Some writings are praised, others are read…. It occurred to me that historically there is a disproportionate number of impoverished writers and artists out there, who only get famous, their productions selling for big bucks, posthumously. The plebes who create for screen entertainment however, be they popcorn movies, tv series or (shudder) video games, actually y’know, get to enjoy some of that wealth in their own lifetime. Due to the basic laws of Demand and Supply therefore, ceteris paribus, it follows that more talented people are going to decide to be tv writers and game designers than say, Van Gogh (Sacrilege! 😀 Well I’m just sayin’…)
2 years. 9 hotbeds of talent, places producing more top ranked achievers in their chosen fields than the laws of probability and chance would allow them. Author Daniel Coyle researched for The Talent Code: How Talent Is Created:
Why did the Spartak Tennis Club, Moscow, described as a “freezing junkpile” equipped with just one indoor court and “resembling the set of a Mad Max movie” in December 2006, produce more world-ranked top-20 women tennis players from 2005-07 (and half the men’s 2006 Davis Cup team), than the entire United States during that same time frame?
How do music students at the prestigious Meadowmount music school in New York (known for such alumni as Yo-Yo Ma) get through a year’s worth of material in just 7 weeks?
Brazilian soccer players are world re-known for their formidable skill. Many assume it’s “just” the many, many hours of practice, fueled also by the desperation of poverty. Yet in the 40s and 50s, Brazilians weren’t so hot at producing world class players. What changed?
What if, “just like the robots”, you could code yourself talented? What if we looked at it differently, that that’s “always” been around, for as long as there’ve been living things?
Author Daniel Coyle talks about the ways in which a human brain cultivates talent/ ability, how top performers practice, how top instructors and coaches set the stage.
We form so many analogies, invent so many things, by drawing from the living, breathing, evolving world around us, from the mess and imperfection of it all. Nature is a powerful teacher. Evolution is your ultimate Sink or Swim (or Go Extinct) coach. The world was created with so many lessons and solutions just waiting for us to find them, if only we looked. Horses for eg, are born already myelin*-ated to walk/run – otherwise in the wild they’d get eaten.
We just don’t call it computer code, we call it DNA, and picking up different abilities is the development of neuron pathways for electrical impulses to travel along. There are so many, many things to study, which nature simply creates without a seeming second thought, that no one or few people can know everything.
*Practice of a talent makes a substance known as myelin that insulates the neuron pathway governing a particular skill, be it ball dribbling or string plucking. Myelin is the difference between an electrical impulse moving along at 2 miles an hour, or 200 miles an hour. When they autopsied the brain of a particularly brilliant scientist, he was found to have the ability to produce particularly large amounts of myelin. Even more interesting is this is not a new study; back when they first picked it up, they missed the significance of the finding. The scientist’s last name btw was Einstein.)
A decade ago, some people must’ve then got the idea for a great tv show –
Zachary Quinto as Sylar from the fictional Heroes series (pic from Legion of Evil Geeks)
In this old series, once popular enough to rival Game of Thrones but hit by the Writers Guild of America labor strikes of 2007/08), ordinary humans begin to discover they have superpowers and like the spider said, it comes with great responsibility and they find they now have a world to save. The supervillain Sylar’s enhanced ability is to process information and teach his own body to reproduce the special abilities of all the other “Heroes.”
He initially can only do so by dissecting the brains of living fellow evolved humans so he can examine how their brains work, thereby teaching his own brain to re-create the same superpower. (Unfortunately, even after he learns to reproduce the ability without killing the other person, he decides he still prefers to kill them so he’s the only person who is ever “special”. Loser.)
Now here’s the parenting story (what d’you want from me, Imma Mummy Blog) – Gabriel Gray becomes a supervillain from being raised by a mum who is absolutely convinced her son is special, and that the world owes him more for it. The big irony is she is absolutely right about the part where her son is “gifted”- he is arguably the greatest of all the evolved special humans and it takes practically all the other Heroes to take down and contain the AntiHero.
Yet the difference between superhero and supervillain is often not one of ability, it is one of personality – forever insecure, Sylar never believes he is “special enough,” and is always filled with an uncontrollable compulsion to fill that urge, thereby illustrating the critical need for correct guidance – from parents, teachers, coaches, seniors, friends.
(On an aside, there is such a great need for “good” professionals, in every sense of the word, there are so many things we need all those hands on deck for, but increasingly there is such a disconnect between really helping, vs what our society tends to recognise (and reward)… “Everyone” wants to vie for some roles while other professions languish for lack of talent pool. Shows like CSI or even movies like Concussion (clip below) help to tip the scales back just a bit. (Otherwise everyone wants to be Patrick Dempsey in Grey’s Anatomy 😀 )
(Oh yeah. That’s Aladdin’s Genie playing Dr Omalu 😀 ) What stood out for me is that it took someone who didn’t watch American football (and therefore didn’t get swept up and tempted to make the same excuses about how “you have to be there, in the game, to understand” that the players all take all kinds of medications just to be able to get back in the game and play…) Because we are all human, and however brilliant and well-intentioned, we need a second or third pair of eyes, a counsel…
(Also something about why woodpeckers don’t get concussion but humans need serious helmet protection since we didn’t evolve skulls that allow us to bang our heads into trees fifty billion times a day to get lunch, and how the position of Center on the football field is particularly deadly…)
The movie Concussion is based on this book
Dr Omalu, Nigerian forensic pathologist with 8 university degrees and based in Pennsylvania (not say, celebrity neurosurgeon Dr Strange or Dr McDreamy), who discovered CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) and faced intense pressure and criticism as a “young upstart non-American doctor” taking on the “very American” NFL. Article here….
<Ends aside> )
Back to Talent Code… In 1997, English soccer coach Simon Clifford borrowed USD 8,000 from his teachers’ union and set off for São Paulo, Brazil, to find out what made Brazilian players different.
How do you go from Amazing and Consistent Performance All Through Practice, to Blow Everyone Away When Facing A Real Opponent/ Team At A High Stakes Tournament?
What Clifford discovered was futebol de salao, or “futsal”, originally invented by Uruguayan coach Juan Carlos Ceriani for rainy-day trainings, which very vaguely resembles soccer but is played with half the players, a much smaller court, and a ball half the size, twice as heavy. Players touch the ball 6 times more than in regular soccer. (I love this – we naturally want the perfect weather, grassy fields kissed in sunlight – but without that rainy day, they would’ve had less need to come up with futsal.)
Brazilian players didn’t care how close their opponent came. “No time plus no space equals better skills. Futsal is our national library of improvisation.”
Deep practice (which is what builds myelin to insulate neurons) is built in paradox. Sometimes things moved incredibly slowly at the talent hotbeds – when they were fine-tuning the right neurons to fire. Then you have to operate at the edge of your ability, increasing the chances you’re gonna mess something up. And then your concentration has to be intense.
Myelin wraps indiscriminately, but how do you tell it to go where you really need and want it, and to build it up fast?
Imperfection does something to your brain, in making you adjust it arguably forces you to try harder, makes the lesson/practice stick better***. Basically what Talent Code author Coyle found football master coaches and upscale NY music teachers and the rest of the talent hotbed instructors had in common, was in their own ways they were fine-tuning the brains of their prodigies “from the outside”. They watched each student’s face and reactions like hawks, tweaking lessons, recreating otherwise random factors into their coaching routines, fine-tuning again.
Robert Bjork, psychology chair at UCLA, says that “effortless performance” might be something we think is “desirable,” but in reality it’s the opposite. Ron Gallimore, another prof at UCLA who is quoted by author Coyle, talks about recognising the student’s fumbling, stumbling effort ….and connect(ing).” Arguably then, it’s the fumble, not the perfect practice, that helps coach/teacher and student to connect, directing the firing of neuron impulses, then building myelin to wrap them.
Here’s another tv series that came out around the same time, and was similarly a casualty of the Writers’ Guild strike –
(This one has plans for revival later this year or next) pic from Fanpop
In the above series it turns out we really are alone in this world after all. All those “alien abductions” really did happen. But those weren’t aliens, they were humans in our distant future, who by then had discovered time travel. They use it to try to – yes, save the world. OR end it.
Future Humans research various historical events and finally abduct 4400 people throughout history. They then implant them with neurotransmitters, which affects how their brains work, thereby giving them superpowers. (And then unceremoniously dump them into the picture above, where how they will then proceed to live, have kids, etc will ultimately save the world. OR end it. Another verdant script writer’s playground, set to be revisited this or next year (can’t wait!)
Can’t light the fire without a spark… Like the proverbial car engines Rockstar says some of his friends are very knowledgeable about, Talent Code describes how even the most fine-tuned engine needs an ignition. Keith Simonton in Origins of Genius describes it as an “adverse event that triggers a personality robust enough to overcome frustrations and obstacles…” So what fires up the kind of response you might need to succeed?
Loss of a parent (unfortunately) is a big one, for some kids that’s the thing that triggers a difference in the way they view the world, therefore taking on its challenges. There’s an actual section in Talent Code that tracks high achievers who lacked a parent early on (we really can “over-protect”). Sometimes, it’s crappy facilities, insufficient resources. We have so much today, our kids are so well provided for… so we’re just gonna have to fake it <shrugs> Hold on while I go tell Rockstar we can’t afford any more Robucks for game mods, he’s gonna have to make his own – Wheee!
***Re Imperfection Sometimes Improving The Way You Work – I can attest to that, I once hacked my way through a lowly Pass in ABRSM Grade 8 piano on 90 minutes practice a day in my “O” Levels year. Serious piano players will tell you that’s quite bad – in those days you should’ve been putting in easily double that practice. But I had so many activities I badly wanted to complete, plus max number of subjects for the public exams, before leaving for Singapore-And-Goodness-Knew-What-Else-I-Wanted-To-Take-Up.
Lemme tell you more about the piano I was using for that 90mins – a very old, at-least-third-hand thing we’d gotten as a stopgap when we first arrived in Penang from Sandakan. It had to be propped under one corner with a plank because one of my large crazy mutt dogs dug out a wheel when his rawhide chew toy got stuck behind it. (At one point I had 8 of the things and they would all tear out into the front yard to bark their lungs out at the mailman, the newspaperman, or a leaf). DON’T take up the piano the way I did- 8 mutts are just overkill. But I stuck to that broken-piano-no-one-would-mind-if-the-dogs-trashed, because I wanted to keep the dogs.))
In the last 6 months or so before my practical exam, 2 of the keys stopped working. Til today I can tell you they were the F and G, one octave above Middle C. Pretty “high traffic area” on the keyboard. Every time I practiced my exam pieces and scales I had to adjust for the F that always stuck and the G that stuck half the time. If the piano shifted a bit, I knew the board propping up the corner with the missing wheel was coming loose. Every time I played the same routine in school or at a friend’s house on a piano with all the keys working and without a missing wheel, I was conscious of the difference in how I played. Looking back, that must also have been “practice”.
Some people wondered, HOW could I prepare for a big music exam on a broken instrument. I would say, Which Would Your Rather Have, The Ability… Or The Stuff? And I want the DOGS 😀That old piano and I knew each other intimately, there was no judgement. Y’know, unlike when Thor is just super relieved Mjolnir still thinks he is worthy to lift it. 😀 I wouldn’t want to learn to drive in a brand new expensive sports car either <shudder>…)
We will get a “real” piano soon enough, but the kids have practiced for several years on – yes, a crappy old thing HN once drew all over with marker, and which is kind of our warning sign that the rabbit is feeling particularly feisty. (He usually makes no sound. If we abruptly hear clashing keys we know he’s looking for action…) No he will not be allowed on the new piano, I’m not tha-at crazy. But by then we will all be well-trained. Fingers crossed 🙂
