The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (10 page)

Whereas the amateur singers experienced the lesson as self-actualization and an enjoyable release of tension, the professional singers increased their concentration and focused on improving their performance during the lesson
. In their research on chess expertise, Charness et al. (1996, 2005) found that the amount of solitary chess study was the best predictor of performance during chess tournaments … Similar findings of the unique effectiveness of deliberate solitary practice have been reported by Duffy et al., 2004, for dart throwing. A recent study by Ward et al. (2004) demonstrated that elite level youth soccer players spent less time in playful activities than less-skilled control participants, and accrued more time spent engaged in deliberate practice.

What about those who practice regularly and strenuously, pursuing their pursuits seriously, but who do not improve significantly? Are they just missing that magic genetic spark? Not as far as Ericsson and his team can tell. “A careful review of the published evidence on the heritability of acquisition of elite sports achievement,” he writes, “failed to reveal reproducible evidence for any genetic constraints for attaining elite levels by healthy individuals (excluding, of course, the evidence on body size).”

Rather, nonachievers seem to be missing something in their
process
—one or more aspects of style or intensity of practice, or technique, or mindset, or response to failure.

Genes are involved, of course
. They’re a dynamic part of the process as they become activated.
“When individuals deliberately push themselves
beyond the zone of relative comfort and engage in sustained strenuous physical activity,” Ericsson explains, “they [induce] an abnormal state for cells in some physiological systems … These biochemical states will trigger the activation [of] dormant genes within the cells’ DNA. The activated genes in turn will stimulate and ‘turn on’ systems designed to cause bodily reorganization and adaptive change.”

The exact same thing happens with any sustained intellectual or creative activity—chess, for example. As it does for every London cabbie, the brain will physically adapt to any intellectual stretch its owner demands.

All of this nicely reinforces the original double lesson from Ericsson’s original 1980 memory experiment: there is no escaping basic human biology—nor is there any need to. Becoming great at something requires the right combination of resources, mentality, strategies, persistence, and time; these are tools theoretically available to any normal functioning human being.
This does not mean, of course, that every person has the same resources and opportunity, or that anyone can be great at anything; biological and circumstantial differences and advantages/disadvantages abound. But in revealing talent to be a process, the simple idea of genetic giftedness is forever debunked. It is no longer reasonable to attribute talent or success to a specific gene or any other mysterious gift
. The real gift, it turns out, belongs to virtually all of us: it is the plasticity and the extraordinary responsiveness built right into basic human biology. The real gift is the GxE dynamic.

The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of elapsed time—not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day, Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years’ time (which comes to an average of three hours per day).
From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark
.
³

In fact, contrary to long-standing myth, Mozart’s own career fits beautifully with this new insight. A precocious but by no means adult-level musician as a young boy, Mozart’s true greatness as a composer developed slowly and steadily over time.
“People make a great mistake who think that my art has come easily to me,” Mozart himself once wrote to his father, as if to make this precise point
. “Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I.”

As impressive as it was that little Amadeus attempted to compose at a very early age, his early work was far from extraordinary. In reality, his earliest compositions were mere imitations of other composers.
His first seven piano concertos, written from ages eleven to sixteen, “contain almost nothing original,” reports Temple University’s Robert Weisberg, and “perhaps should not even be labeled as being by Mozart
.” He was essentially arranging the works of others for performance on the piano and other instruments.

Over about ten years, Mozart voraciously incorporated different styles and motifs and developed his own voice. Critics consider his Symphony no. 29, written ten years after his first symphony, to be his first work of real stature. His first great piano concerto is widely considered to be the no. 9, “Jeunehomme,” written at age twenty-one. It was his 271st completed composition.
Idomeneo
, his first operatic masterpiece, written three years later, was his thirteenth opera. The most notable thing about his teenage years is not the quality of his work, but his breathtaking output. Given that, the quality seemed to—in due course—take care of itself. Looking at Mozart’s works chronologically, there is a clear trajectory of increasing originality and importance leading up to his final three symphonies, written at age thirty-two, which are generally considered his greatest.

Who else has the potential to scale such heights?

Conventional nature-versus-nurture wisdom says very few people, but the clear and exciting lesson from GxE and from Anders Ericsson’s research is this:
no one knows
. We do not—and cannot—know our own limits unless and until we push ourselves to them. Finding one’s true natural limit in any field takes many years and many thousands of hours of intense pursuit.

What are your limits?

³
This ten-thousand-hour phenomenon has recently attracted significant media attention and has become corrupted and confused. Critics have somehow understood it to be a claim that anyone can achieve anything by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. No serious researcher in expertise studies has ever made any such claim. Ericsson and others have merely observed that approximately ten thousand hours of deliberate practice seems to be one of the necessary components to extraordinary achievement.

Join other readers in online discussion of this chapter: go to
http://GeniusTalkCh3.davidshenk.com

CHAPTER FOUR
The Similarities and Dissimilarities of Twins

Identical twins often do have striking similarities, but for reasons far beyond their genetic profiles. They can also have surprising (and often overlooked) differences. Twins are fascinating products of the interaction between genes and environment; this has been missed as “heritability” studies have been wildly misinterpreted. In reality, twin studies do not reveal any percentage of direct genetic influence and tell us absolutely nothing about individual potential.

A
fter nineteen captivating seasons with the Boston Red Sox,
Ted Williams retired from baseball on September 28, 1960, at age forty-two
. To begin with, it was a blessed anniversary: on the same day in 1941, the Kid had gone six for eight in a doubleheader and earned his legendary .406 batting average for the season. Now, two decades later, in the eighth inning of his final game, in his last career at-bat, with a stiff neck and other infirmities, Williams stepped to the plate in Fenway Park, swung steady, and ripped one into deep right center field for a home run. The Red Sox won the game 5–4.

Would there ever be another hitter like him? When Williams died in 2002, at age eighty-three, his son, John Henry, became convinced that his father’s particular genius could be equaled only by a perfect replica: a clone. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if in 50 years, we could bring dad back,” John Henry remarked to his half sister, Bobby-Jo.
“What if we could sell dad’s DNA and there could be little Ted Williamses all over the world?
” Against Bobby-Jo’s wishes, John Henry had Ted’s body shipped to a cryonics lab in Scottsdale, Arizona, to be frozen and preserved indefinitely at −321 degrees Fahrenheit. “There will only be one Ted Williams,” ESPN reported cheekily, “—for now.”

A perfect copy. Even nonexperts intuitively knew it would never be possible to re-create Ted Williams quirk for quirk and swing for swing. Genes aside, Williams had—like all of us—lived a life, made choices and mistakes, enjoyed friendships and endured hardships, collected memories. A clone would make different mistakes and collect different memories; he’d lead a different life.

He’d also have a very different GxE landscape—with an untold number of different gene-environment interactions than his clonal twin. This is the great unexplained truth about clones: the degree to which the GxE dynamic guarantees enormous differences between originals and their copies. Ever since Dolly the sheep, the world has discussed clones as though they are perfect reproductions of adult beings. GxE guarantees that this isn’t so.

Take
Rainbow the cat and her clone Cc
(short for “Carbon copy”). In 2001, Rainbow became the first household pet to be successfully cloned. Her clone Cc, created and verified by geneticists at Texas A&M University, shares exactly the same nuclear DNA. But she didn’t turn out to be much of a carbon copy. The cats look very different, with different-colored fur (Rainbow sporting the typical calico colors of brown, tan, white, and gold, while Cc is white and gray) and different physiques (Rainbow is plump, while Cc is slender).

They also have different personalities, according to firsthand observers. Rainbow is quiet and calm, while Cc is curious and playful. Even given their age difference, these genetic clones are clearly far from perfect copies of each other. “Sure, you can clone your favorite cat,” concludes the Associated Press’s Kristen Hays. “But the copy will not necessarily act or even look like the original.”

That is exactly what thoughtful analysts of human cloning have come to realize as well.
“Identical genes don’t produce identical people
, as anyone acquainted with identical twins can tell you,” write Wray Herbert, Jeffrey Sheler, and Traci Watson in
US News & World Report
. “In fact, twins are more alike than clones would be, since they have at least shared the uterine environment, are usually raised in the same family, and so forth … All the evidence suggests that the two [clones] would have very different personalities.”

Despite this straightforward understanding, many in the media still produced knee-jerk responses based on the old gene-gift paradigm. In their Ted Williams clone story, ESPN found a biologist, Dr. Lee Silver, who said that a Williams clone would have a leg up on everyone else.
“In theory, you could create someone who would be a step ahead of other people
,” Silver said. Even if he didn’t take full advantage of his special gene-given talent, Silver explained, “[he] might be just a regular major-league player.”

With such misleading rhetoric still coming from some scientists, how could anyone expect the public to understand genes any better? Practically every word reported in the press supports the notion that genes guarantee every person certain baseline attributes. Ted Williams had superior baseball genes, Isaac Stern had superior music genes, and you—well, you have rather ordinary genes. Accept it.

This impression has been heavily reinforced by the extraordinary coverage of reunited identical twins—beginning in modern times with the amazing Jim twins.

In February 1979, in southwestern Ohio, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Jim Lewis tracked down and introduced himself to his long-lost identical twin brother, Jim Springer. For both men, it was like interacting with a living mirror. Not only did they look the same and talk the same, it turns out their lives uncannily resembled each other’s. They had each married and divorced a woman named Linda, and then each married a woman named Betty. They each had an adopted brother named Larry and childhood dog named Toy. They had named their respective firstborn children James Alan Lewis and James Allen Springer. They each drank Miller Lite, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, enjoyed carpentry and mechanical drawing, chewed their nails, suffered migraines, and had served as part-time sheriffs in their respective towns. They both liked math and disliked spelling in school. They drove the same model and color car, lived in the same region of Ohio, and had unknowingly vacationed on the same beach in Florida. They were each six feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds.

Like all identical (or monozygotic) twins, Jim and Jim had been born from twin embryos derived from the same fertilized egg. Their single mother put them both up for adoption after birth, and they were separated into different adoptive families at four weeks of age.
Coincidentally, they’d been given the same first name by their adoptive parents
. One Jim learned he was an identical twin at age eight. The other didn’t know until he met his twin.