club before he could walk. He got the best
instruction and practiced constantly from infanthood. Even today,
he outworks most of his rivals. He has laboriously constructed his
genius.
Right now ESPN
has a piece on the internet on E-ticket, in which they have
enlisted a triathlete, Kathryn Bertine to try out in various sports
to see if a naturally talented athlete can gain a spot, any spot,
in the 2008 Olympics over the next two years. They clearly have not
read the research. Kathryn is a talent, and a nice person besides,
and calm and laid back and focused, and a lot more good things, but
she hasn’t a hope in hell of making the Olympics on these
qualities alone. It makes a good story but that is all it is.
Olympic level in any sport, and genius in science, music, and art
are all built from a lot of hard yards in that in the particular
specialty. They are never born.
Spend the Time
Right
You not only
have to put in the concentrated time in any field, you also have to
use it brilliantly. In my work with potential Olympians, I
encounter talent aplenty, as parents bring their children to the
Colgan Institute for assessment as potential world champions.
Even with great parental involvement and consistent training most
do not succeed. From studies of more than 1500 of them, and
the associated research worldwide, we have extracted some major
reasons why, reasons that form the basis of this
paper.
A dominant
problem is what we call cosseting. The talented child
is often indulged, and allowed to behave in weak and dependent
ways. Consequently and inevitably, they develop behavior patterns
that are the opposite of those required for athletic
success.
A second
problem is insufficient competition. Often the talented child is
competing only against local children. Often they are protected
against failure by parents and well -meaning coaches by being
entered in only those competitions they are likely to win.
Their progress is hampered by others who do not have their talent
and do not understand how to develop it. Thus many talented
children do not have to work very hard to succeed, and do not apply
the focused motivation that is essential to growing the brain
networks required for their sport. They also fail to acquire
the brain circuits for toughness and resistance to pain that come
from fierce competition. For Olympic sports especially, it is
essential to develop this toughness early, in order to continue to
train and progress through the failures and injuries that
inevitably litter the path to the few short years of youthful glory
on the Olympic stage.
We have found
that the people we have trained, both in sport and in science, who
have become elite, work hard every day, year in, year out. They
rarely excuse and they rarely complain. From 32 years of
working with them, I have learned that the moderately talented but
fearlessly persistent, will beat the big but high maintenance
talent every time. When I first met Julie Moss for example,
she had been training in the three sports of the triathlon for
seven years. She had moderate talent in cycling and swimming but
was not a talented runner. I trained with her for another six years
before she won the World Triathlon championship - twice. And
she became a champion runner. She was noble in defeat, modest in
victory, but always relentless.
I have been
privileged to work alongside two Nobel Prize winners, and in the
company of many world-class scientists at Rockefeller University in
New York. I am also a long time member of Mensa, the high IQ
society. One big difference between these two groups of highly
intelligent people is the individual toughness of the elite
scientists, the overriding motivation to perfect their work, often
against great odds. Because of these experiences, and because
the Colgan Institute is in the business of training champions, I
prefer to take only students who have demonstrated tenacity, that
is the ability to stick to the path, unwavering through failure and
injury, disappointment and injustice, every day, for as long as it
takes.
Mentors
Essential
The third
important factor that has emerged from our study of champions is
the necessity of a great mentor in order to use the time
right. I was privileged to know the genius violinist Yehudi
Menuhin who died in 1999. Like Mozart he began to play the
violin at age three. Under the tutelage of Sigmund Anker, he
presented his first solo performance at age seven. But, restricted
by his early instruction from several teachers, Menuhin did not
reach prominence until 1947 at age 28, when he performed in Germany
as the first Jewish violinist to play there after the Second World
War. His playing then improved dramatically to genius level in
the 1950s, after meeting and commencing the study of meditation and
yoga under the great BKS Iyengar in 1952. He called Iyengar,
“my best violin teacher”, even though the yogi does not
play. Menuhin was acknowledged for his contributions to music by a
knighthood in 1965.
The subjects of
Bloom's study above, like most elite performers, almost invariably
had great support in their formative years. As I am
contending in this course regarding our goal of improving the
brain, Bloom came to see genius as less of an individual trait, and
more a creation of environment and mentoring. "We were looking for
exceptional kids," he said, "and what we found were exceptional
conditions."
He was
intrigued to discover that few of the study's subjects had shown
special promise when they first took up the fields they later
excelled in, and most showed no early ambition for stellar
achievement. Rather, they were encouraged as children to explore
and learn, and then supported in more focused ways as they began to
develop an area they particularly liked.
In addition to
Bloom, numerous other studies have shown that almost all high
achievers are blessed with at least one crucial mentor. A
representative example is the work of Rena Subnotnik, of the
American Center for Gifted Education Policy. In 1996 she began to
compare music students at New York's elite Juilliard School of
Music against winners of the high-school Westinghouse Science
Talent Search. She found that the Juilliard students realized
their potential more fully because they had one-to-one
relationships with expert mentors who prepared them for the
challenges ahead.2
Subnotnik showed that the most important relationship throughout
this developmental process is with the student’s studio
teacher, and that most Julliard teachers who work with advanced
students continue a talented lineage of descent from earlier
generations of music teachers, performers, and composers. In
contrast, most of the Westinghouse prizewinners she studied went on
to colleges where they failed to find the right mentors to nurture
their talent and guide them through the rough spots to shape their
careers. Only 50% ended up pursuing science, few with
distinction.
In science,
Nobel laureates also display a mentor to apprentice relationship
that mirrors the one found in music 3 Doctoral students generally
continue the work of their professors, and extend their lineage. As
in music, reputation is crucial, even when choosing a teacher for a
pre-adolescent. Unless the student has an expert mentor that they
admire and are motivated by, they are unlikely to excel.
Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99%
perspiration.” Now we know it has to be correctly guided
perspiration.
Chunking
In addition to
long-term self-motivated study and brilliant mentoring, the
research on genius offers one more important strategy that we can
apply to improving the brain. That strategy is called chunking, that is the skill
of grouping details and concepts into easily remembered
patterns. With innumerable details to remember, medical
schools and law schools are awash with chunking routines, but chess
provides the classic illustration. Show a novice a chess game
in progress for a few seconds, and typically they will be able to
remember the positions of only five or six pieces. Show Gary
Kasparov the same game and he will memorize the board
instantly. He can not only recreate it unseen but also detail
all the moves open to either side.
Yet chess
masters don't necessarily have innately better memories than you or
I. Their chunking skills apply predominantly to the
chessboard. Show a chess master and a novice a random list of
20 digits for a few seconds, and the memory difference declines
dramatically. Neither will be able to recall all the digits in
sequence. In a chess game, the master sees not the 20 or more
pieces that confront him, but patterns of power relationships, well
learned chunks, each of which is already in his memory. By long and
correct study he has altered his brain to construct a mental map of
chess.
We all use
chunking skills when we read. Conventional instruction in
reading starts with being taught to recognize letters. Then you
learn chunks of letters as words, then chunks of words as phrases,
and eventually whole sentences. That’s where most of us stop
learning to read, about the end of high school. It is not even
close to the capacity of your brain. In fact, as you will see later
in this course, conventional methods of learning to read may
interfere with some in-built software in the brain, which is
capable of processing the skill of reading without most of
that schooling.
As you saw in
the course DVD, Release the Power of Your Brain, some savants, such
as Kim Peek, can read and totally recall whole pages of text in a
few seconds. To improve brain function at the Colgan Institute we
have taken these findings, plus the work on brain plasticity of
Michael Merzenich and his group, and his techniques of Fast For
Word, to advance the learning of reading a step
further.4 We have successfully
taught some of ourselves, and some children with above average IQ,
to read by whole paragraphs at the same pace that the average
person reads a sentence, and with no loss of comprehension.
This level of chunking quadruples reading speed, and provides a
great asset for academic studies and personal affairs.
Neuroscience
of Genius
The study of
elite performance has been based mainly on observational and
interview techniques. Nevertheless, its models agree well with
recent discoveries in neuroscience about how the brain
learns. In 2000, Eric Kandel of Columbia University in
New York, shared the Nobel Prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul
Greenspan for their work on the neural basis of memory and
learning.6 Research
worldwide, especially that of the Kandell and Merzenich groups,
shows that both the number and strength of the nerve connections
that process a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often
and how effectively the lessons are repeated.
From this
recent research, it is likely that the right focused study and
practice can literally growing the neural networks of genius.
Genetics may allow one person to build the connections faster than
another, but the lessons can be learned by almost everyone.
And the lessons do have to be learned. You cannot appreciate
the genius of Shakespeare unless you have studied his
works.
No matter what
age you are now, if you want to improve your thought processes, and
with them every aspect of your existence, you should begin today to
grow your new brain with the right study and the guidance of an
expert mentor. There is no more important task in your
life. The new research shows that, within a decade, you may
well begin to think like a genius.
1. Bloom,
B.S. Generalizations about talent development. In B.S. Bloom
(Ed.). Developing
talent in young people New York: Ballentine,
1985, 507-549.
2. Subotnik,
R.F. The Juilliard model for developing young adolescent
performers: An educational prototype. In C.F. M. van Lieshout &
P.G. Heymans (Eds.) Developing talent
across the lifespan. Hove, UK: Psychology
Press, 2000, 249-276.
3.
Zuckerman, H. Scientific
elite: Nobel laureates in the United States (2nd Ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1996.
4.
Kilgard MP, Merzenich MM. Cortical map reorganization enabled by
nucleus basalis activity, Science, 1998
279:1714-1718.
5. Merzenich MM, Jenkins WM,
et al. Temporal Processing deficits of Language-Learning
Impaired Children Ameliorated by Training. Science, 1996
271:77-81.
6.
http://www.erickandel.org/publications_fr.html Accessed
23 July 2007.
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