The Social Animal (15 page)

What had happened, of course, is that as he had done more reading; he had unconsciously reorganized the information in his brain. Thanks to a series of internal connections, new aspects of the subject seemed important and old aspects, which had once seemed fascinating, now seemed mundane. He had begun to inhabit the knowledge differently and see it in a new way. He had begun to develop expertise.

Harold was not a real expert in ancient Greek history, of course, or ready for his exams at Oxford. But he had crossed the white-belt threshold of expertise. He had come to see that learning is not entirely linear. There are certain breakthrough moments when you begin to think of and see the field differently.

The easiest way to understand this is to examine the expertise that chess grandmasters possess. In one exercise, a series of highly skilled players and a series of nonplayers were shown a series of chessboards for about five to ten seconds each. On each board twenty to twenty-five pieces were arrayed, as if in an actual game. The participants were later asked to remember the positions on the board. The grandmasters could remember every piece on every board. The average players could remember about four or five pieces per board.

It is not that the chess grandmasters were simply a lot smarter than the others. IQ is, surprisingly, not a great predictor of performance in chess. Nor is it true that the grandmasters possess incredible memories. When the same exercise was repeated, but the pieces were arrayed randomly, in a way that did not relate to any game situation, the grandmasters had no better recall than anyone else.

No, the real reason the grandmasters could remember the game boards so well is that after so many years of study, they saw the boards in a different way. When average players saw the boards, they saw a group of individual pieces. When the masters saw the boards, they saw formations. Instead of seeing a bunch of letters on a page, they saw words, paragraphs, and stories. A story is easier to remember than a bunch of individual letters. Expertise is about forming internal connections so that little pieces of information turn into bigger networked chunks of information. Learning is not merely about accumulating facts. It is internalizing the relationships between pieces of information.

Every field has its own structure, its own schema of big ideas, organizing principles, and recurring patterns—in short, its own paradigm. The expert has absorbed this structure and has a tacit knowledge of how to operate within it. Economists think like economists. Lawyers think like lawyers. At first, the expert decided to enter a field of study, but soon the field entered her. The skull line, the supposed barrier between her and the object of her analysis, had broken down.

The result is that the expert doesn’t think more about a subject, she thinks less. She doesn’t have to compute the effects of a range of possibilities. Because she has domain expertise, she anticipates how things will fit together.

Ms. Taylor’s third step was to help bring Harold’s tacit knowledge of Greek life to the surface. After the weeks of reading, and then more weeks of rereading, she asked him to keep a journal. In it he would describe both his thoughts about Greek life and his own time in high school. She told him to let his mind go free, to let his thoughts bubble up from his unconscious, and to not worry for the time being about what he was writing or how good it might be.

Her basic rule was that a student should be 75 percent finished with a paper before he sits down to write it. Before composition starts, there should be a long period of gestation, as he looks at the material in different ways and in different moods. He should give his mind time to connect things in different ways. He should think about other things and allow insights to pop into his head. The brain doesn’t really need much conscious pushing to do this. It is such an anticipation machine, it is always and automatically trying to build patterns out of data. A telephone transmits only 10 percent of the tones in a voice, and yet from that, any child can easily build a representation of the person on the other end of the line. This is what the brain does easily and well.

Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to write a journal because she wanted Harold to retrieve the knowledge that was buried inside in as frictionless a way as possible. She wanted him to go off on a reverie, and convert the intuitions he had developed into language. She was a firm believer in Jonah Lehrer’s dictum “You know more than you know.” She wanted to give him an exercise that would allow him to wander around the problem in a way that might seem haphazard and wasteful, because the mind is often most productive when it is the most carefree.

Harold would save that journal for the rest of his life, though he was always tempted to burn it because he didn’t want his descendents to see his overwrought adolescent musings. At first he would just write a word in the center of a page and then scribble the ideas or thoughts that popped into his head in a cluster around it, and sometimes a peripheral thought would become the center of its own cluster.

He wrote a lot about the passions of Greek heroes. He compared the anger of Achilles to his own anger at various situations, and in his telling he came off as the slightly more heroic character of the two. He wrote a lot about courage, and copied down a passage Edith Hamilton wrote about Aeschylus: “Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens.”

He wrote about pride, copying Aeschylus’s own passage, “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.” He tended to be the hero of his own stories, feeling more and seeing better than his classmates. But at his best, the Greek passages did lift him up and give him a sense of profound connection to an age long past and men and women long dead. “I make honorable things pleasant to children,” one Spartan teacher boasted, and this contact with excellence inspired Harold. He experienced a feeling of historical ecstasy late one night reading and writing a journal entry about Pericles’ funeral oration. He began to share the Greek sense of the dignity and significance of life. He also began, especially in his later journal passages, to make judgments and connections. He wrote one passage about the difference between the warlike Achilles and the subtle Odysseus. He began to notice the ways in which he was different from the Greeks. There were troubling passages where they seemed to lack all sympathy. They were great in expressing the competitive virtues—like seeking glory—but they were not so great when it came to the compassionate virtues—like extending a sympathetic hand to those suffering or in need. They seemed to lack an awareness of grace, of God’s love even for those who didn’t deserve it.

After a few weeks, Ms. Taylor asked to see Harold’s journal. He was reluctant to share it, because so many personal thoughts had found their way in there. With a male teacher he never would have allowed himself that vulnerability. But he trusted her, and one weekend he let her take it home.

She was struck by its nearly schizophrenic quality. Sometimes Harold wrote in a portentous Gibbonesque voice. Sometimes he wrote like a child. Sometimes he was cynical, sometimes literary, and sometimes scientific. “The mind wheels,” Robert Ornstein has written. “It wheels from condition to condition, from emergency to quiescence, from happiness to concern. As it wheels among different states, it selects the various components of the mind which operate in that state.”

There didn’t seem to be one Harold represented in this journal, but dozens of them and Ms. Taylor wasn’t sure which one she would find as she turned each page. Ed school had not prepared her for the multiplicity inside the mind of even a single student. “How do you teach a classroom of Sybils,” Ms. Taylor wondered, “who are breaking apart and re-forming moment by moment in front of you?” Still, she was thrilled. This happened only once every few years—to have a student seize on her suggestion and leap so far ahead.

After a few weeks, Ms. Taylor decided Harold was ready to move on to the fourth and final stage of the exercise. The best learners take time to encode information before they begin work on their papers. And Harold had now spent months encoding and re-encoding information. It was time to make an argument and bring it all to a point.

Harold had drawn a picture called “Pericles at the Prom” in one of his journal entries. It showed a guy in a toga in the middle of kids in tuxes and gowns. Ms. Taylor suggested that he use that as his paper title. She noticed that in his journal Harold seemed to alternate between passages on his Greek studies and passages on his high-school life. But creativity consists of blending two discordant knowledge networks. She wanted him to integrate his thoughts on Greece with his thoughts about himself.

Harold sat at home, with his books and journal pages spread out on the floor and bed before him. How to turn all of this into one twelve-page paper? He read, with some embarrassment, some of his old journal entries. He dipped into some of his books. Nothing was coming together. He texted his friends. He played a few games of solitaire. He went on Facebook. He dipped back into some of the old books. He kept interrupting himself and starting over. A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.

The problem was that Harold was not mastering his data. It was mastering him. He was hopping from one fact to another, but had found no overall scheme with which to organize them. In a small way he was temporarily like Solomon Shereshevskii, the Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything. In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactly.

Shereshevskii could remember, but he couldn’t distill. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldn’t even make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences.

In small form, Harold was in the middle of that kind of impasse. He had a certain paradigm he used when thinking about high school. He had another paradigm he used when thinking about the Greeks. But they weren’t meshing together. He had no core argument for his paper. Being a normal seventeen-year-old kid, he quit for the night.

The next night, he turned off his phone and closed the web browser. He resolved to focus his attention, exile himself from the normal data smog of cyber-connected life, and get something done.

Instead of starting with his own writing, he went back and read Pericles’ funeral oration from
The Peloponnesian War
. The virtue of reading classic authors is that they are more likely to set your mind racing, and of all the things Harold had read, that speech fired his imagination most. In one passage, for example, Pericles celebrated Athenian culture: “We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it.”

Harold was moved and uplifted. It wasn’t even so much the substance but the lofty cadences and the heroic tone. The spirit of the speech entered his mind and his mood changed. He began to think about heroism, about men and women achieving immortal glory through valor, dedicating their lives to the service of their nation. Pericles celebrated excellence and offered models for imitation.

Harold began to think about the different kinds of Greek heroes he had read about: Achilles, the furious man of war; Odysseus the clever leader who seeks to return to his wife and family; Leonidas, who surrendered his life at Thermopylae; Themistocles, who saved his country through deceit and manipulation; Socrates, who gave his life for truth, and Pericles, the gentleman and statesman.

Over the next few hours, Harold thought about these different flavors of greatness. He intuited that somewhere the key to his paper lay in comparing their styles, or in finding some common thread. Somehow his unconscious mind was telling him that he was on the right track. He had that feeling you get when an answer is on the tip of your tongue.

For the first time since he’d begun the writing stage, his attention was truly focused on the task at hand. He looked at his books and journal entries again for examples of different types of heroism. He was possessed by what Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch.” He had a vague, hard-to-explain sense that he was heading in the right direction, but it would take many delays and much circling around until a solution popped into his head.

We are always besieged by different pieces of information bidding for attention. But in his aroused state, Harold shut out everything that didn’t have to do with Greek ideas of heroism. Music that might have annoyed him suddenly was rendered mute. Sounds and colors disappeared. Scientists call this the “preparatory phase.” When the brain is devoting serious attention to one thing, then other areas, like the visual cortex or the sensory regions, go dark.

Over the next hour or two, Harold pushed himself. He searched for a way to write a paper on heroism, both in Greek and contemporary life. His focus had narrowed but he still did not have an argument. So he went over his books and journal entries yet again to see if some point or argument leaped out at him.

It was hard and frustrating work, like pushing on a series of doors and waiting for one to break open. And yet none of the patterns that popped into Harold’s head bound his thoughts. He started writing notes to himself. He’d come up with an idea and then see a stray piece of paper and realized that he’d come up with the same idea a few hours ago and had already forgotten about it. To make up for the limitations of his short-term memory, he began arranging his notes and journal entries into piles on the floor. He hoped that this process of shuffling his notes would somehow bring some coherence. He put notes on courage in one pile and notes on wisdom into another, but over time the piles began to seem arbitrary. He was loosening his imagination. Sometimes an answer seemed to hang just a few millimeters out of reach. He would follow a hunch, a subtle signal from the mental regions beneath consciousness. But he still had no overall concept. Harold had reach but no reciprocity. He was tired and at an impasse.