But I disagree, what about learning faster by doing it wrong?
Practice makes perfect — or does it?
Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect
Zach
Hambrick has always been fascinated by exceptional performance, or what
he calls “the extremes of human capabilities.” Growing up, he’d devour Guinness World Records,
noting the feats it described and picturing himself proudly posing in
its pages. By the time he reached college, though, he’d moved on to a
new obsession: becoming a golf pro. “I was very serious about it,” he
told me. “I practiced religiously. It was very deliberate practice.”
Every day, for hours, he’d be out swinging and putting. He expected to
find himself on his way to glory. Except it didn’t quite
work out that way. Instead, young Zach was confronted with an
uncomfortable truth: “I just wasn’t very good.” He saw other students,
even kids around town—many of them, far less devoted and far less
driven—and many of them played a better game. When he tried out for the
college team, he didn’t even come close to making it. “I thought, What
is the deal here?”
This was
Hambrick’s introduction to an age-old debate: nature versus nurture,
genetics versus effort. We’ve been having it long before we knew what
DNA was. Right around the same time Gregor Mendel was messing about with
his famous peas, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, was positing
that genius tends to run in families. Take almost any enterprise and
find its most famous voices, he argued, and you’re led to family trees
of great accomplishment, much like his own. (He would take this notion
to an extreme with his eugenics program.) And, while that view hasn’t
survived in its extreme form, the basic question still guides modern
research—not nature versus nurture so much as just how much nature, and just how much nurture?
After
finishing college, Hambrick began graduate work in psychology at
Georgia Tech, with Timothy Salthouse, looking at aging and expertise in
older adults. Despite his failures at golf, Hambrick was still very much
of the belief that, given enough effort, you could reach excellence.
Maybe golf just hadn’t been the right thing for him. In 1996, when the
Olympics came to Atlanta, the students had to leave campus to make way
for the athletes and visitors, and Salthouse suggested that Hambrick
spend a few months at Florida State University. There, he ended up
working with Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology. A couple of
years earlier, Ericsson and Neil Charness had published
a provocative paper arguing that training and so-called deliberate
practice could describe performance differences that had been previously
ascribed to innate talent. “The traditional view of talent, which
concludes that successful individuals have special innate abilities and
basic capacities, is not consistent with the reviewed evidence,”
Ericsson and Charness wrote. “Differences between expert and less
accomplished performers reflect acquired knowledge and skills or
physiological adaptations effected by training, with the only confirmed
exception being height.” In other words, training was everything.
Hambrick could have become a world-class golfer with enough practice. Maybe he’d given up too soon.
It’s
a provocative argument, and one that Ericsson still espouses over two
decades later, having made a single modification to his list of
exceptions: body size joined height as one of only two areas with any
possible genetic influence. When we spoke recently, I presented him with
multiple papers from different labs, from studies on the heredity of
talent in twins to genetics papers on specific gene variants implicated
in performance. But he held firm to his argument. He told me he had yet
to encounter someone presenting him with evidence that anything other
than practice matters. (He did, in a later conversation, add that the
age at which one begins practicing can make a difference in someone’s
achievement level.) “I have no problem conceptually with this idea of
genetic differences,” he said when we first spoke, “but nothing I’ve
seen has convinced me this is actually the case. There’s compelling
evidence that if it’s length of bones, that cannot be explained by
training. We know you can’t influence diameter of bones. But that’s
really it.”
If that’s true, it
means that the sky is the limit, especially if you’re dealing with areas
other than athletics, where length of bones can offer no competitive
edge. Follow your dreams and, with enough training—an average of ten
thousand hours, as the famous formulation
goes—you can reach them, whether they involve golf or poetry. (It’s
important to note here that Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized Ericsson’s
work in his book “Outliers,” takes a much more nuanced position and has
argued
that practice isn’t sufficient. “I could play chess for 100 years and
I’ll never be a grandmaster,” he has written. “The point is simply that
natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made
manifest.”)
But
Hambrick obviously didn’t become a golf pro. And, if you look closely
at ten thousand hours as an average, rather than absolute, number, you
can start to see a problem with it. If, as shown even in Ericsson’s own
data, some people require fewer hours and some require more to reach an
identical point, doesn’t that imply that some individual difference other than
practice is at play? When I brought this issue up with Hambrick, he
noted that, in his introductory psychology course, some of the students
who study very little do better than the ones who study a lot.
So
I asked Ericsson if, given all the advances in genetics research and
all the work on the science of expertise and élite performance that has
taken place since his original formulation, he still believed in the
preëminent importance of training. Do natural, heritable abilities
really mean nothing? If, for instance, he himself could choose my
trainer and design the perfect training plan, could I become a
world-class pianist? (I chose this example since I played for many years
in my youth and easily have ten thousand hours in hand.) At first,
Ericsson demurred, refusing a straight yes-or-no answer in favor of
asking questions about my past. Why hadn’t I been better as a child?
Perhaps I wasn’t motivated? No, I assured him, I was. Perhaps my teacher
wasn’t qualified? No, I responded. She was a former professor at a
music conservatory in Russia. Maybe, I countered, I’m just not
particularly talented at piano. He refused to accept that, and
ultimately blamed my teacher. Clearly, she didn’t provide the right deliberate practice. I’d be in a different profession today if only she’d been better.
Hambrick
blames something else. That summer in Florida, in 1996, he and Ericsson
grew close. He remembers meeting often at Ericsson’s F.S.U. office,
going to his house to peruse his book collection, taking in F.S.U.
basketball games on later visits. “It was fantastic. Wonderful,
inspiring conversations,” he recalls. Together with one of Ericsson’s
own students, Len Hill, they decided to tackle the golf question
head-on. Hambrick spent weeks tracking down data for P.G.A. tour stats
and running analyses to determine how the pros reached their level of
success. The work continued when he returned to Atlanta, and even went
on into the first years of his professorship at Michigan State
University. But the analyses weren’t turning out quite as
expected—training was not explaining nearly as much as it should. So,
while the work languished in unpublished state, Hambrick began to focus
more and more on the other possible components of expert accomplishment.
Of course, training was important—but how important? “I started to ask,
Well, wait a second, can these strong claims about the primacy of
practice actually hold up—is there the evidence to back it up?” The more
he researched, the more he concluded that the answer was no. No matter
how much he had practiced as a teen-ager, he would never have reached
the P.G.A. tour. Of course, he’d known that all along, on some
level—after all, he quit golf. People do have natural ceilings to their
talent in any given area, and after a certain point their success arose
from things other than deliberate practice.
In one study,
for instance, Hambrick looked at pianists and measured their working
memory, or the ability to keep chunks of information in mind and
accessible for short periods of time. In the past, working-memory
capacity has been found to be heritable.
In his sample, it predicted success even when you accounted for the
effects of practice; pianists with better working memory were better at
sight reading—and increased practice did not alter the effect. When he looked back
to one of the most frequently studied groups in expertise research,
chess players, he found that, in addition to working or short-term
memory, three more components of cognitive ability—fluid reasoning,
comprehension knowledge, and processing speed, all abilities that are,
to some extent, heritable—were related to performance. This was
especially true of younger and less experienced players. If you’re
naturally better, you don’t have to practice quite as much to get good.
So how much did practice actually explain? In a 2014 meta-analysis
that looked specifically at the relationship between deliberate
practice and performance in music, games like chess, sports, education,
and other professions, Hambrick and his team found a relationship that
was even more complex than they had expected. For some things, like
games, practice explained about a quarter of variance in expertise. For
music and sports, the explanatory power accounted for about a fifth. But
for education and professions like computer science, military-aircraft
piloting, and sales, the effect ranged from small to tiny. For all of
these professions, you obviously need to practice, but natural abilities
matter more.
What’s more, the
explanatory power of practice fell even further when Hambrick took exact
level of expertise into account. In sports—one of the areas in
which deliberate practice seems to make the most difference—it turned out
that the more advanced the athlete, the less of a role practice plays.
Training an average athlete for a set number of hours yields far more
results than training an élite athlete, which, in turn, yields greater
results than training a super-élite athlete. Put differently, someone
like me is going to improve a great deal with even a few hundred hours
of training. But within an Olympic team tiny differences in performance
are unlikely to be the result of training: these athletes train
together, with the same coach, day in and day out. Those milliseconds
come from somewhere else. Some may be due to the fact that genetic
differences can account for some of the response to training. At
Stanford’s ELITE study, which looks at the most
accomplished athletes in the world, Euan Ashley, a professor of medicine
and genetics, is studying how an Olympian’s body may respond
differently to a given training regimen.
Some changes are due to genetic variants that may affect blood
transport or oxygen uptake or fat metabolism, or any other number of
factors. Some are due to sheer luck—How much sleep did you get? How are
you feeling? And some, of course, are due to hours of training. But at
the top of the top of the top, the power of additional training falls
off sharply.
So
where else, exactly, do performance differences come from? While
Hambrick’s work has been focussed more explicitly on practice and
genetics, David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt
University, has been approaching the question from a slightly different
angle: through what’s called the Study of Mathematically Precocious
Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of the lives of
students who, by the age of thirteen, had scored in the top one per cent
of mathematical-reasoning ability and were then selected to take part
in an enriched educational environment. (The study, co-directed for many
years by Lubinski and his wife, Vanderbilt’s education-school dean,
Camilla Benbow, was described in detail in a recent article in Nature.)
It’s a crucial supplement to work like Hambrick’s; the data you get
from close observation of the same sample and the same individuals over
time can answer questions other approaches can’t. “What kinds of
practice are more effective? What approaches more effective for some
people than others?” Hambrick asks. “We need all the pieces to the
puzzle to maximize people’s potential. Lubinski’s work on mathematically
precocious youth is an essential piece.”
Now, more than four decades since the SMPY observation began, we are beginning to see some answers. Perhaps not surprisingly, kids in both the SMPY sample and an unrelated cohort
of talented students identified by Duke University excel at measures
like academic accomplishment, patents, publications, academic tenure,
and organizational leadership. They reach full professorship and C.E.O.
status at rates far above any population norm. They were selected on
nothing more than measurable intellectual promise, and here they are.
That
is not the whole story, though, as Lubinski points out. To him, the
interesting finding is the striking range of abilities within this élite
sample. “Individual differences in the top one per cent matter,”
Lubinski told me. “People think of the top one per cent, whether in I.Q.
or reasoning or what have you, as categorical. But that top contains
one-third of the ability range you see in other samples. There is a huge
amount of psychological diversity among the gifted.” Some accomplish a
lot, but some, even with all their promise, end up indistinguishable
from their initially less gifted counterparts. Genes give everyone a
possible peak, but whether you reach that peak depends on a
constellation of other factors.
Part
of the difference in accomplishment, it turns out, really is due to
practice, just like Ericsson argues. “What separates intellectually
talented kids from their intellectual peers when it comes to actual
creative advances? A lot of it is how much people are willing to work,”
Lubinski told me. Some people are gifted, or “intellectually talented,”
as he prefers to refer to them, but don’t want to work forty hours a
week, while some want to work more than sixty hours. “That has huge
implications. Chance always favors the prepared mind.” Practice, work
ethic: differences that aren’t apparent at age thirteen will, in their
presence or absence, become magnified by the time you hit your forties
or fifties. (As it turns out, though, even work ethic may be heritable.
Hambrick has recently published a study
on the heritability of practice, using eight hundred pairs of twins.
“Practice is actually heritable. There have now been two reports of
this—ours, and one using ten thousand twins. And practice is substantially heritable.”)
Also
crucially important is one of the first things that critics of studies
like this point out: environment. These kids aren’t just identified
young; they are then nurtured in a way others are not. How much of their
success lies in opportunity? It’s a question Lubinski and Benbow have
studied in some detail. In three educational–intervention
studies, they have demonstrated that, if you compare intellectually
talented children who have had the sorts of developmental opportunities
the SMPY affords, they end up doing better in terms of
measurable intellectual achievements like number of patents and
publications than their intellectual peers—individuals matched on
general intellectual ability—who have not had that enriched experience.
Opportunity
must be there. Genes are great, but they need to have the right
environment in which to flourish. You don’t just give birth to a
“genius,” whether an academic or an athletic or an artistic one. You
also give her the right environment, train her, encourage her, support
her, challenge her, respond to her individuality. And who knows what
else may ultimately matter. “All the abilities we assess, we still miss
things,” Lubinski points out. Lewis Terman, the intellectual forefather
of giftedness studies, famously missed two Nobel laureates in his
selection. They were cut from the initial samples for not being gifted
enough and never had a chance to take part in his study. “You’re tapping
potential, but there’s also passion, commitment to work, people who
want to do any one thing. People really vary. The diversity of human
individuality is breathtaking.”
That
diversity originates in our genetic code. But it becomes infinitely
more complex as you add life into the mix. We cannot predict with
accuracy who will become élite in a given field, but we know that genes
and environment matter and that we all have different natural peaks that
we can reach through application and training. Saying that training is
everything may be tempting, but it’s wrong. “One of the criticisms
people direct at us is that we’re killing people’s dreams,” Hambrick
says. “But I think in fact it’s the contrary: the more we can know about
the origins of expertise, including training but everything else, the
more we can help people be their best selves.” Perhaps it’s just enough
to know that no matter how many hours I spend in the pool, I won’t be
Katie Ledecky. And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to become Brad Mehldau, either, even if I get a better teacher.
No comments:
Post a Comment