April 7, 2022 • 35 mins
Is elite performance just a matter of how much and how well you practice? I interview a man known as the expert on experts, Dr Anders Ericsson and discuss the controversy surrounding Deliberate Practice. Learn about how we learn in this episode of Prodigy.
This is Part 2 of a re-release of the first 3 Prodigy episodes. They are meant to be listened to together as they cover the argument of nature vs nurture as related to performance.
Created, produced and hosted by Lowell Brillante
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Prodigy is a production of I Heart Radio. World records
are humanity's scoreboard. They're broken every single day by people
who pushed themselves further than any human being before them.
Could I break a world record if I practiced enough.
(00:25):
The most push ups I've ever done is sixty. The
world record is ten thousand and seven. In grade school,
I memorized thirty digits of pie. The record is over
sixty thousand. Can anyone achieve anything if you try hard enough.
(00:48):
My name is Lowell Brillante and this is Prodigy. Dr
Anders Ericsson spent his entire adult life studying elite performance.
He's referred to as the expert on experts Anders or
(01:12):
anders the way it's pronounced in Swedeness on this. But
you know, unless you're born in Sweden, that's hard, So
pretty much any anything is fine. Ericson's name might not
be familiar to you, but his research probably is. It's
been cited over eleven thousand times. I learned about him
from the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and I guess
(01:34):
one of the questions that we were interested in was
the role of practice and sort of determining who would
be very successful as a violinist, Gladwell wrote that ten
thou is the magic number of hours it takes to
master something. He came to this number from Ericson's study
of classical musicians, which showed a direct correlation between the
(01:59):
amount of prac disand achievement. And we found that sort
of the most successful violinists actually had practice more during
their development than those in the same program who were
not as successful. Basically in the music competitions. Ericson's abstract said,
(02:19):
many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually
the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of
ten years. Basically, finding now an interesting rank ordering here
of the amount of practice yet engaged in and basically
your success as a sort of an adult. There has
(02:41):
been some controversy about what Rickson called deliberate practice, and
we'll get into that suit, but let's start at the beginning.
Sixty years ago, a Harvard psychologist published what became one
of the most cited papers inside coology. It was about
(03:01):
cognitive limitation, specifically related to memory span. Memory span is
the max amount of items like digits in a phone number,
that one can repeat back immediately. You might know it
as short term memory. The items were read out loud
to a subject at the speed of one per second.
The list had to be recalled in the correct order
(03:23):
and accomplished at least fifty of the time. The study
showed that the average memory span for adults is seven items.
I tested this on myself and I can usually recall
seven digits, but not eight. If you want to test
your memory span, visit Prodigy podcast dot com slash memory.
Here's a list of seven digits seven zero four, one, nine,
(03:50):
eight five. It's difficult to hold those individual numbers in
your working memory, but it's much easier if you use
a mechanism called chunking. Chunking is the process of breaking
down a data set and grouping the pieces together into
meaningful chunks. For the seven digits I just read, I
would group them into two chunks seven zero four, And
(04:16):
those chunks make sense to me because it's my hometown
area code in the year I was born. As you
can probably guess, chunks are based on an individual's perception
and past experiences. A different person might chunk them as
seventy four nineteen and here's Dr Scott Berry Kaufman. Chunking
(04:37):
is a Terman in the expertise literature, where once you
get lots of complex information and you start looking at
them as a little smaller patterns, you can really quite
quickly appear quick and smart and talented in very specific
forms of expertise. So seven items was understood to be
the average memory span. More than thirty years later, a
(04:58):
young postdoctoral researcher by the name of Dr Carl Anders
Erickson developed a study to determine if memory span could
be improved. Their subject's name was Steve Faloon, who was
a cross country runner at Carnegie Mellon University. Ericson would
read him random digits at a rate of one per second,
which is too fast to store in long term memory.
(05:20):
If Steve recalled them correctly, then Ericson would add a digit.
If he made an error, then Ericson would subtract one.
He initially did what a lot of people would do
with phone numbers, you know, you would just kind of
repeat them in your head, maybe grouping them, but basically
that's all you were doing. And he just found that
when he did that, he pretty much plateaued. After several sessions,
(05:42):
Steve didn't improve and became discouraged, but then there was
a breakthrough, and then he realized that if he concentrated
on the first three digits and thought of them as
a running time, he was basically a cross country runner.
He could actually think of those numbers in a meaningful way,
and then once he got further into the sequence, he
(06:06):
could then maybe even do another group of three and
interpret that with some meaningful associations. That session, Steve was
able to recall eleven digits for the first time, but
it didn't stop there. What he did was to build
like a hierarchy where he kind of had running times
a different place than the space typically as three of
(06:30):
them organized hierarchically, Steve was learning to chunk chunks. Three
weeks later, he was able to recall twenty digits. After
a hundred hours of training, he was able to recall forty,
which at the time was the most ever, and by
the end of the study he could recall a random
string of eighty two digits. These were groundbreaking results. Now
(06:54):
Ericson needed to repeat it. He began again with the
second subject, but she ended up quitting. She did something
quite different, so she actually tried to identify numbers and
then make it like a little meaningful story about the numbers.
Oh six, that would be a six year old, so
she kind of would generate these little stories or scenarios.
(07:19):
We argue that that type of strategy it's just not
useful or possible to keep improving. She was able to do,
I guess at least twenty digits, so it's pretty impressive. Nonetheless,
Steve recruited his teammate Dario Donna Telly and taught him
his method. Dario spent over five years in the study
(07:41):
and at his peak, was able to recall an incredible
one d and thirteen digits. Practice is about building mental
representations that formed the connections in or between chunks. In
the book, peak Ericson defines mental representations as a structure
that corresponds to an object, idea, or collection of information.
(08:05):
Grand Master chess players can memorize the positions of every
piece in a game with just a quick glance. They
can even play a game without ever looking at the board,
and not just one. Some can play multiple games at
the same time without seeing the board. The current record
for simultaneous games played blindfolded is forty eight with thirty
(08:28):
five wins, seven draws, and six losses. Forty eight games
of chess, I can't even remember eight numbers. Everyone assumed
these grand masters had photographic memories until a study was
done where researchers showed them a chessboard where the pieces
were arranged in a way that couldn't naturally occur in
(08:48):
a game of chess. Now the grand masters barely outperformed
the average person. Through thousands of hours of practice, grand
master chess players build up mental representations for the aagement
of pieces on the board. I wanted to know what
is physically happening when we code these patterns into our
long term memory. Our body, including our nervous system, is
(09:12):
engineered to kind of respond to challenges. For example, if
we take something like a long distance running, the first
two or three weeks, when you actually are starting now
to run, the neurons in your legs are actually coordinating
their activity. If you actually go beyond three weeks, you
(09:32):
can actually see that capillaries are growing because you now
have such an effective way of using up muscular energy.
You now have a depletion of oxygen and other things,
and that depleted state will now stimulate the growth of capillaries,
and with even more training, you will actually increase the heart,
(09:56):
so it will actually be able to pump more blood,
and so your arteries will be growing. And what's interesting
is that if you for some reason stop training, most
of these changes will actually go back towards the normal
state that you started out before training. Most people have
experienced these types of physical effects on their body, But
(10:18):
what about an area that's harder to recognize, like the brain.
There's numerous different ways in which the brain can actually change,
and one of the most noted ones is that you
can kind of grow milent around certain nerve fibers, and
that actually allows you enough to speed up processing by
(10:39):
an order of magnitude. There's also you can grow synapses.
You know, the brain is such incredibly complex that people
are still working on trying to come up with ways
of measuring and quantifying. I mean, we're talking about trillion
different nerve cells. The brain is wired with nerve cell axins.
(11:03):
Myelin insulates the wires and helps increase the rate at
which electrical impulses are transmitted. One of the books based
on Ericson's research is The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.
In the Ted Talk, Coyle actually called the idea of
people being born with talent the greatest story ever told,
(11:24):
and he called it that because it had magic babies
in it. It's the greatest story ever because it has
magical babies in it. Is there a better story anywhere?
Coil quite literally referred to genetic predisposition as magic. He
wrote on his website his opinion of genes quote they matter,
(11:46):
but not nearly as much as we think. Scientists have
sequenced the human genome, but they can't locate the genes
for musical talent, or math, or art or sports, mostly
because genes don't work that way. And here's what Dan
Coyle believes is the science behind skill acquisition. Quote. To
put it in construction terms, genes are the blueprint for
(12:09):
our bodies, but the skill circuits that allow those bodies
to perform complex skills are built through deep practice. Coil
suggests that what he calls deep practice causes new nerve
cells to fire, which increases myelin and establishes a strong
skill circuit. I asked Dr Brooke McNamara, what is happening
(12:33):
in the brain when we learn She's a professor at
Case Western Reserve University, where she investigates complex human performance.
She got her PhD from Princeton on the subject. So
I figured she might be a better source than journalist
Dan Coile. That is a great question. That is something
that we're still figuring out. Really, it's a bit more
(12:55):
on the theory side at this point. There's some theories
that say that a new neural traces put down whenever
you experience a new stimuli, and then when you experience
that same stimuli again, you either sort of try to
figure it out how you did the first time, where
you go back to that neural trace, and either some
theories say the neural traces strengthened. There's other theories that
(13:17):
say a new neural traces laid down, and eventually, based
on the strength of the neural traces or the strength
of multiple neural traces, you begin to recognize that stimuli.
You don't have to try to figure it out. You go, oh, right,
I remember that, and I know the response to it,
so you start recalling it directly from memory. But even
that depends on the stimuli. So those types of theories
(13:40):
seem to hold for verbal tasks and mathematical tasks, but
they don't seem to hold for dynamic spatial tasks like
returning a servant tennis, and so we don't actually even
know exactly what's going on in the brain there. So
there's there's lots of both neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive
psychology left on the table for people to discover more
(14:02):
about how the brain works. The brain is incredibly complex
and difficult to study. We do have some methods, but
they're relatively rudimentary. Here is psychiatrist and nuclear medicine specialist
Dr Rob Tarswell. He uses radioactive tracers to study activity
in the brain. It's just something that with our current
(14:23):
state of science and technology, is pretty difficult to see. Right.
So the kind of imaging I'm working at is at
about four to six millimeter scale. Within a four to
six millimeter cube, there's about eight million neurons. So in
a sense, we're trying to figure out whether Joe Biden
(14:45):
or Donald Trump is going to win the election by
watching voters in lines from satellites in orbit. It tells
you something, but it's not drilling down fine enough to
give you the kind of information you really need. For
some reason, Dr McNamara and Dr Tarswell didn't know that
(15:06):
Coyle had all this figured out eleven years ago when
his book was published. I didn't have the heart to
tell them, but joking aside. Dan Coyle is an environmentalist
who clumsily rebranded Ericson's theory of deliberate practice to sell books.
All right, we're going to dive into deliberate practice and
(15:27):
the rule right after this quick break. Welcome back to Prodigy.
You can find source material and test your memory spam
at prodigy podcast dot com. All right, back to the show. So,
now that we've covered how practice improves ability, let's look
at Ericson's research, which altered the perception of expert performance.
(15:49):
In his Ericson denied that innate talent determined the level
of one's performance. I'm going to paraphrase a quote from
the paper that described the belief. We agree that expert
performers have abilities outside the range of normal adults. However,
we deny that these differences are due to genetic talent.
(16:10):
Only a few exceptions, like height, are genetically prescribed. We
argue that the difference between expert and normal performers is
a lifelong period of deliberate effort to improve in a domain.
Ericson's data showed that the only determining factor of expert
performance is the amount of time spent practicing, but not
(16:31):
just any type of practice, A specific type he referred
to as deliberate practice. In Malcolm Gladwell's best selling book
titled Outliers, The Story of Success, he defines practice as
purposefully and single mindedly playing their instruments to get better.
Gladwell then describes the Beatles playing hundreds of shows in
(16:53):
Hamburg as a reason why they became so good. But
this example doesn't fit the definition of deliberate practice. Ericson
describes three types of activities, work, play, and deliberate practice.
Work includes public performances and other activities motivated by external rewards.
(17:13):
Play has no explicit goal and is enjoyable. Deliberate practice
is activities specifically designed to improve performance. So, according to Ericsson,
Gladwell's example of the Beatles would be defined as work.
The reason that Erikson made the distinction is because during
a show, your focus is on performing at your highest level,
(17:35):
while deliberate practice is focused on increasing your highest level.
If you want to dunk a basketball, I think most
people would think, well, you know, I'm just gonna keep
trying to get a higher jump it's well known now
that there are other ways in which you can actually
improve your jumping ability so much more than actually just
(17:57):
trying to dunk. So, for example, one thing is weightlifting.
So if you basically look at the stimulation of your
legs when you're actually lifting your weight, that is so
much more intense than the stimulation that you get from
actually trying to jump towards the hoop, and you know,
(18:18):
reach a higher level. Another thing that's been demonstrated to
also be far superior to just doing the thing is
jumping from a height. So if you're basically standing on
a table and then you jump down, the stimulation that
you get on your legs when they have to absorb
your body weight is actually much more intense and therefore
(18:42):
will lead to the development and the strengthening of your
legs in a much more effective way than trying to
jump up towards the hoop. He also said that it
should include a coach to provide feedback and design the training.
Whether or not it must include a coach wasn't clear,
which brings me to Dr Hambrick. Here's a clip from
(19:04):
one of his lectures andres Erickson has argued that expert
performance largely, if not entirely, reflects a long period of
engaging in what he calls deliberate practice. In two thousand thirteen,
researchers Hambrick, McNamara, and Oswald published a meta analysis of
(19:24):
deliberate practice. A meta analysis examines multiple scientific studies that
address the same question, in this case, how effective is
deliberate practice. Since they include more data than a single study,
they're expected to be more accurate. So meta analysis takes
all relevant studies or data sets and synthesizes across them
(19:48):
looking for patterns. That's Dr Brooke McNamara again, she works
with Dr Hambrick a lot. With any one study, you
could find any effect. I might find some thing, but
unless I replicate it, I can't be too confident in
that result. It's interesting, and I'll probably put it forth,
(20:08):
but until I get some confirmation of that, I don't
know if it just happened to be those people that
I sampled that seemed to give that effect. So either
through replication, especially if you have multiple replications, or if
you have a meta analysis, so instead of that one
study that gives me this one result, if I have
twenty studies, then I can see, well, how many of
(20:30):
these twenty studies give me the same result. They agreed
that practice is critical and accurately predicts how much an
individual person improves. We were in complete agreement on the
importance of training. I mean we aren't literally born as experts.
You have to acquire skill and knowledge. They determined that
deliberate practice is not as important as ericson claimed. They
(20:53):
weren't saying that deliberate practice doesn't matter. It's necessary for
improving your skill. However, they on that it wasn't a
major factor in explaining the skill differences between people. So
the more you practice, the better you'll be, but that
doesn't guarantee you'll be better than someone else who has
practiced less. Here's another clip from Hamburg lecture. There's no
(21:17):
reason to think that healthy person will not benefit from
delivered practice, but people vary widely in the amount of
delivered practice it takes them to reach a given level
of skill. This is a study done in Buenos Areas
by my colleague Jerimo camp Telli. He recruited nine players
from the Buenos Areas Chess Club and the finding was
(21:40):
that number one practice in chess rating correlated point four two.
That's not trivial. Nothing to see that, but there's still
a massive amount of aariability in the amount of delivered
practice it took the players to reach a given a
level of skill master status. We see a large amount
of aiabile within skill level of some never reached master
(22:04):
level despite overs of delivered practice. This is like me
trying to get too scratching Captain Golf. The results of
the meta analysis showed that deliberate practice contributed to a
four difference in performance. This differed by domain, though, so
deliberate practice contributed to difference in games, but just one
(22:26):
for professions. Ericson said that performance was one related to
the amount of deliberate practice spent. What was the cause
for such a wide discrepancy in findings? Their definition of
basically the studies of practice that they included really failed
to meet those standards that we were pointing out of
(22:47):
actually having training activities where you get immediate feedback so
you can actually monitor how you get better. So, for example,
they included one estimate of having adolescens watch sport on television.
I think that's fundamentally different. So Ericson said they didn't
use the correct criteria for choosing studies. Let's look at
(23:08):
the description in the meta analysis. They define it as
quote engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance
in a domain. So those activities are very different from
the way we define deliberate practice. There's not a teacher
who is actually assessing a given individual and then posing
(23:30):
here appropriate training activities that would allow that individual to
improve from the current performance. And they included times like,
for example, scrimmaging where you know, you just had the
team split up into two groups and then playing against
each other. Again, that's very, very far from the criteria
(23:51):
that we established. So the meta analysis included studies that
didn't meet Ericson's definition of deliberate practice. I asked Dr
Hambrick what criteria they used. There were a number of criteria,
but the main one was that the studies reported a
measure of performance in a domain and a measure interpretable
(24:11):
as deliberate practice. And what is deliberate practice? Well, this was,
at least to us, it was unclear in terms of specifics.
One thing that a consistent point that Derricksson's colleagues made
all along was that it's an activity that's been designed
to elevate performance. There were elements of a definition where
(24:33):
we saw inconsistencies in his writings, for example, whether or
not a coach or teachers required, whether it can be grouped,
or whether it can be individual. And so we cast
a wide net and used a broad definition of deliberate practice.
That was one of the reasons that we made all
our data available, so that people could reanalyze our data
(24:57):
using their own definition or what they believed to be
the correct definition. Ericson took that available data and reanalyzed
it according to his definition of deliberate practice. And when
we selected now these studies that met these criteria, we
found substantially higher estimates than they did. Why would an
(25:19):
intelligent person like Hambric misinterpret the definition at the beginning
and then pretty recently in his colleagues did emphasize the
importance of having a coach at other times said that
deliberate practice could be designed by the performers themselves. Hambrike
and colleagues released an article in August explaining the source
(25:40):
of the confusion quote. Ericson and colleagues have been inconsistent
on critical elements of the definition of deliberate practice, and
consequently it has been unclear what activities do and do
not qualify as deliberate practice. Hambric then provides a timeline
over the course of twenty seven years where Erickson is
(26:01):
given three different definitions of deliberate practice regarding who designs
the training program one the teacher alone, two typically the teacher,
and three the teacher or performers themselves. Hambrig's issue is
not with the evolution of the definition. He states that
revising a theory as new evidence is accumulated is not
(26:25):
only normal, it's expected, but the revisions must be explained
so they can be evaluated. If the revisions are not transparent,
then they can be altered in order to stay relevant.
This is what's referred to as post hawk interpretation of data. Sadly,
we'll hear no response. The day after our interview, Dr
(26:47):
Carl Anders Erickson passed from heart complications. It is really
difficult to overstate the influence that he had on the
field of expertise. I mean, his ideas and his perspective
shaped the trajectory of research on expertise for decades, and
(27:08):
it inspired a whole generation of researchers. Ericson helped to
find the optimal way to improve skills. His research was
so groundbreaking that it transformed our understanding of potential. Transformation
of a field is the metric that psychologists used to
define a genius, Andres was a genius and a genuinely
(27:30):
good person. I love people to raise difficult questions because
I think that's a little bit the way I view
purposeful practice for scientists is the more that you can
find the best, most challenging questions that allows you to
get ahead, start thinking about things and hopefully being able
(27:52):
to understand them better. He was such an engaging person
to be around. I remember going in the first time
in the Honors office and it was just filled with
papers and books, as if they had been just kind
of shoveled in there. He uh was just really warm
and friendly. And of course, as you may know, I
(28:13):
did work critiquing his perspective, but that's what academics do.
But I have very fond memories of him. He had
a great sense of humor and was a voracious reader.
He would go to conferences and he would take a trunk.
He would fill the trunk full of books and ship
(28:34):
it back to his home. And speaking of his home,
he had a library in his home full on library
with stacks like rose and it was pretty cool cool
to see that. It was really obvious how much Hamburg
respected Ericson and valued his contribution to the field. I've
(28:57):
been critical of it is what happens in a scholarly area,
but he forced me to think carefully about my perspective
and to try to put my best case forward. His
influence has been on the field has been profound, and
he's certainly had a huge influence on my own work.
(29:18):
I've spent a lot of time, you know, thinking about
his work and critically examining yet in assumptions about the
origins of expertise, and it's I have to say, it's
just it's really weird to think about him no longer
being around. But his ideas, of course, we'll will live
on and they'll continue to inspire debate in scholarship and
(29:44):
move us ever closer towards a full understanding of of
expertise and expert performance. In two thousand, a study was
published proving the existence of extrasensory perception, also known as
ees P. We'll explore that after a quick break. Welcome
(30:05):
back to Prodigy. Pam Peacock is the talented designer of
our cover art. You can see more of her work
on Instagram at the Voyager Peacock. All right back to
the show. The issue with the definition of deliberate practice
is fairly common. Social sciences have been suffering from something
known as the replication crisis. Researchers found that many studies
(30:26):
are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Here's Dr McNamara. It
began with a study on ESP that got published, and
this outraged a number of psychologists, thinking what what have
we come to when we know that this can't exist.
In two thousand eleven, Darryl Bem published the results of
a ten year study on extrasensory perception. The data seemingly
(30:50):
showed that time flowed in two directions, allowing people insight
into the future. Them's research appeared to be done correctly,
but his peers knew that EESP couldn't exist, or if
it could, then that the evidence should be really strong.
And you read this paper and you realize that that
it's not and that there's problems with it, and that
(31:11):
surely if any other psychologists tried to conduct this experiment
they would not find significant effects. So this led people
to start really thinking about replication and how many of
the effects that we see in the published literature maybe
aren't real. So how can we avoid confusion like this
moving forward? We want to see larger samples, We want
(31:33):
to see rigorous methods. Something else that has really changed
the landscape quite a bit is pre registrations. Pre registration
is submitting a document explaining what research they plan to
do and how. So we know from medicine that things
changed a lot in the year two thousand. This is
when it became required for any clinical trial to be preregistered,
(31:56):
and all of a sudden, from that date forward, the
way fewer successful attempts at a new drug or a
new clinical trial. So you know what I want to
be treated by a doctor using a study before two
thousand or after two thousand, The answer is probably after
two thousand. How it used to be was that if
there was no preregistered plan, people would treat the data
(32:19):
however could get them an effect. But now if it's
documented how you're going to do it, then you can
actually confirm hypotheses as opposed to just try and to
find something from the data. If deliberate practice is not
the primary predictor of expert performance, then what is Hambric
and McNamara propose something called the multi factorial model. We
(32:42):
can't rely on the single cause fallacy That practice, however
it's defined, can't fully account for individual differences and performance.
In fact, it doesn't even account for the majority of it.
The single cause fallacy occurs when it is assumed that
there is a single sim will explanation for an outcome,
when in reality it's a combination of factors. There really
(33:05):
needs to be a broader picture taken into account multiple
factors to begin to explain human performance in a real way.
One question I've really been wanting the answer to is
where does the motivation to spend thousands of hours on
a single domain come from? Heritability of lifetime hours of
music practice was on average about now in the expertise literature,
(33:30):
this is kind of a hit scratcher. Who cause weight?
You know? How could how con tract just be heritable? Right?
That doesn't compute. It's a purely environmental variable. But this
is readily explained in terms of the concept of gene
environment correlation. This gene environment correlation is extremely interesting. Next episode,
we're going to dig into the details of that and
(33:52):
a whole lot more. I have so many questions to
answer and a ton of really interesting topics to cover.
Thank you so much for listening, and please subscribe to
the show because they'll be back next week with another
episode of Prodigy. Prodigy was created and produced by me
Low Berlante. I'm very fortunate to have the brilliant former
(34:13):
Magic Baby Tyler Klang as my executive producer. If you
want to measure the quantity of your miele in, then
take the memory test at Prodigy podcast dot com. Dr
Andres Erickson was the expert on Experts and will be
sorely missed. Dr David Hambrick runs the Expertise Lab at
Michigan State, which focuses on the origins of skill. You
(34:34):
can find more information at Science of Expertise dot com.
Dr Brooke mc namara is a professor at Case Western
Reserve University where she investigates complex human performance. Follow her
on Twitter at Brooke McNamara. Dr Scott Berry Kaufman is
host of the Psychology Podcast and has a new book out.
(34:56):
Visit Scott Berry Kaufman dot com for details. Dr Rob
Tarswell is a nuclear medicine scientist and psychiatrist. Subscribe to
his YouTube channel. It's called One Minute Med School. If
you like the artwork, check out Pam Peacock on Instagram
at The Voyager Peacock Very special thanks to Camille Design,
(35:18):
Ben Key Brick, Tristan McNeil, Terry Meyer, Alison Cantor, and
Alex Cardinali. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts
Prodigy is a production of I Heart Radio. World records
are humanity's scoreboard. They're broken every single day by people
who pushed themselves further than any human being before them.
Could I break a world record if I practiced enough.
(00:25):
The most push ups I've ever done is sixty. The
world record is ten thousand and seven. In grade school,
I memorized thirty digits of pie. The record is over
sixty thousand. Can anyone achieve anything if you try hard enough.
(00:48):
My name is Lowell Brillante and this is Prodigy. Dr
Anders Ericsson spent his entire adult life studying elite performance.
He's referred to as the expert on experts Anders or
(01:12):
anders the way it's pronounced in Swedeness on this. But
you know, unless you're born in Sweden, that's hard, So
pretty much any anything is fine. Ericson's name might not
be familiar to you, but his research probably is. It's
been cited over eleven thousand times. I learned about him
from the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and I guess
(01:34):
one of the questions that we were interested in was
the role of practice and sort of determining who would
be very successful as a violinist, Gladwell wrote that ten
thou is the magic number of hours it takes to
master something. He came to this number from Ericson's study
of classical musicians, which showed a direct correlation between the
(01:59):
amount of prac disand achievement. And we found that sort
of the most successful violinists actually had practice more during
their development than those in the same program who were
not as successful. Basically in the music competitions. Ericson's abstract said,
(02:19):
many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually
the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of
ten years. Basically, finding now an interesting rank ordering here
of the amount of practice yet engaged in and basically
your success as a sort of an adult. There has
(02:41):
been some controversy about what Rickson called deliberate practice, and
we'll get into that suit, but let's start at the beginning.
Sixty years ago, a Harvard psychologist published what became one
of the most cited papers inside coology. It was about
(03:01):
cognitive limitation, specifically related to memory span. Memory span is
the max amount of items like digits in a phone number,
that one can repeat back immediately. You might know it
as short term memory. The items were read out loud
to a subject at the speed of one per second.
The list had to be recalled in the correct order
(03:23):
and accomplished at least fifty of the time. The study
showed that the average memory span for adults is seven items.
I tested this on myself and I can usually recall
seven digits, but not eight. If you want to test
your memory span, visit Prodigy podcast dot com slash memory.
Here's a list of seven digits seven zero four, one, nine,
(03:50):
eight five. It's difficult to hold those individual numbers in
your working memory, but it's much easier if you use
a mechanism called chunking. Chunking is the process of breaking
down a data set and grouping the pieces together into
meaningful chunks. For the seven digits I just read, I
would group them into two chunks seven zero four, And
(04:16):
those chunks make sense to me because it's my hometown
area code in the year I was born. As you
can probably guess, chunks are based on an individual's perception
and past experiences. A different person might chunk them as
seventy four nineteen and here's Dr Scott Berry Kaufman. Chunking
(04:37):
is a Terman in the expertise literature, where once you
get lots of complex information and you start looking at
them as a little smaller patterns, you can really quite
quickly appear quick and smart and talented in very specific
forms of expertise. So seven items was understood to be
the average memory span. More than thirty years later, a
(04:58):
young postdoctoral researcher by the name of Dr Carl Anders
Erickson developed a study to determine if memory span could
be improved. Their subject's name was Steve Faloon, who was
a cross country runner at Carnegie Mellon University. Ericson would
read him random digits at a rate of one per second,
which is too fast to store in long term memory.
(05:20):
If Steve recalled them correctly, then Ericson would add a digit.
If he made an error, then Ericson would subtract one.
He initially did what a lot of people would do
with phone numbers, you know, you would just kind of
repeat them in your head, maybe grouping them, but basically
that's all you were doing. And he just found that
when he did that, he pretty much plateaued. After several sessions,
(05:42):
Steve didn't improve and became discouraged, but then there was
a breakthrough, and then he realized that if he concentrated
on the first three digits and thought of them as
a running time, he was basically a cross country runner.
He could actually think of those numbers in a meaningful way,
and then once he got further into the sequence, he
(06:06):
could then maybe even do another group of three and
interpret that with some meaningful associations. That session, Steve was
able to recall eleven digits for the first time, but
it didn't stop there. What he did was to build
like a hierarchy where he kind of had running times
a different place than the space typically as three of
(06:30):
them organized hierarchically, Steve was learning to chunk chunks. Three
weeks later, he was able to recall twenty digits. After
a hundred hours of training, he was able to recall forty,
which at the time was the most ever, and by
the end of the study he could recall a random
string of eighty two digits. These were groundbreaking results. Now
(06:54):
Ericson needed to repeat it. He began again with the
second subject, but she ended up quitting. She did something
quite different, so she actually tried to identify numbers and
then make it like a little meaningful story about the numbers.
Oh six, that would be a six year old, so
she kind of would generate these little stories or scenarios.
(07:19):
We argue that that type of strategy it's just not
useful or possible to keep improving. She was able to do,
I guess at least twenty digits, so it's pretty impressive. Nonetheless,
Steve recruited his teammate Dario Donna Telly and taught him
his method. Dario spent over five years in the study
(07:41):
and at his peak, was able to recall an incredible
one d and thirteen digits. Practice is about building mental
representations that formed the connections in or between chunks. In
the book, peak Ericson defines mental representations as a structure
that corresponds to an object, idea, or collection of information.
(08:05):
Grand Master chess players can memorize the positions of every
piece in a game with just a quick glance. They
can even play a game without ever looking at the board,
and not just one. Some can play multiple games at
the same time without seeing the board. The current record
for simultaneous games played blindfolded is forty eight with thirty
(08:28):
five wins, seven draws, and six losses. Forty eight games
of chess, I can't even remember eight numbers. Everyone assumed
these grand masters had photographic memories until a study was
done where researchers showed them a chessboard where the pieces
were arranged in a way that couldn't naturally occur in
(08:48):
a game of chess. Now the grand masters barely outperformed
the average person. Through thousands of hours of practice, grand
master chess players build up mental representations for the aagement
of pieces on the board. I wanted to know what
is physically happening when we code these patterns into our
long term memory. Our body, including our nervous system, is
(09:12):
engineered to kind of respond to challenges. For example, if
we take something like a long distance running, the first
two or three weeks, when you actually are starting now
to run, the neurons in your legs are actually coordinating
their activity. If you actually go beyond three weeks, you
(09:32):
can actually see that capillaries are growing because you now
have such an effective way of using up muscular energy.
You now have a depletion of oxygen and other things,
and that depleted state will now stimulate the growth of capillaries,
and with even more training, you will actually increase the heart,
(09:56):
so it will actually be able to pump more blood,
and so your arteries will be growing. And what's interesting
is that if you for some reason stop training, most
of these changes will actually go back towards the normal
state that you started out before training. Most people have
experienced these types of physical effects on their body, But
(10:18):
what about an area that's harder to recognize, like the brain.
There's numerous different ways in which the brain can actually change,
and one of the most noted ones is that you
can kind of grow milent around certain nerve fibers, and
that actually allows you enough to speed up processing by
(10:39):
an order of magnitude. There's also you can grow synapses.
You know, the brain is such incredibly complex that people
are still working on trying to come up with ways
of measuring and quantifying. I mean, we're talking about trillion
different nerve cells. The brain is wired with nerve cell axins.
(11:03):
Myelin insulates the wires and helps increase the rate at
which electrical impulses are transmitted. One of the books based
on Ericson's research is The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.
In the Ted Talk, Coyle actually called the idea of
people being born with talent the greatest story ever told,
(11:24):
and he called it that because it had magic babies
in it. It's the greatest story ever because it has
magical babies in it. Is there a better story anywhere?
Coil quite literally referred to genetic predisposition as magic. He
wrote on his website his opinion of genes quote they matter,
(11:46):
but not nearly as much as we think. Scientists have
sequenced the human genome, but they can't locate the genes
for musical talent, or math, or art or sports, mostly
because genes don't work that way. And here's what Dan
Coyle believes is the science behind skill acquisition. Quote. To
put it in construction terms, genes are the blueprint for
(12:09):
our bodies, but the skill circuits that allow those bodies
to perform complex skills are built through deep practice. Coil
suggests that what he calls deep practice causes new nerve
cells to fire, which increases myelin and establishes a strong
skill circuit. I asked Dr Brooke McNamara, what is happening
(12:33):
in the brain when we learn She's a professor at
Case Western Reserve University, where she investigates complex human performance.
She got her PhD from Princeton on the subject. So
I figured she might be a better source than journalist
Dan Coile. That is a great question. That is something
that we're still figuring out. Really, it's a bit more
(12:55):
on the theory side at this point. There's some theories
that say that a new neural traces put down whenever
you experience a new stimuli, and then when you experience
that same stimuli again, you either sort of try to
figure it out how you did the first time, where
you go back to that neural trace, and either some
theories say the neural traces strengthened. There's other theories that
(13:17):
say a new neural traces laid down, and eventually, based
on the strength of the neural traces or the strength
of multiple neural traces, you begin to recognize that stimuli.
You don't have to try to figure it out. You go, oh, right,
I remember that, and I know the response to it,
so you start recalling it directly from memory. But even
that depends on the stimuli. So those types of theories
(13:40):
seem to hold for verbal tasks and mathematical tasks, but
they don't seem to hold for dynamic spatial tasks like
returning a servant tennis, and so we don't actually even
know exactly what's going on in the brain there. So
there's there's lots of both neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive
psychology left on the table for people to discover more
(14:02):
about how the brain works. The brain is incredibly complex
and difficult to study. We do have some methods, but
they're relatively rudimentary. Here is psychiatrist and nuclear medicine specialist
Dr Rob Tarswell. He uses radioactive tracers to study activity
in the brain. It's just something that with our current
(14:23):
state of science and technology, is pretty difficult to see. Right.
So the kind of imaging I'm working at is at
about four to six millimeter scale. Within a four to
six millimeter cube, there's about eight million neurons. So in
a sense, we're trying to figure out whether Joe Biden
(14:45):
or Donald Trump is going to win the election by
watching voters in lines from satellites in orbit. It tells
you something, but it's not drilling down fine enough to
give you the kind of information you really need. For
some reason, Dr McNamara and Dr Tarswell didn't know that
(15:06):
Coyle had all this figured out eleven years ago when
his book was published. I didn't have the heart to
tell them, but joking aside. Dan Coyle is an environmentalist
who clumsily rebranded Ericson's theory of deliberate practice to sell books.
All right, we're going to dive into deliberate practice and
(15:27):
the rule right after this quick break. Welcome back to Prodigy.
You can find source material and test your memory spam
at prodigy podcast dot com. All right, back to the show. So,
now that we've covered how practice improves ability, let's look
at Ericson's research, which altered the perception of expert performance.
(15:49):
In his Ericson denied that innate talent determined the level
of one's performance. I'm going to paraphrase a quote from
the paper that described the belief. We agree that expert
performers have abilities outside the range of normal adults. However,
we deny that these differences are due to genetic talent.
(16:10):
Only a few exceptions, like height, are genetically prescribed. We
argue that the difference between expert and normal performers is
a lifelong period of deliberate effort to improve in a domain.
Ericson's data showed that the only determining factor of expert
performance is the amount of time spent practicing, but not
(16:31):
just any type of practice, A specific type he referred
to as deliberate practice. In Malcolm Gladwell's best selling book
titled Outliers, The Story of Success, he defines practice as
purposefully and single mindedly playing their instruments to get better.
Gladwell then describes the Beatles playing hundreds of shows in
(16:53):
Hamburg as a reason why they became so good. But
this example doesn't fit the definition of deliberate practice. Ericson
describes three types of activities, work, play, and deliberate practice.
Work includes public performances and other activities motivated by external rewards.
(17:13):
Play has no explicit goal and is enjoyable. Deliberate practice
is activities specifically designed to improve performance. So, according to Ericsson,
Gladwell's example of the Beatles would be defined as work.
The reason that Erikson made the distinction is because during
a show, your focus is on performing at your highest level,
(17:35):
while deliberate practice is focused on increasing your highest level.
If you want to dunk a basketball, I think most
people would think, well, you know, I'm just gonna keep
trying to get a higher jump it's well known now
that there are other ways in which you can actually
improve your jumping ability so much more than actually just
(17:57):
trying to dunk. So, for example, one thing is weightlifting.
So if you basically look at the stimulation of your
legs when you're actually lifting your weight, that is so
much more intense than the stimulation that you get from
actually trying to jump towards the hoop, and you know,
(18:18):
reach a higher level. Another thing that's been demonstrated to
also be far superior to just doing the thing is
jumping from a height. So if you're basically standing on
a table and then you jump down, the stimulation that
you get on your legs when they have to absorb
your body weight is actually much more intense and therefore
(18:42):
will lead to the development and the strengthening of your
legs in a much more effective way than trying to
jump up towards the hoop. He also said that it
should include a coach to provide feedback and design the training.
Whether or not it must include a coach wasn't clear,
which brings me to Dr Hambrick. Here's a clip from
(19:04):
one of his lectures andres Erickson has argued that expert
performance largely, if not entirely, reflects a long period of
engaging in what he calls deliberate practice. In two thousand thirteen,
researchers Hambrick, McNamara, and Oswald published a meta analysis of
(19:24):
deliberate practice. A meta analysis examines multiple scientific studies that
address the same question, in this case, how effective is
deliberate practice. Since they include more data than a single study,
they're expected to be more accurate. So meta analysis takes
all relevant studies or data sets and synthesizes across them
(19:48):
looking for patterns. That's Dr Brooke McNamara again, she works
with Dr Hambrick a lot. With any one study, you
could find any effect. I might find some thing, but
unless I replicate it, I can't be too confident in
that result. It's interesting, and I'll probably put it forth,
(20:08):
but until I get some confirmation of that, I don't
know if it just happened to be those people that
I sampled that seemed to give that effect. So either
through replication, especially if you have multiple replications, or if
you have a meta analysis, so instead of that one
study that gives me this one result, if I have
twenty studies, then I can see, well, how many of
(20:30):
these twenty studies give me the same result. They agreed
that practice is critical and accurately predicts how much an
individual person improves. We were in complete agreement on the
importance of training. I mean we aren't literally born as experts.
You have to acquire skill and knowledge. They determined that
deliberate practice is not as important as ericson claimed. They
(20:53):
weren't saying that deliberate practice doesn't matter. It's necessary for
improving your skill. However, they on that it wasn't a
major factor in explaining the skill differences between people. So
the more you practice, the better you'll be, but that
doesn't guarantee you'll be better than someone else who has
practiced less. Here's another clip from Hamburg lecture. There's no
(21:17):
reason to think that healthy person will not benefit from
delivered practice, but people vary widely in the amount of
delivered practice it takes them to reach a given level
of skill. This is a study done in Buenos Areas
by my colleague Jerimo camp Telli. He recruited nine players
from the Buenos Areas Chess Club and the finding was
(21:40):
that number one practice in chess rating correlated point four two.
That's not trivial. Nothing to see that, but there's still
a massive amount of aariability in the amount of delivered
practice it took the players to reach a given a
level of skill master status. We see a large amount
of aiabile within skill level of some never reached master
(22:04):
level despite overs of delivered practice. This is like me
trying to get too scratching Captain Golf. The results of
the meta analysis showed that deliberate practice contributed to a
four difference in performance. This differed by domain, though, so
deliberate practice contributed to difference in games, but just one
(22:26):
for professions. Ericson said that performance was one related to
the amount of deliberate practice spent. What was the cause
for such a wide discrepancy in findings? Their definition of
basically the studies of practice that they included really failed
to meet those standards that we were pointing out of
(22:47):
actually having training activities where you get immediate feedback so
you can actually monitor how you get better. So, for example,
they included one estimate of having adolescens watch sport on television.
I think that's fundamentally different. So Ericson said they didn't
use the correct criteria for choosing studies. Let's look at
(23:08):
the description in the meta analysis. They define it as
quote engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance
in a domain. So those activities are very different from
the way we define deliberate practice. There's not a teacher
who is actually assessing a given individual and then posing
(23:30):
here appropriate training activities that would allow that individual to
improve from the current performance. And they included times like,
for example, scrimmaging where you know, you just had the
team split up into two groups and then playing against
each other. Again, that's very, very far from the criteria
(23:51):
that we established. So the meta analysis included studies that
didn't meet Ericson's definition of deliberate practice. I asked Dr
Hambrick what criteria they used. There were a number of criteria,
but the main one was that the studies reported a
measure of performance in a domain and a measure interpretable
(24:11):
as deliberate practice. And what is deliberate practice? Well, this was,
at least to us, it was unclear in terms of specifics.
One thing that a consistent point that Derricksson's colleagues made
all along was that it's an activity that's been designed
to elevate performance. There were elements of a definition where
(24:33):
we saw inconsistencies in his writings, for example, whether or
not a coach or teachers required, whether it can be grouped,
or whether it can be individual. And so we cast
a wide net and used a broad definition of deliberate practice.
That was one of the reasons that we made all
our data available, so that people could reanalyze our data
(24:57):
using their own definition or what they believed to be
the correct definition. Ericson took that available data and reanalyzed
it according to his definition of deliberate practice. And when
we selected now these studies that met these criteria, we
found substantially higher estimates than they did. Why would an
(25:19):
intelligent person like Hambric misinterpret the definition at the beginning
and then pretty recently in his colleagues did emphasize the
importance of having a coach at other times said that
deliberate practice could be designed by the performers themselves. Hambrike
and colleagues released an article in August explaining the source
(25:40):
of the confusion quote. Ericson and colleagues have been inconsistent
on critical elements of the definition of deliberate practice, and
consequently it has been unclear what activities do and do
not qualify as deliberate practice. Hambric then provides a timeline
over the course of twenty seven years where Erickson is
(26:01):
given three different definitions of deliberate practice regarding who designs
the training program one the teacher alone, two typically the teacher,
and three the teacher or performers themselves. Hambrig's issue is
not with the evolution of the definition. He states that
revising a theory as new evidence is accumulated is not
(26:25):
only normal, it's expected, but the revisions must be explained
so they can be evaluated. If the revisions are not transparent,
then they can be altered in order to stay relevant.
This is what's referred to as post hawk interpretation of data. Sadly,
we'll hear no response. The day after our interview, Dr
(26:47):
Carl Anders Erickson passed from heart complications. It is really
difficult to overstate the influence that he had on the
field of expertise. I mean, his ideas and his perspective
shaped the trajectory of research on expertise for decades, and
(27:08):
it inspired a whole generation of researchers. Ericson helped to
find the optimal way to improve skills. His research was
so groundbreaking that it transformed our understanding of potential. Transformation
of a field is the metric that psychologists used to
define a genius, Andres was a genius and a genuinely
(27:30):
good person. I love people to raise difficult questions because
I think that's a little bit the way I view
purposeful practice for scientists is the more that you can
find the best, most challenging questions that allows you to
get ahead, start thinking about things and hopefully being able
(27:52):
to understand them better. He was such an engaging person
to be around. I remember going in the first time
in the Honors office and it was just filled with
papers and books, as if they had been just kind
of shoveled in there. He uh was just really warm
and friendly. And of course, as you may know, I
(28:13):
did work critiquing his perspective, but that's what academics do.
But I have very fond memories of him. He had
a great sense of humor and was a voracious reader.
He would go to conferences and he would take a trunk.
He would fill the trunk full of books and ship
(28:34):
it back to his home. And speaking of his home,
he had a library in his home full on library
with stacks like rose and it was pretty cool cool
to see that. It was really obvious how much Hamburg
respected Ericson and valued his contribution to the field. I've
(28:57):
been critical of it is what happens in a scholarly area,
but he forced me to think carefully about my perspective
and to try to put my best case forward. His
influence has been on the field has been profound, and
he's certainly had a huge influence on my own work.
(29:18):
I've spent a lot of time, you know, thinking about
his work and critically examining yet in assumptions about the
origins of expertise, and it's I have to say, it's
just it's really weird to think about him no longer
being around. But his ideas, of course, we'll will live
on and they'll continue to inspire debate in scholarship and
(29:44):
move us ever closer towards a full understanding of of
expertise and expert performance. In two thousand, a study was
published proving the existence of extrasensory perception, also known as
ees P. We'll explore that after a quick break. Welcome
(30:05):
back to Prodigy. Pam Peacock is the talented designer of
our cover art. You can see more of her work
on Instagram at the Voyager Peacock. All right back to
the show. The issue with the definition of deliberate practice
is fairly common. Social sciences have been suffering from something
known as the replication crisis. Researchers found that many studies
(30:26):
are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Here's Dr McNamara. It
began with a study on ESP that got published, and
this outraged a number of psychologists, thinking what what have
we come to when we know that this can't exist.
In two thousand eleven, Darryl Bem published the results of
a ten year study on extrasensory perception. The data seemingly
(30:50):
showed that time flowed in two directions, allowing people insight
into the future. Them's research appeared to be done correctly,
but his peers knew that EESP couldn't exist, or if
it could, then that the evidence should be really strong.
And you read this paper and you realize that that
it's not and that there's problems with it, and that
(31:11):
surely if any other psychologists tried to conduct this experiment
they would not find significant effects. So this led people
to start really thinking about replication and how many of
the effects that we see in the published literature maybe
aren't real. So how can we avoid confusion like this
moving forward? We want to see larger samples, We want
(31:33):
to see rigorous methods. Something else that has really changed
the landscape quite a bit is pre registrations. Pre registration
is submitting a document explaining what research they plan to
do and how. So we know from medicine that things
changed a lot in the year two thousand. This is
when it became required for any clinical trial to be preregistered,
(31:56):
and all of a sudden, from that date forward, the
way fewer successful attempts at a new drug or a
new clinical trial. So you know what I want to
be treated by a doctor using a study before two
thousand or after two thousand, The answer is probably after
two thousand. How it used to be was that if
there was no preregistered plan, people would treat the data
(32:19):
however could get them an effect. But now if it's
documented how you're going to do it, then you can
actually confirm hypotheses as opposed to just try and to
find something from the data. If deliberate practice is not
the primary predictor of expert performance, then what is Hambric
and McNamara propose something called the multi factorial model. We
(32:42):
can't rely on the single cause fallacy That practice, however
it's defined, can't fully account for individual differences and performance.
In fact, it doesn't even account for the majority of it.
The single cause fallacy occurs when it is assumed that
there is a single sim will explanation for an outcome,
when in reality it's a combination of factors. There really
(33:05):
needs to be a broader picture taken into account multiple
factors to begin to explain human performance in a real way.
One question I've really been wanting the answer to is
where does the motivation to spend thousands of hours on
a single domain come from? Heritability of lifetime hours of
music practice was on average about now in the expertise literature,
(33:30):
this is kind of a hit scratcher. Who cause weight?
You know? How could how con tract just be heritable? Right?
That doesn't compute. It's a purely environmental variable. But this
is readily explained in terms of the concept of gene
environment correlation. This gene environment correlation is extremely interesting. Next episode,
we're going to dig into the details of that and
(33:52):
a whole lot more. I have so many questions to
answer and a ton of really interesting topics to cover.
Thank you so much for listening, and please subscribe to
the show because they'll be back next week with another
episode of Prodigy. Prodigy was created and produced by me
Low Berlante. I'm very fortunate to have the brilliant former
(34:13):
Magic Baby Tyler Klang as my executive producer. If you
want to measure the quantity of your miele in, then
take the memory test at Prodigy podcast dot com. Dr
Andres Erickson was the expert on Experts and will be
sorely missed. Dr David Hambrick runs the Expertise Lab at
Michigan State, which focuses on the origins of skill. You
(34:34):
can find more information at Science of Expertise dot com.
Dr Brooke mc namara is a professor at Case Western
Reserve University where she investigates complex human performance. Follow her
on Twitter at Brooke McNamara. Dr Scott Berry Kaufman is
host of the Psychology Podcast and has a new book out.
(34:56):
Visit Scott Berry Kaufman dot com for details. Dr Rob
Tarswell is a nuclear medicine scientist and psychiatrist. Subscribe to
his YouTube channel. It's called One Minute Med School. If
you like the artwork, check out Pam Peacock on Instagram
at The Voyager Peacock Very special thanks to Camille Design,
(35:18):
Ben Key Brick, Tristan McNeil, Terry Meyer, Alison Cantor, and
Alex Cardinali. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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