Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (16 page)

Deliberate practice isn’t “fun,” doesn’t involve doing what comes easily, and requires a high degree of motivation. “The requirement for concentration for improving performance sets deliberate practice apart from mindless routine,” according to Ericsson. He points to expert violinists as another example of the power of deliberate practice, in this instance solitary practice aimed at mastering the specific goals determined by their music teacher at weekly sessions. “The greater amount of solitary music practice accumulated during development, the higher the levels of attained musical performance.”

In time the intense concentration required for deliberate practice brings about alterations in the brains of extraordinary achievers. People with extraordinary abilities, it turns out, learn to use their brains differently from the average person. Take chess grand masters, for instance.

Measurements of brain activity during a chess game reveal that grand masters activate their frontal and parietal cortices, two brain areas known to be involved in long-term memory. Skilled amateurs, in contrast, activate their medial temporal lobes, areas involved in coding new information. This preferential activation of the frontal cortex by the grand masters, who have memorized thousands of moves over their lifetime, suggests that they are using their long-term memory to recognize positions and problems, and to retrieve the solutions. Use of the medial temporal lobe by the amateurs, in contrast, suggests a less effective strategy of analyzing on a case-by-case basis the best response to moves and positions not previously encountered.

The grand master’s expertise, in other words, involves storage in the frontal lobes of vast amounts of chess information. And this takes a long time and a lot of hard work. Grand masters typically spend a minimum of ten years amassing in their brains an estimated hundred thousand or more items of chess information (opening gambits, strategies, endgames). Thanks to this rich memory store, the grand master is able to quickly assess the advisability and potential consequences—many plays ahead—of a specific move. This ability is one of the reasons a grand master’s performance against a good amateur always improves when moves must be made rapidly; there simply isn’t time for a detailed and time consuming move-by-move analysis.

So, would learning more moves and deepening one’s knowledge of chess turn an amateur player into a grand master? Not necessarily. The genius of the grand master depends not just on the amount of chess information stored in his long-term memory, but also on the organization of those memories and on how efficiently they can be retrieved. In essence, the grand master must put long-term memory to short-term use. Indeed, according to Brian Butterworth of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in London, “experts develop a kind of long-term working memory [LTWM], which is specific to their area of interest.”

An expert can be defined as a person who, after increasing his long-term memory as a result of many years of deliberate practice, incorporates that accumulated reservoir of information into LTWM. In essence, the more easily the expert can access information about his subject, the greater his expertise and control. And the more knowledge the expert brings to a subject, the more easily he can access that knowledge. After many years of deliberate practice and experience—ten years is considered the minimum—expert performance is attained.

There are many everyday examples of experts who are capable of increased temporary storage of information pertaining to their interests or occupation. An experienced waiter, rather than being limited to the usual seven items, can keep in his working memory the precise orders of up to twenty people without writing them down. An actor can recall his lines after reading them over just once. All of us can effortlessly understand and retain in working memory sentences of twenty words or more—well beyond our span for random sequential words (seven words) or words in a foreign language (three words).

Geniuses can store vast amounts of information in longterm memory and then retrieve it as circumstances demand. PET scan studies of geniuses and prodigies confirm increased frontal activity. For example, one study compared the PET scan of German math prodigy Rudiger Gamm with scans of people with no special calculating skill. When doing mental arithmetic, Gamm’s brain, but not the brains of people who lack calculating skills, shows activity in frontal areas involved in long-term memory. It’s speculated that Gamm uses his long-term memory to store the working results that he needs moments later to complete his mental calculations. Thus, when rapidly performing mental calculations he is less likely to lose his place. It’s as if he were writing down on a notepad all the steps of his calculation so that he could later read them off. And if memory is indeed like a notepad—an analogy I borrowed from scientists who study calculating geniuses—then the memory of a Rudiger Gamm is like a library of notepads containing within his LTWM for instant retrieval every calculation he has ever carried out.

In 2005, I personally confirmed the power of deliberate practice. I was in La Jolla, California, to deliver a lecture on music and the brain immediately before a performance by concert pianist Gustavo Romero at the Mozart Festival. After the concert, which featured several of Mozart’s piano sonatas, Romero invited me to accompany him to a dinner party in his honor. At one point in our conversation that evening, I asked Romero how much time he spends practicing each day. He answered: “With the exception of those times when I’m in transit from one concert to another, I practice between four and six hours a day. When I get to my concert destination, I make up for lost time by increasing the hours of practice over the next few days. I’ve kept to this schedule since starting to play the piano at age eight.”

As with the grand masters, Romero has stored within his frontal lobes all his special knowledge, in this case the different compositions of Mozart. So is he a genius who has simply coincidentally logged many thousands of hours of practice? Or does his genius consist of his willingness to put in those hours?

In other words, is the ability to form larger-than-normal long-term memories a genetic trait? Or does it depend on one’s individual effort? Important implications ensue from the answer to this question.

If genius is entirely genetic, then the average person’s reservations about achieving success at the highest levels would seem to be justified. Indeed, if genes are more important than environment, most people are likely to remain permanently mired in mediocrity. But if, on the other hand—as suggested by the research of K. Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice and by the Flynn effect of intelligence researcher James Flynn—individual effort can lead to enhancement of the brain’s structure and function, then most people may be capable of achieving levels of performance that will separate them from the vast majority of their competitors. Indeed, superior performers sometimes admit when pressed on the subject that their achievements depend more on hard work than genius or genetic endowment.

In a famous interview with Larry King, Marlon Brando stated that with proper training anyone could be an actor. The novelist Graham Greene made a similar point when asked about his writing talent: “One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”

I put this question of inheritance versus development secondary to increased effort to K. Anders Ericsson. He is on the side of Brando and Greene, firmly convinced that special inherited qualities aren’t what distinguish people with expert abilities from people of more humble accomplishment. The key ingredient turns out to be the willingness to “stretch yourself to the limit and increase your control over your performance,” he said.

For proof, Ericsson points to a study he carried out at the highly regarded Music Academy of West Berlin. “Superior” students, judged by their teachers as most likely to go on to concert careers, put in an average of twenty-four practice hours per week. “Good” students, thought more likely to end up as teachers than performers, practiced an average of only nine practice hours per week. Ericsson found a similar pattern of intense solitary deliberate practice among superior performing athletes, chess players, mathematicians, and memory virtuosos.

A 2007 study of chess players carried out at Oxford University confirms Ericsson’s emphasis on the power of deliberate practice. The researchers studied fifty-seven primary and secondary school chess players, logging their hours of daily chess practice as well as challenging them with chess problems and IQ tests. Although IQ and years of experience contributed to chess ability in the fifty-seven students, the highest correlation was with the number of hours a day the participants in the study played chess or studied classic chess games. Among the top twenty-three players the correlation of chess ability with IQ disappeared altogether. And within the group with the highest IQ, playing ability aligned with the number of hours practiced rather than the IQ score.

Ericsson’s claim that exceptional memorizers are “made, not born” was confirmed in 2003 when ten of the world’s foremost memory performers, drawn from the World Memory Championships, were pitted against ten people with ordinary memories but equal intelligence and spatial abilities. As a first step, both the memory performers and the controls submitted to structural MRI images of their brains. No differences were found. Brain activity was then recorded while members of both groups memorized digits, black-and-white photographs of faces, or snow crystal patterns.

Not surprisingly, the memory superstars greatly outperformed the members of the control group on digits. But no differences could be detected on memorizing snow crystal patterns (unusual and difficult to verbalize). On facial memorization the memory performers remembered more faces, but the differences between the two groups weren’t striking.

Next, all of the participants were quizzed about their memorization techniques. Nine of the memory performers but none of the controls used the mnemonic strategy of mentally placing the items to be memorized within an imagined place, such as within one’s living room. (This memorization “method of loci,” dating back to 477 B.C., is described in Part Three.)

In the final part of the experiment everyone in the study underwent an fMRI while memorizing. One dramatic difference separated the two groups: those with superior memories engaged brain regions that are critical for spatial memory.

“In essence, we found that superior memory is not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain differences,” concludes Eleanor Maguire, the principal investigator in the study. “Rather, superior memorizers use a spatial learning strategy and engage brain regions that are critical for spatial memory.”

Maguire’s findings provide “compelling evidence,” according to Ericsson, that “ordinary people can dramatically improve their performances in various areas by means of deliberate practice and the development of novel strategies.”

History provides additional support in favor of individual effort rather than genes. Take athletics, for instance. In marathon and swimming events, many serious amateurs active today could easily outperform the gold medal winners of the Olympic Games of the early twentieth century. Further, some performances that are now considered routine (double somersault dives, for example) were once thought impossible or too dangerous.

After the fourth Olympic Games of the modern era, in 1908, the Olympic Committee prohibited double somersault dives because they were considered impossible to control. Today, as a result of deliberate practice, competitive divers have moved well beyond double somersaults and routinely perform dives of far greater complexity. Runners Roger Bannister and John Landy provide another example. When they both broke the four-minute mile in 1954, their performances were considered extraordinary. Today the ability to run a mile in less than four minutes isn’t going to guarantee a victory at the higher levels of competition. Such examples from competitive sports illustrate that, with the exception of height and body size, our bodies and nervous systems are modifiable.

In practical terms, research confirms that exceptional performers aren’t endowed with “superior” brains. Rather, the brain, thanks to its plasticity, can be modified by deliberate practice and the use of innovative strategies. That combination will enable you to achieve high levels of performance in the area of your choice—
if you are willing to put in the effort required to achieve mastery.

PART FOUR

Using Technology to Achieve a More Powerful Brain

I
f you’re over forty, you may not be terribly familiar with video games. But you need to do something about that if you’re serious about improving your brain’s performance. That’s because when wisely used, video games, especially action-video games, can help you notice more, concentrate better, respond more quickly, and increase several components of your overall IQ.