DEBATE
Fight Club:
Is talent
taught rather
than innate?
YES
says Daniel Coyle,
author of The Talent Code
For centuries talent was considered a gift from the gods.
More recently it has been considered a gift from our
genes. Now science is showing us a deeper and more useful truth: talent is a gift from our brains and their remarkable capacity to grow and learn.
This is a strange and surprising idea, because it cuts against our
intuition. Most of us grow up being told that talent is the combination
of genes, environment and hard work. The trouble with this wellworn formula is not that it is false, but rather that it is spectacularly
vague. Thinking that talent is a combination of genes, environment
and hard work is like thinking a Ferrari is a combination of steel, red
paint and Italians. The recipe is accurate but it glosses over the vital
step: the process of construction that transforms raw ingredients into
the fluency, speed and accuracy that make up high performance. The
brain is the engine for this process, specifically the neural circuits that
comprise thoughts and actions.
For decades scientists assumed our brains to be fixed at birth.
However, research has revealed that they are
capable of building new and vastly improved
circuitry through a combination of intensive
practice and motivation. This connection is
—
summarised in the Rule of 10,000 Hours, the
Age that Ruth
amount of time performers in all domains
Lawrence achieved (music, maths, sports, art) have been found to
a first-class degree intensively practice to reach world-class status.
The new formula goes something like this: pasin maths at the
University of Oxford sion plus intensive practice plus 10,000 hours
equals high-speed neural broadband.
source: bbc
Science biographers have dug into the lives
of top performers, brushing away myths to
uncover shared patterns of practice and motivation. Mozart, long the poster child for innate
talent, had been immersed in music from birth, trained for thousands
of hours by his ambitious father (a composer) and fuelled by the family’s expectation of greatness. Mozart’s talent was indeed natural,
not because of a divine twist of his genes, but because of the way
his growing brain interacted with his one-off environment.
The argument naturally shifts to whether genes limit us
to some pre-set maximum capacity. To be sure, limits
would seem to apply to physical skills involving speed,
etc. But when it comes to maths, music and other cognitive skills, the brain’s potential to grow and learn
holds the advantage over genes, with each containing an astonishing 100 billion neurons.
The debate between genes and the brain follows a familiar historical pattern. Magical phenomena (such as the weather) are first presumed
to be controlled by deterministic agents, then
revealed to be the result of complex interactions.
We are beginning to understand what principles
created Mozart and other talented performers.
The question now is whether we can exert leverage — in schools, families and social institutions — to use these principles to grow our
brains and talents to their highest potential. •
13
Vs
—
Take part
in a live
debate on
talent at
1pm on
May 6 at
www.
timesonline.
co.uk/
eurekazone
NO
says Ellen Winner,
Professor of Psychology, Boston College
The great Slavic linguist, Roman Jakobson, taught one of
his seminars in Russian. When a student told him that he
could not enrol because he did not speak Russian, Jakobson, who spoke many languages with ease, allegedly replied, “Try.”
The view that hard work is all that is required for genius or even
expert level performance has made its way into the popular press
with books by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Coyle and David Shenk. In
his 1990 book, The Origins of Exceptional Abilities, Michael Howe
wrote that “with sufficient energy and dedication on the parents’ part,
it is possible that it may not be all that difficult to produce a child
prodigy”. This anti-inborn talent view has also been put forward by
psychologist Anders Ericsson, who reports correlations between
hours of practice and levels of attainment in music, chess and sports.
But there are two logical flaws in the denial of inborn talent or
intellectual potential. First, the fact that no one achieves at elite levels
without significant effort shows that hard work is necessary, not that
it is sufficient. In addition, the reverse is also likely: innate talent may
be a necessary condition for hard work. For
instance, it is highly plausible that only when
playing the piano comes easily (read talent)
are children willing to keep at it. Those lacking
—
talent will find it harder to learn and are thus
Age that Sergey
more likely to give up. In my book, Gifted ChilKarjakin, from
dren: Myths and Realities, I argue that gifted
children have a “rage to master” in their
Ukraine, became
domain. Without this intense drive, no child
world’s youngest
will clock huge amounts of deliberate practice.
chess grandmaster
It is difficult to prove the existence of innate
source: the times
talent because doing so requires disentangling
nature from nurture. But when we see very
young children showing signs of extraordinary
ability prior to any training, we have evidence
of nature before nurture. Some children learn to read at 2 or 3.
Mozart picked out tunes on the piano at 3 and was composing at 5.
True these reports are anecdotal. But there are so many of them that
we cannot dismiss these as fabrications by boastful parents.
The best systematic evidence disentangling nature from
nurture comes from studies of chess masters by Fernand
Gobet, Guillermo Campitelli and Robert Howard. These
researchers found wide individual variation in the number
of hours needed to reach grandmaster level. They also
found players who put in huge amounts of chess time
(from childhood) yet never attained master level. Thus,
sheer hard work is simply not sufficient to become a
master. What is true of chess is bound to be true of all
kinds of great achievers, whether in the arts, the sciences or athletics, though comparable studies have
not yet been conducted.
It would be great if hard work was sufficient to
become a Picasso or Einstein. But effort does not
open all doors. If parents believed Howe, they
would push their children. Those few whose
children have innate talent would be
rewarded. The rest would fail, blaming
themselves, or worse, their children. •
12
May 2010 | Eureka | THE TIMES | 49