Genius: The Modern View

[bobover3 (imported)]

Genius: The Modern View

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: April 30, 2009 in the NY Times

Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.

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We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

The recent research has been conducted by people like K. Anders Ericsson, the late Benjamin Bloom and others. It’s been summarized in two enjoyable new books: “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle; and “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin.

If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you’d take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn’t have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday — anything to create a sense of affinity.

This contact would give the girl a vision of her future self. It would, Coyle emphasizes, give her a glimpse of an enchanted circle she might someday join. It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success.

Armed with this ambition, she would read novels and literary biographies without end. This would give her a core knowledge of her field. She’d be able to chunk Victorian novelists into one group, Magical Realists in another group and Renaissance poets into another. This ability to place information into patterns, or chunks, vastly improves memory skills. She’d be able to see new writing in deeper ways and quickly perceive its inner workings.

Then she would practice writing. Her practice would be slow, painstaking and error-focused. According to Colvin, Ben Franklin would take essays from The Spectator magazine and translate them into verse. Then he’d translate his verse back into prose and examine, sentence by sentence, where his essay was inferior to The Spectator’s original.

Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a ball. The aim is to focus meticulously on technique. (Try to slow down your golf swing so it takes 90 seconds to finish. See how many errors you detect.)

By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. By now she is redoing problems — how do I get characters into a room — dozens and dozens of times. She is ingraining habits of thought she can call upon in order to understand or solve future problems.

The primary trait she possesses is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine.

Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Thank you for this post.

[Matt85 (imported)]

While Dante, and Mozart may be able to be explained by the deliberate application of dedicated and painstaking perfectionism to one's craft, the idea to write off genius IQ as 'merely' a numerical representation is foolish. One of the problems with books like this is that it purports the notion that anyone, given adequate time and study or practice could be either Tiger Woods or Einstein. This is simply not true.

In the case of Tiger, yes someone could be that dedicated and learn the craft...to a point. Unfortunately for us, there stands the case most recently of Michael Phelps. Now, while I am not on his bandwagon as far as fandom is concerned, it has been shown through scientific study that a very very very small percentage of the population, even if they were born in the water and swam every day, could come close to his performance in a pool. He is literally built to swim; scientifically. His legs are the right ratio, his lungs have amazing capacity, (some of which can improve with practice, but some is completely genetic), and several other factors I cannot recall work in his favor to deny the rest of us the access to that particular level of greatness. No matter how young we start or how hard we work. The man who broke the world record at the same time as Phelps was probably pretty pissed that he simply wasn't built to keep up. I use Phelps as an example because I know nothing of Tiger.

Another example cited is Einstein. A friend of mine, who passed away a few years ago, met Einstein while he was at Princeton. The man was flighty and incapable of normal social intercourse. This, however, was due to a disproportionate amount of his brain being dedicated to the processes that govern mathematical calculation and spacial reasoning. That is a genetic and hence uncontrollable, defect. He was defective, especially to those who were in the know at the time. That defect allowed him to percieve the universe in ways that most people can't even inject their minds into, let alone wrap around. The man wasn't only a genius, he was also insane by some standards. No amount of study, application, or desire to succeed would allow any of our brains to rewire themselves to be more like him. Yes, many have understood and applied some of his theories over the years, however they were going over old territory, and he was working in a mental vaccuum without anyone even being able to look at the universe as he saw it.

Conclusion, while it may be possible to train and attain exceptional, true genius and originality is very much out of reach of the normal person. It's also something I wouldn't wish on anyone. I say to the authors, and their readers: be content with what you were given and make the most of it, just don't tear down the truly gifted because you aren't one. Consider yourself lucky.

[bobover3 (imported)]

Every life starts with a genetic template, but the question is how close one comes to one's potential. For most people, what they achieve is far short of potential. What's more, we have no reliable way of measuring that potential. Working in the dark as we are, the best course is to do all we can to further each person's development. Brooks describes, at a very high level, what that looks like.

I mistrust the view, very popular in this age of the "common man" and the market economy, that genius is to be pitied for its abnormality. This is only a backhand form of self-praise when said by an ordinary person, or someone who believes himself to be ordinary.

Take a look at Jose Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt of the Masses," a seminal work in which he describes the change in our culture from admiration of the excellent and exceptional to admiration of the average. Nowadays, most ordinary people are proud of themselves for being ordinary, instead of the humility which would once have been assumed. Sly contempt for the gifted follows. How convenient to say one doesn't want what one can't have. An instance of Aesop's "sour grapes."

The Einstein apocrypha might be re-interpreted to mean that the man couldn't understand Einstein, and rather than admit he wasn't bright enough, concluded that Einstein must have been "incapable of normal social intercourse." The vanity behind this rationalization is saddening. Every bright person, not only geniuses, experiences this sort of resentment. Those who can't keep up say it's your fault for sprinting ahead. But society would wither without the services of the brilliant few who lead the rest of us.

There's nothing done by man that isn't accessible to man. Einstein's theories, once thought impenetrable because they confounded nineteenth century assumptions, are now the stuff of freshman physics, and are readily understood by millions. Original thought always seems hard, until it becomes familiar.

There's plenty in the biographies of great people in support of Brooks. G.B. Shaw attributed his writing prowess to many years of practice, and advised aspiring authors to write and write more. Sergei Rachmaninoff practiced new piano pieces so slowly they were unrecognizable as music, and said that many, many hours of slow practice was the only way to get music "under his fingers."

The idea that genius is spontaneous and without effort is intended to flatter those who achieve little, even though they spend their time "drinking beer and picking their nose." "There's no point in trying," they say, "since if I were a genius I'd be doing great things no matter how I spend my time." Rubbish. Study the lives of the great, and you'll almost always find both talent and hard work - persistent, disciplined labor. Music? Who worked harder than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven? Writing? Flaubert, Proust, Joyce did little else. Science and math? Einstein, Godel, Von Neumann, Crick, Fermi, et al., were all great workers.

[Kortpeel (imported)]

.

There's nothing done by man that isn't accessible to man. Einstein's theories, once thought impenetrable because they confounded nineteenth century assumptions, are now the stuff of freshman physics, and are readily understood by millions. Original thought always seems hard, until it becomes familiar.

On Genius:

To my mind there are different sorts of genius. Athletic genius calls for a genetic disposition to athletics as a prerequisite and then comes the hours of training in order to perfect the muscles and the motor neuron circuits that control them. In order to put in the hours of training a potential athletic genius needs to be fortunate enough to have someone around who can motivate and inspire the would be genius to put in the effort and organise for it to happen..

The Williams sisters (tennis) and Tiger Woods (golf) would seem to be good example of this. Some would argue that ‘genius’ is the wrong word for athletic achievement. Rather they are brilliant exponents of their sport.

Genius of the kind possessed by Newton and Einstein is something else altogether. Both of these guys changed the world and the way it thinks. It calls for a special kind of brain, which is either a fluke of heredity or act of divine providence. Take your pick – either way such a brain happens rarely. And no amount of commitment or dedication could match those brains if the initial potential isn’t there.

However there has to be a combination of circumstances that permits such genius to manifest itself. The world was ready for Newton’s Principia Mathematica and science had got to a stage where it was ready for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Little Boy and Fat Boy turned out to be convincing demonstrations of it.

Note that the world only needs such a truly great mind every now and then. In between we need intelligent worker bees to digest and exploit the results of a great scientific leap forward.

However, I would say that the time is now right for another genius who will make sense of quantum physics and give us the ‘theory of everything’ that science is currently seeking.

Perhaps such genius is more common that we know. Just that the other circumstances are not right for the genius to emerge. As Thomas Gray put it:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Hence the person who has a brain that potentially could discover the cure for hiv may be an illiterate peasant struggling to survive somewhere in Africa. His family and neighbours probably think he’s not right in the head and they may well be right. Genius does seem to produce distortions in the brain which impair social function.

Kortpeel

[Arab Nights (imported)]

On Genius:

However, I would say that the time is now right for another genius who will make sense of quantum physics and give us the ‘theory of everything’ that science is currently seeking.

I offer you AN's General Theory of Everything which pretty much covers all the bases - except how to get lucky in Pahrump. I haven't figured that one out yet.

I read a book a couple of years back looking at how the extraordinary jumps in thought and technology were distributed thru history and across the globe. It was kind of interesting considering that, but what was unsaid was the increasingly rapid changes since 1850. Either the world is chock-a-block with genii or there is something to be said about educating the worker bees and letting those with the desire and ability have at it. Throw in a dash of genius now and then and you have continual progress.

[coinflipper_21 (imported)]

Thomas Edison supposedly said, "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

[kristoff]

Thomas Edison supposedly said, "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

Did he by chance invent deodorant?

[moi621 (imported)]

Spiritual influence helps too.

Oops, I guess that's the divine spark again.

Einstein was Spiritual. He was not really religious.

[bobover3 (imported)]

Kortpeel, I think you and I both agree with Brooks that it would benefit us all to create a culture which encouraged the best from each of us. No one can know where that might lead, but since this world is far from utopia, it could only be an improvement.