Those who think geniuses are born and not made should think again, says author
David Shenk.
Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like "gifted
musician", "natural athlete" and "innate intelligence", we have long assumed
that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't.
But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and
improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process
and this includes what we get from our genes.
A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors, always uttering the same
lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this
old idea. In recent years, though, scientists have seen a dramatic upgrade in
their understanding of heredity.
They now know that genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on
and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects
depending on who they are talking to.
Malleable
"There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the
environment," says Michael Meaney, a professor at McGill University in Canada.
Start Quote
David Shenk
It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything.
But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity
is built into most of us
End Quote David Shenk Author of The Genius in All of Us
"And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the
genome. [A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment."
This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our
abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of
"innate" no longer holds together.
"In each case the individual animal starts its life with the capacity to
develop in a number of distinctly different ways," says Patrick Bateson, a
biologist at Cambridge University.
"The individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number
of distinctly different ways. Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential
to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental
tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is
growing up."
Is it that genes don't matter? Of course not. We're all different and have
different theoretical potentials from one another. There was never any chance
of me being Cristiano Ronaldo. Only tiny Cristiano Ronaldo had a chance of
being the Cristiano Ronaldo we know now.
But we also have to understand that he could have turned out to be quite a
different person, with different abilities. His future football magnificence
was not carved in genetic stone.
Doomed
This new developmental paradigm is a big idea to swallow, considering how much
effort has gone into persuading us that each of us inherits a fixed amount of
intelligence, and that most of us are doomed to be mediocre.
How a London cabbie's brain grows
Taxi
London cabbies famously navigate one of the most complex cities in the world.
In 1999, neurologist Eleanor Maguire conducted MRI scans on their brains and
compared them with the brain scans of others.
In contrast with non-cabbies, experienced taxi drivers had a greatly enlarged
posterior hippocampus - that part of the brain that specialises in recalling
spatial representations.
What's more, the size of cabbies' hippocampi correlated directly with each
driver's experience: the longer the driving career, the larger the posterior
hippocampus.
That showed that spatial tasks were actively changing cabbies' brains. This was
perfectly consistent with studies of violinists, Braille readers, meditation
practitioners, and recovering stroke victims.
Our brains adapt in response to the demands we put on them.
The notion of a fixed IQ has been with us for almost a century. Yet the
original inventor of the IQ test, Alfred Binet, had quite the opposite opinion,
and the science turns out to favour Binet.
"Intelligence represents a set of competencies in development," said Robert
Sternberg from Tufts University in the US in 2005, after many decades of study.
Talent researchers Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde and Samuel Whalen
agree.
"High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," they
write in their book Talented Teenagers, "but work harder and develop more
self-discipline."
James Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand has documented how IQ
scores themselves have steadily risen over the century - which, after careful
analysis, he ascribes to increased cultural sophistication. In other words,
we've all gotten smarter as our culture has sharpened us.
Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has
demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than
fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.
The same dynamic applies to talent. This explains why today's top runners,
swimmers, bicyclists, chess players, violinists and on and on, are so much more
skilful than in previous generations.
All of these abilities are dependent on a slow, incremental process which
various micro-cultures have figured out how to improve. Until recently, the
nature of this improvement was merely intuitive and all but invisible to
scientists and other observers.
Soft and sculptable
But in recent years, a whole new field of "expertise studies", led by Florida
State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, has emerged which is cleverly
documenting the sources and methods of such tiny, incremental improvements.
Cristiano Ronaldo Born to be a footballer?
Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how
different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise
push people along very different pathways.
Does your child have the potential to develop into a world-class athlete, a
virtuoso musician, or a brilliant Nobel-winning scientist?
It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything.
But the new science tells us that it's equally foolish to think that mediocrity
is built into most of us, or that any of us can know our true limits before
we've applied enormous resources and invested vast amounts of time.
Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far
into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination,
greatness is something to which any kid - of any age - can aspire.
David Shenk is the author of The Genius in All of Us.