BOOK ORIGINS
The notion to pursue a better understanding of talent and giftedness arose from a series of sparks. First, I became intrigued by the 1999 book Genius Explained by Michael Howe, which very forcefully took on myths of innate genius and argued that extraordinary abilities can be explained by life’s external events. It wasn’t entirely persuasive, but it did open my eyes—particularly Howe’s deconstruction of the powerful Mozart myth.
Second, during the writing of my previous book on the history of chess, I became intrigued by a number of studies and stories suggesting that even unimaginably great chess minds are constructed over time by emotional drive and extraordinary effort. When the young Alfred Binet studied the great European chess masters of the late nineteenth century (including my great-great-grandfather Samuel Rosenthal), he discovered that they did not—as everyone had assumed—have innately superior visual memories. In fact, their abilities sprouted directly from specific experiential memories that they had created over the years. Later, the Dutch psychologist (and master chess player) Adriaan de Groot, continuing Binet’s research, startled the cognitive world with the observation that great chess players also did not actually calculate significantly better or faster than lesser players, nor did they have better memories for raw data than other people. Extraordinary chess players were adept only at the particular skill of seeing chess patterns—the one skill they had spent many thousands of hours studying.
And boy, did they study. Part of the task of understanding high achievement includes a detailed appreciation of the intense and sustained regimen behind it. In that vein, I was struck by something chess columnist Tom Rose wrote about the young Norwegian player Magnus Carlsen. “He has become a fine player at a very young age. But is that because of exceptional innate talent for chess? Imagine yourself in young Magnus’s place. You play in your first tournament aged eight, do well, and get noticed by [a grandmaster] who decides to help teach you. Immediately you believe that you are special, that you have ‘talent,’ that you can really shine. This encourages you to work very hard at this game that gets you such agreeable attention … [M]ore tournament success and more media attention [encourage] you to work even harder. At first you work at it for 2 or 3 hours a day. By the time you are ten years old it is more like 4 or 5 hours a day.”
This led me to the recently developed science of talent, and to this remark from my near namesake David Shanks, a London psychologist:
Evidence for the contribution of talent over and above practice has proved extremely elusive … [In contrast] evidence is now emerging that exceptional performance in memory, chess, music, sports and other arenas can be fully accounted for on the basis of an age-old adage: practice makes perfect.
“Practice makes perfect” is a terrible phrase, and it invites the obvious question, what about all the people who practice a lot but don’t attain high achievement? That’s where the work of Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness comes in. Seeing their 1994 paper “Expert performance—its structure and acquisition” was a revelation. It opened me up to the world of researchers trying to determine precisely how people get good at stuff. There are different degrees of practice, it turns out, and many other elements that go into successful and unsuccessful training, studying, mentoring, etc.
The final spark came after The Immortal Game was published. A discussion with the writer Steven Johnson clarified some key issues; a second conversation with the writer Cathryn Jakobson Ramin prompted Ramin to send me a provocative editorial, “The Sky’s the Limit,” from the September 16, 2006, issue of New Scientist. That piece very succinctly suggested that maybe it was time for a wholesale reevaluation of the notion of talent and alerted me to the critical work of Carol Dweck on the questions of mind-set and motivation.
From there, I dug up and read through a truckload of journal articles and books, eventually realizing that I was bouncing between two very separate scientific worlds: the study of genetics and the study of talent/achievement. Each had undergone great transformations in recent years that scientists themselves were still struggling to articulate—with frankly very limited success. My ambitious goal became to try to somehow bridge these two worlds and to distill it all into a new lingua franca, adopting helpful new phrases and metaphors that scientists could share with teachers, journalists, politicians, and so on. And so the odyssey began …
INITIAL SOURCES
Binet, Alfred. Mnemonic Virtuosity: A Study of Chess Players, 1893. Translated by Marianne L. Simmel and Susan B. Barron. Journal Press, 1966.
de Groot, Adrianus Dingeman. Thought and Choice in Chess. Walter de Gruyter, 1978.
Elliot, Andrew J., and Carol S. Dweck, eds. Handbook of Competence and Motivation. Guilford Publications, 2005.
Ericsson, K. Anders, and Neil Charness. “Expert performance—its structure and acquisition.” American Psychologist 49, no. 8 (August 1994): 725–47.
Ericsson, K. Anders, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert R. Hoffman, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Howe, Michael. Genius Explained. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
New Scientist Editorial Board. “The Sky’s the Limit.” New Scientist, September 16, 2006.
Ridley, Matt. Nature via Nurture. HarperCollins, 2003.
Rose, Tom. “Can ‘old’ players improve all that much?” Published on the Chessville.com Web site.
Shanks, D. R. “Outstanding performers: created, not born? New results on nature vs. nurture.” Science Spectra 18 (1999).