The Genius in All of Us

What does "heritable" mean? (You won't believe it when I tell you.)

What does "heritable" mean, in the context of genetics? If you've casually followed genetics stories over the last few years, you've surely seen the term, and probably assumed that it refers to the extent to which a particular trait is genetically inherited.

For instance, here are a few recent uses in the New York Times:

"Studies of twins show that homosexuality, especially among men, is quite heritable, meaning there is a genetic component to it." (4/10/07)

"Since personality is heritable, this would be a mechanism for Yanomamo nature to evolve and become fiercer than usual." (3/12/06)

"A genetic analysis using tissue samples from 185 dolphins, 13 of them spongers, showed that it was highly unlikely that sponging was a heritable trait." (6/7/05)

So why does noted biologist and geneticist Tim Tully tell author Matt Ridley: "I can prove in a court of law that heritability has nothing to do with biology"?

And how is it that the heritability of the number-of-fingers on the human hand is close to zero?

And how can height be 90% heritable and yet subject to extraordinary influence from nutrition?

And how can I.Q. be 50-60% heritable in some well-designed studies and almost 0% in other, equally valid studies?

Welcome to the truly bizarre world of heritability and its misuses. If you're a non-scientist like me, you will be stunned to learn the word's actual definition, and its implications. In fact, a close look at how the term is misused by journalists and scientists alike goes a long way to helping us understand why the public still has such a profound misunderstanding of genetics and human development.

One thing is clear enough, to me anyway: the terms "heritable" and "heritability" should never, ever be used in a general interest publication without extensive context.

So -- here now the definition, from Merriam-Webster:

***
heritability: the proportion of observed variation in a particular trait (as height) that can be attributed to inherited genetic factors in contrast to environmental ones.
***

Let's break that down:

"the proportion"
-- a heritability estimate comes from a statistical analysis of a given population, not the results of a biological investigation (that, of course, doesn't mean it's invalid; but it does convey some important limitations); further, heritability can only be estimated, never actually known -- in fact, the "proportion" heritability seeks to estimate is ultimately unknowable, for reasons I will explain below;

"of observed variation"
-- heritability cannot actually look directly at what causes a trait (partly because every complex trait has multiple causes); it can only look at the amount of variation in that trait in a particular population. As Matt Ridley explains, heritability studies come from "measuring how similar identical twins are, how different fraternals are, and how both identicals and fraternals turn out if separately adopted into different families."

-- since the observed variation is going to differ from population to population, a heritability estimate is only relevant to the particular population studied. "It is strictly a property of a particular population," University of Arizona's Bruce Walsh explains. "Different populations, even if closely related, can have very different heritabilities."

    And, adds Matt Ridley, heritability is "meaningless for any individual person." This is critical to keep in mind.

"in a particular trait that can be attributed to inherited genetic factors in contrast to environmental ones."
-- What traits are we talking about? Not the basic Mendelian stuff like eye and skin color, obviously, but  the really complex stuff like sexuality, aspects of intelligence, personality factors, etc. How are those traits formed, to the best of our understanding? From an extremely complex combination of, and interaction between, genes and the environment. The actual equation used by behavioral geneticists is: V(p) = V(a) + V(d) + V(i) + V(e) + V(g X e) + COV(G,E). In layman's terms, there are four basic variables.

1. One or more separate genes, some of them interacting with one another (taking height, for example: hypothetically, you might inherit four different genes that help determine your height, two of whom are completely independent actors, and the other two which also have independent influence AND which will interact with one another to effectively produce a unique fifth genetic influence).

     plus

2. Environment (your in-utero and post-utero nutrition will have a direct and significant effect upon your adult height)

     plus

3. Gene-environment interactions (some of your nutritional experience will have a specific interaction with your particular genes -- with a *different* outcome than the interaction my genes might have with the exact same nutrition)

     plus

4. Gene-environment covariation (these are genetic influences on environment; for example, let's say from early on you are a particularly active baby, and as a result you get placed in a daycare group with other particularly active babies; that group happens to get a slightly different snack chosen by a different teacher, and that affects your nutrition, which effects your height. In effect, you have some non-height genes having had unexpected impact on your environment, which in turn is going to have an effect on your height. This indirect but very real phenomenon is called "covariation).

It actually gets more complex than that, but that's a fair summary. What this means, of course, is that for any such traits the nature vs. nurture paradigm simply DOES NOT EXIST. It's a false choice, like saying a meal either comes from the ingredients or the cook. Instead, the development process is continuously and inseparably nature-and-nurture.

If nature and nurture are inextricably intertwined, how can we determine what portion of a certain trait is due to genetics? We can't. We can only come up with crude averages from population studies. As a matter of biology, such a proportion does not exist. Which is why the Human Genome Project website calls heritability "a statistical construct," and warns: "heritability statements provide no basis for predictions about the expression of the trait in question in any given individual."

Heritability is not a useless measure, by any means. It has wide applications in genetics and agriculture. But in the context of conveying scientific understanding to a general audience, it is inherently misleading.

Executive function: critical and trainable

Scientific American's website reports on a new study demonstrating that IQ is far less relevant to math success than two specific brain skills -- working memory and inhibitory control, which are part of the suite of skills known as executive function.

Regular followers of this blog won't be surprised to learn that these skills are trainable. 

"It's often thought that kids don't do well because they're dumb, and there's nothing we can do about it," the site quotes Penn State professor and lead study author Clancy Blair. "But not only is executive function pivotal for academic success, it's amenable to training, and this training might make a big difference in a child's ability."

There's also a clear educational mandate here: "Preschool curricula that focus on development of these skills and self-regulation are needed in a big way," Blair says. "There is a federal push to learn our numbers, our letters and our words, but a focus on the content, without a focus on the skills required to use that content, will end up with children being left behind."

Kurt Vonnegut

The great Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday, and for a moment the earth stopped rotating. To me, he was an inspiration for his brutal honesty, intense skepticism and willingness to think and write utterly strange things. He seemed to be constantly in pursuit of a particular spectrum of truth that only he could see. When I reflect on the aspirations I have for my children, high on the list is that willingness to be brazenly your own self. If that isn't one of the key ingredients of greatness, I don't know what is.

I was fortunate to briefly visit with Vonnegut in his home almost 20 years ago, as I was just beginning my writing career. Here is the published interview that came out of it.

Is IQ actually AQ? (Mistaking Achievement for "Intelligence")

Have we been mistaking achievement for "intelligence"?

I've just gotten my hands on a copy of Andrew Elliott and Carol Dweck's mammoth Handbook of Competence and Motivation. Following the lead chapter from the editors is an utterly fascinating contribution from Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg, who, in just a few pages, seems to completely shatter the popular myth of I.Q. and intelligence testing. Being an academic text, the writing is a little dry; still, it may be the most important thing I've yet read on the subject.

According to I.Q. advocates and to popular understanding, intelligence tests are able to discern each individual's raw, natural intelligence -- which academic psychologists refer to as g for "general intelligence." So-called g is supposedly an innate, unchanging cluster of intellectual abilities that each of us simply possesses -- it is the hand we're dealt. This pure intelligence is not what we've learned, but simply how well our brains work. Furthermore, it seems to correlate so well with later job performance and life success, people have come to believe that each person has a specific amount of inherited intelligence that truly drives his/her level of success.

To reinforce the idea of pure intelligence tests, the testing community has gone to great efforts to distinguish between these so-called "ability tests," which reveal our innate intelligence, and "achievement tests," which examine the knowledge and skills we've been able to develop.

But what if those distinctions simply don't exist? What if every intelligence test measures a certain combination of skills and knowledge, revealing only what we've learned up to that point in our lives? And what if this correlation is more of a mirage than a true indication of cause-and-effect?

These are Sternberg's staggering -- and yet rational -- claims. "There is no qualitative distinction between various kinds of assessments," writes Sternberg. "The main thing that distinguishes ability tests from achievement tests is not the tests themselves, but rather how psychologists, educators, and others interpret the scores on these tests."

"Conventional tests of intelligence and related abilities," he says, "measure achievement."

Furthermore: "These skills develop as results of gene-environment covariation and interaction. If we wish to call them intelligence, that is certainly fine, so long as we recognize that what we are calling intelligence is a form of development competencies that can lead to expertise."  [We will discuss gene-environment covariation in another post].

In other words, it's not at all fine, because that is not at all how we use the word "intelligence." Intelligence is defined in the dictionary and in popular understanding as "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge" -- our natural ability. Distinct from knowledge and learned skills, it is what is built-in to our brains.

Sternberg argues that no current tests actually measure such built-in intelligence, and that intelligence testers are instead relying on a dangerous circular logic:

"Some intelligence theorists point to the stability of the alleged general (g) factor of human intelligence as evidence for the existence of some kind of stable and overriding structure of human intelligence. But . . . [w]ith different forms of schooling, g could be made either stronger or weaker. In effect, Western forms and related forms of schooling may, in part, create the g phenomenon by providing a kind of schooling that teaches in conjuction the various kinds of skills measure by tests of intellectual abilities."

In other words: we are teaching certain skills in our schools -- skills which do correlate reasonably well with Western job performance -- and then measuring how well kids learn these skill. Then we pretend that the results reveal a person's raw intelligence, when all they actually reveal is how well a child learned those skills. All we're really learning from intelligence tests is that some kids do better than others in school. We are not, as intelligence testers claim, uncovering the innate cause of these differences.

Is Sternberg saying there's no such thing as innate intelligence?
No. But he is saying that such intelligence is "not directly measurable," that it is not one general ability which can be scored, and that it is not inherently limiting. The evidence shows that skills and abilities are inextricably interwoven, and that all skills are modifiable. "The main constraint in achieving expertise is not some fixed prior level of capacity, but purposeful engagement involving direct instruction, active participation, role modeling, and reward."

What about the famous correlation between intelligence test scores on the one hand and job performance/life success on the other?
It's a mirage. The correlation does exist, says Sternberg, but not because one causes the other; rather, it's because they both measure the same abilities. Or as Sternberg puts it:
     "Such correlations represent no intrinsic relation between intelligence and other kinds of performance, but rather overlap in the kinds of competencies needed to perform well under difference kinds of circumstances. The greater the overlap in skills, in general, the higher the correlations."

Sternberg then points to a series of studies demonstrating that practical expertise does not correlate well with analytical ("intelligence") tests but do correlate very nicely with job performance and life success.
-- The Yup'ik Eskimo children of Alaska have "extremely impressive competencies and even expertise for surviving in a difficult environment, but because these skills are not ones valued by teachers" they tend to do very poorly in school. (Grigorenko et al, 2004).
-- In Brazil, street children who are extremely successful in running street businesses, and highly expert in math skills necessary for those affairs, do very poorly in abstract, pencil-and-paper math propblems. (Nunes, 1993 and 1994).
-- In Berkeley, California, there is "no correlation" between housewives' impressive abilities in comparison shopping math and scores on pencil-and-paper math tests. (Lave, 1989).

The essential point being that whatever our innate abilities -- which clearly exist but are still far from being understood and specified -- they do not limit us in a way that I.Q. scores imply. Ultimately, life success is a function not of inherent abilities, but of highly developed skills.

The nature and nurture of muscles

Some of the truly fascinating insights into talent and greatness emerge from the realm of human musculature -- how our skeletal muscles are initially formed, the attributes of different muscle fibers, and the different ways muscles can be transformed by activity and training. Reviewing the nature/nurture of muscles is also perhaps the best window into the dynamics of genetic expression. Here's an overview:

The human body contains three basic muscle types:
-- Smooth (involuntary muscles serving the digestive system, blood vessels, airways, etc.)
-- Cardiac (also involuntary; cardiac muscle is self-excitable and designed to function on its own)
-- Skeletal (all voluntary muscles, from eyes to fingers to toes).

   This overview concentrates on skeletal muscles -- the muscles we exert direct control over.

What are the basic components of skeletal muscle?
Each skeletal muscle is a bundle of thousands of specialized elongated cells called muscle fibers.

The fibers are fed by tiny, blood-filled capillaries, held together with various kinds of connective tissue, and fired ("innervated") by motor neurons -- one neuron firing 600 or so muscle fibers.

Each individual muscle fiber also contains a string of DNA-containing nuclei positioned just underneath and along the entire length of its membrane. The genetic material constantly instructs each fiber how to react *and adapt* to various circumstances.

 

 

There are two basic types of muscle fibers:
-- "Slow-twitch" (type I) fibers are designed to contract for long periods of time; packed with mitochondria, they are extremely efficient at converting oxygen to fuel.
----- These fibers enable us to jog, swim, bicycle, and other lengthy activities

-- "Fast-twitch" (type II) fibers contract rapidly and forcefully for a period of seconds, very quickly using voracious amounts of (anaerobic) energy, becoming spent and needing to rest and replenish.
----- These fibers enable us to sprint, jump, lift weights and other short-burst activities.

In musculature, we are not all created equal
Although on average, human beings have about a 50/50 mix of slow and fast-twitch muscle fibers, some are born with differing proportions.

"The 'average' healthy adult has roughly equal numbers of slow and fast fibers in, say, the quadriceps muscle in the thigh. But as a species, humans show great variation in this regard; we have encountered people with a slow fiber percentage as low as 19 percent and as high as 95 percent in the quadriceps muscle." (Anderson et al, 2000)

As anyone might logically expect from the above description of the fiber types, a higher proportion of one or another can offer certain potential advantages to highly-trained athletes. Elite marathon runners and cyclists benefit from a higher proportion of slow-twitch fibers, for example, while sprinters benefit from a higher proportion of fast-twitch fibers. (Anderson et al, 2000).

These genetic differences, however, must be put into careful context.
First, muscle fiber proportion is only one of many performance factors. On its own, it is not a good predictor of individual performance.

Second, muscles are tremendously adaptive to external stimulus, and are designed to be so. The muscles we are born with are merely default muscles -- ready and waiting to recreated in one or another particular direction by active use.

***

To understand how adaptation is literally built into our muscle DNA, let's look at all the things that happen as a result of training
At any given time, each muscle is adapted to a status quo of activity and exertion -- i.e., each muscle is exactly as big, strong and efficient as it needs to be. When pushed just beyond the ordinary level of exertion, a number of physiological changes begin to unfold:

1. Neural response.

"The first measurable effect is an increase in the neural drive stimulating muscle contraction. Within just a few days, an untrained individual can achieve measurable strength gains resulting from 'learning' to use the muscle." (NSMRC)

2. Genetic response makes muscle fibers more efficient.
In response to extended (aerobic) exercise -- e.g. jogging -- there is a genetic response in the nucleus of each cell fiber that makes it more efficient and enduring: increasing the number of mitochondria and provoking an increase in surrounding capillaries and the accumulation of fats and carbohydrates. (Wiki)

3. Genetic response makes muscle fibers become stronger and grow in size.
In response to overload/resistance exercise -- e.g. weight lifting -- the DNA responds with instructions that will lead to the strengthening and enlarging [hypertrophy] of each fiber.

"As the muscle continues to receive increased demands...upregulation appears to begin with the ubiquitous second messenger system (including phospholipases, protein kinase C, tyrosine kinase, and others). These, in turn, activate the family of immediate-early genes, including c-fos, c-jun and myc.  These genes appear to dictate the contractile protein gene response.
    "Finally, the message filters down to alter the pattern of protein expression. It can take as long as two months for actual hypertrophy to begin. The additional contractile proteins appear to be incorporated into existing myofibrils (the chains of sarcomeres within a muscle cell). ...These events appear to occur within each muscle fiber. That is, hypertrophy results primarily from the growth of each muscle cell, rather than an increase in the number of cells." (NSMRC)

4. When training is particularly intense and prolonged, slow-twitch muscle fibers can become transformed into fast-twitch fibers, and vice-versa.

"Adult skeletal muscle shows plasticity and can undergo conversion between different fiber types in response to exercise training or modulation of motoneuron activity." (Wang et al, 2004)

 

A detailed diagram of gene expression at work in muscle fibers:

 

Exercise, stretches and other muscle activity (LEFT) interacts with DNA in the nucleus (CENTER, circled in red), which in turns interacts with protein translators to effect changes on the cell and surrounding tissue (RIGHT).

(Source of graphic and detailed explanation of genetic transcription:  Rennie et al 2004.)

 

 

In summary

While evolution has given humans some variability in muscle types, the much more powerful product is its adaptivity. Muscles are designed to be rebuilt.

"The ability of striated muscle tissue to adapt to changes in activity or in working conditions is extremely high. In some ways it is comparable to the ability of the brain to learn." (Bottinelli and Reggiani, 2006)

Calling all born-genius legends

A friend recently asked me to explain the Ted Williams phenomenon. Perhaps the greatest baseball hitter of all time, Williams was famously endowed with unparalleled eyesight, astounding coordination and a "natural" swing.

 

It's a nice story, but as I've said before, when you look closer, these tales always turn out to be much more interesting. In his own 1969 autobiography, Williams wrote: "They used to write a lot of bull about my eyesight. How I could read license numbers on cars before another guy could see the license....Sure, I think I had good eyesight, maybe exceptional eyesight, but not superhuman eyesight. A lot of people have 20/10 vision. The reason I saw things was that I was so intense...it was discipline, not super eyesight."

A more recent Williams biography by Leigh Montville identifies Williams' obsession with improvement as his defining characteristic, and chronicles his over-the-top dedication to perfect his swing -- his "scientific" approach. Montville explicitly and painstakingly debunks the sportswriter-created legend of Williams' "natural" ability.

To me, learning these details makes Williams' feats even more spectacular. Built-in ability is nice, but acquired ability is inspirational.

Please send me your favorite born-genius story. I'd like to collect, and examine, all the best legends out there.

How to bake a Beethoven cake: Johann's recipe for musical genius

You've probably seen this old anti-abortion canard, popular among "right-to-life" activists:

"How would you advise a mother who is pregnant with her fifth child based on the following facts: Her husband has syphilis. She has tuberculosis. Their first child was born blind. Their second child died. Their third child was born deaf. Their fourth child had tuberculosis. Would you advise the mother for an abortion? Oops! If you said yes, you would have just killed the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven! We cannot know what God has in mind for every individual..."

Aside from hilariously having almost every biographical fact wrong (the writer above is 1 for 7 -- I will give a signed book for the first person to name the single correct fact), this pungent morality tale is riddled with logical and cultural fallacies. But my very favorite thing about the story is its faulty science: it rests on the assumption that geniuses are born pre-destined and self-contained, ready to unfold before our eyes.

The born-genius myth is a common one, easy and fun to write about it. But are we ready to confront the more nuanced truth? In his 2005 biography of Beethoven, Edmund Morris paints a sober portrait of a genius in slow, steady formation. His intensive training started early (before age 5), had dark psychological overtones, and reads almost like a recipe for extraordinary ability. Any modern researcher from today's study of expertise would recognize the elements immediately.

Ludwig's early training was ruthless and exhaustive, driven by his tyrannical father Johann who was disappointed in his own achievements.  Starting at age 4 or 5, Johann made his eldest son his special project, forcing him to practice constantly. "Neighbors of the Beethovens," Morris writes, "recall seeing a small boy 'standing on front of the clavier and weeping.' He was so short he had to climb a footstool to reach the keys. If he hesitated, his father beat him. When he was allowed off, it was only to have  a violin thrust into his hands, or musical theory drummed into his head. There were few days when he was not flogged, or locked up in the cellar. Johann also deprived him of sleep, waking him at midnight for more hours of practice."

Much like future tennis greats at today's Spartak training camp in Russia, tiny Beethoven was allowed aboslutely no artistic or performance freedom for several years. It was all about technique and discipline -- "the constant suppression of his [improvisational] fantasies by Johann ('More of your fooling around....I'll box your ears')," writes Morris. "Even on the violin, Ludwig's fingers could not help searching out new music. 'Now isn't that beautiful?' he would plead. The response was always, 'You are not to do that yet.'"

"Johann's insistence on his practicing by rote laid the foundations of a formidable technique. Over the next two years...he worked 'prodigiously' to develop [his] facility...Of his own accord, he took extra instruction from organists around town."

Did his god-given talent emerge immediately? Apparently not. More than three years into his training,
at around age 8, a schoolmate later recollected of Beethoven, "Not a sign was to be discovered...of that spark of genius which glowed so brilliantly in him afterwards."

At age 10, he outgrew his father's instruction, and moved up to a more capable mentor. At that point, he was exposed to Bach and taught how to compose variations on a theme. His first attempts were mechanical and uninteresting, later evolving into some awkward attempts at something new. When he was 12, his new mentor bragged in a magazine article that Ludwig had the potential to "become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to continue as he begun."

And so it went, steadily, persistently, passionately . . .

   

 

Savants and us (An FAQ)

The prodigious savant Daniel Tammet was just profiled on 60 Minutes, sparking a provocative email from my brainy and combative step-uncle Stan; he wants to know how savant syndrome fits into, or conflicts with, my developing understanding of talent.

Tammet is as rare as it gets: there are only 50 or so prodigious (truly exceptional) savants out there. But there are thousands more savants who are highly-impressive in one way or another, and as a group they can offer us enormous insight into the workings of the brain and the nature of intelligence.

The lessons are surprising. At first blush, one might assume that savants are proof that biology trumps effort: everyone's brain has a slightly different circuitry and will perform accordingly; savants are at one extreme end of the spectrum, with very strange wiring that confers amazing ability.

The truth is a lot more interesting. Here's a Savant FAQ, informed by the work of Darold Treffert, one of the world's leading savant authorities.

What is savant syndrome?
Savant syndrome is the presence of unusual intellectual and/or artistic abilities in otherwise impaired individuals. It is seen in an estimated 1 in 10 persons with autism, AND in roughly 1 in 1000 persons with other mental impairments, including developmental disability, mental retardation, and other central nervous system injuries or diseases. Savantism occurs in many more males than females -- a 6:1 ratio.

Is it always present from birth?
No, and that turns out to have very important implications. Says Treffert: "Savant syndrome can be congenital, or it can be acquired following brain injury or disease later in infancy, childhood, or adult life. Recent reports of savant-type abilities emerging in previously healthy elderly persons with fronto-temporal dementia are particularly intriguing."

What are the specific abilities displayed by savants?
As a rule, they are right-hemisphere skills: music, art, math, spatial dexterity and calendar calculation -- what Treffert calls an "intriguingly narrow range of special abilities" made possible by a spectacular deployment of mechanical, or concrete (also called "implicit") memory.

What's the underlying cause?
No current theory can account for all the cases of savant syndrome, but the most prominent theory that plausibly covers most cases is an injury to the left part of the brain (in the womb, infancy, childhood or adulthood) which sparks a dramatic compensation by the right brain.

--- Treffert elaborates: "Some savants, because of prenatal, perinatal or postnatal central nervous system damage, from a variety of genetic, injury or disease processes have substituted right brain capacity in a compensatory manner for left brain dysfunction and limitation. Simultaneously, because of those same injurious factors, these savants have come to rely on more primitive cortico-striatal (procedural or habit) memory rather than higher level cortico-limbic (semantic or declarative) memory. This combination of right brain skills coupled with procedural memory produces the constellation of abilities and traits that is savant syndrome."

But how can a brain injury give someone exceptional abilities?
We know from centuries of medical history, including the emergence of various medical oddities over the years, that certain components in every brain are equipped with incredible technical capabilities -- capabilities normally suppressed by other components so that the brain can do its main job, which is to balance out function and help a person lead a normal life. For example, in my book The Forgetting, I discuss the famous Russian patient S. who literally remembered every detail he came across in his entire life. He could recite verbatim conversations or random number lists decades after the fact. Sounds cool,bBut this was actually a huge liability -- remembering every detail makes it impossible to form intelligent summaries of details, which is the basis of all intelligent thought and communication. The ability to forget -- get rid of sensory detail -- turns out to be just as important in the brain as the ability to form new memories.

Similarly, savants become unhinged from the usual cerebral checks and balances. Treffert explains: "'Weak central coherence' theory (WCC) [is the ability/disability of] focusing on details rather than the whole....Not being distracted by more global patterns, the savant can focus on a single item or skill and perfect it." (He cites Frith & Happe, 1994).

Like a car spinning around and around because its steering wheel is stuck in the right-turn position, savants' severe brain injuries push them to focus all their time and energy away from the wide burden of social function and into one or more very narrow skills.

What are the lessons for normal functioning brains?
1. Savants don't have amazing abilities -- they acquire them.
Savant brain injuries, whether in the womb or much later on, don't instantly bestow people with amazing powers -- rather, they set loose normally restricted brain mechanisms which allow that person to hyper-focus on a certain skill set in a way that normal functioning minds cannot. Through their disability, they are able to develop amazing skill. As Daniel Coyle recently wrote in the NYT: "Savants' true expertise, the research suggests, is in their ability to practice obsessively, even when it doesn't look as if they're practicing."

2. We can acquire them too.
Although it's a far more cumbersome process, anyone with a normal functional brain can also develop advanced -- and even extraordinary -- skills. Ericsson, Dweck et al have shown some paths to get there, and Treffert argues that we may be able to develop further training methods based on what we're learning from savant brains. "Does some Rain Man ability — savant-like skill and capacity — exist in each of us?" posits Treffert. "Probably so. [The] more primitive memory circuitry, and right brain capacity, both still exist in each of us. However because of their inherent, utilitarian usefulness we have generally come to rely more heavily on left (dominant) hemisphere functions such as language, logical & sequential thinking, for example, than on right (non-dominant) hemisphere skills. Likewise in our day to day functioning we have come to generally use and depend upon semantic or declarative memory much more than using our more primitive, and less facile, procedural or habit memory capabilities. The question becomes then, is it possible to tap and use those still existent, but less frequently used, capacities and circuits, with some of their savant-like characteristics, in those of us more wedded to left brain capacity and higher level memory? ... ...I am convinced there is."

The Myelin in All of Us

This has been a terrific couple of weeks for anyone wanting to better understand talent -- several smart magazine and newspaper pieces have zeroed in on new, critical data. Daniel Coyle has a solid piece in yesterday's NYTimes Sports Magazine that nicely combines Anders Ericsson's work on "deliberate practice" with some very recent findings about myelin, the fatty insulation around nerve fibers that makes electrical nerve signals more efficient (Ishibashi et al, 2006; Fields, 2006).

Here's the connection:

It is now very well established that persons of great skill in any field have spent many years carefully honing their technique (this includes savants, who, by nature of their disability, are able to focus obsessively and persistently on math or music or art, effectively tuning out distractions). Why does high-level skill take so much time and steady effort to develop? It turns out that this slow, patient persistence is exactly what myelin needs to become a thicker and more efficient insulator. You can't rush that process. "In neurology, myelin is being seen as an epiphany," NIH's Douglas Fields told Coyle. "This is a new dimension that may help us understand a great deal about how the brain works, especially about how we gain skills."

Coyle also looks at the current epicenters of great sports training -- the Spartak tennis center in Russia, golfers in South Korea, baseball payers in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. The common thread, he observes, is an obsessive focus on technique. Each of these places are incubators for deliberate practice. Harnessing the competitive drive comes later (at Spartak, they don't allow students to compete in tournaments for at least three years).

***

Are some people born with more efficient myelin-boosters than others? Maybe so. Maybe, on top of the years and years of persistent development of technique, Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods and Nicolo Paganini also got lucky in the genetic lottery. But to anyone following the last few years of research, genetic differences seem less and less relevant. Here's why:

1. No one has actually found these much-vaunted genetic differences relating to skill and talent.  Maybe they're connected to intelligence, maybe persistence -- but we haven't actually found them yet. Meanwhile, Ericsson, Fields, Dweck, et al have exhaustively documented various external influences.

2. Regardless of what differences we're born with, evidence suggests that:
-- most people do not come remotely close to achieving their genetic potential (Ericsson, Ceci)
-- high-level achievement is simply impossible without hard work and persistence (Ericsson et al)

3. We know from Carol Dweck's definitive research that no one benefits from a mindset that relyies on their "natural" abilities. Students encouraged to rely on their natural gifts stagnate, as do poor-performing students told that they are limited by some disability. Conversely, students of every caliber perform better when they are encouraged to equate hard work with results.

Labels and limits

Maia Szalavitz has an interesting piece in yesterday's Washington Post about the national mania for diagnosing kids:

"Increasing numbers of children are given increasingly specific labels, ranging from psychiatric and neurological diagnoses such as Asperger's and attention-deficit disorder to educational descriptors including "gifted" and "learning disabled."

-- The main problem being that these labels tend to overwhelm parent, child and teacher with a fixed and false set of expectations. She cites Stanford's Carol Dweck, author Alissa Quart and psychiatrist Bruce Perry all insisting that abilities are not fixed.

"Recent research in neuroscience bolsters the idea that people can and do change. Says Perry: 'The brain is like a muscle: The areas that are used grow and improve while those which aren't, don't.'"

Kids diagnosed with a disability need to understand that there are no fixed limits on what they can achieve. "It's incumbent on parents," says Dweck, "to explain that 'Well, you may be wired a little differently; this might make it more difficult for you; you might have to work harder and use different strategies,' as opposed to 'This means you can't learn.' "

And at the other end of the spectrum, kids labeled as "gifted" need to understand that success will only come with effort and a willingness to take risks. "Children who believe in permanent traits like fixed intelligence," Dweck explains, "are actually vulnerable because when something goes wrong they think they don't deserve the label anymore."