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Matthew Syed, two-time Olympian, was ranked Britain’s number one table tennis player for a decade and won the Commonwealth championship three times. Named British sportswriter of the year in 2008, the Times reporter (and aspiring politician) argues in Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success that natural ability has very little to do with high achievement.
Q: At the 2000 Olympics you had a good shot at a medal. What happened?
A: I know table tennis is not big in North America, but it’s a really big sport in the U.K., with 30,000 paid-up members of the governing body and over two million regular participants. And my whole life, really, had been directed at competing effectively at the Olympics. But when I got out there, I could hardly hit the ball. All those complex skills I’d built up over years of purposeful practice deserted me in a millisecond and for the duration of the match. I was very badly beaten.
Q: What causes a choke?
A: When we’re beginners, creating the neural framework for any kind of complex task—hitting a golf ball or kicking a football or singing or dancing—we have to exert conscious control to learn the skill because it’s unfamiliar. Neuroscientists have discovered that as you’re building up a skill, your prefrontal cortex is very activated. But over many hours of practice, the skill becomes encoded in implicit memory, and areas in the brain such as the basal ganglia become more effective. So beginners use an explicit system where they focus on the actual mechanics of performing the task, while expert performers operate implicitly, and can actually focus on other things, like tactics. Choking happens when a performer is under so much pressure that he thinks, “Oh God, I must make sure that I play this forehand well,” and instead of just doing it, he begins to exert conscious control and the neurophysiology is dramatically changed. You’re almost playing like a beginner again, operating from the explicit system rather than the implicit system. You’re trying to hit the ball, rather than just hitting it.
Q: How do you prevent choking?
A: According to the psychologist I worked with, and it makes intuitive sense, you pretend to yourself that what you’re doing doesn’t actually matter. Because if it doesn’t matter, you’re not going to try to exert conscious control. But once a choke starts, it seems to be an inexorable slide. Since Sydney, I’ve watched sports with a real eye on this, and I’ve hardly ever seen someone come back.
Q: As a spectator watching an athlete lose, I usually conclude that the other player simply has more innate ability. Why do so many of us believe “the talent myth”?
A: It fits into the familiar old Darwinian narrative: those who do well have a superior genetic inheritance. Yet if you look at the scientific evidence, where you end up in a field bears no relation whatsoever to your initial endowment and is created by the quality and quantity of your practice. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown that the difference between extraordinary performers and everyone else is that they practise more.
Q: Most of us put in a lot of practice at something: parenting, say, or our jobs. Why aren’t we super-achievers?
A: It has to be purposeful practice, with the right level of focus, and you have to be extending your limitations and receiving good training with rigorous feedback, or you’re not going to improve. I’ve driven for thousands of hours but I’m not a world-class driver, because when I drive, I’m listening to the radio and wondering what to have for dinner. But when I play table tennis, I’m pushing myself, always, just beyond my limits. That’s not particularly comfortable. I’m concentrating as hard as I can; I have a camera trained on me so I can get feedback by watching the video later; I’ve got the best coach in the world watching—all that means that you just keep getting better and better. Ericsson pointed out that the most amazing thing about expertise is the capacity of “ordinary” people to just keep improving with practice.
Q: But doesn’t the athlete who starts out with more natural ability, which is at least partially genetically determined, have a distinct advantage?
A: Genes are relevant to initial ability. You can see, for example, that some kids are better than others when they first pick up a ball. But the evidence shows that over many thousands of hours, that initial disparity just doesn’t matter. What really alerted me to a fundamental problem with the idea that success is all about natural talent is that I grew up on Silverdale Road in Reading, about as anonymous a road as you can imagine, and yet in the early 1980s that one tiny street contained more of the top table tennis players in the United Kingdom than the rest of the nation combined. There was no genetic mutation that occurred only for people living on Silverdale Road. We just had access to better opportunities—most importantly, the opportunity to practise at a facility that was open around the clock and receive very advanced training from the best coach in the country, who taught at our local primary school. Our genetic inheritance didn’t matter, because after a number of years, all of us who lived on that road found ourselves to be very new people, with brains and bodies sculpted by the training and practice.
Q: How does practice sculpt the brain?
A: The importance of myelin, an insulating material that wraps around nerve fibres and helps neural signals travel faster, is a hot new topic in neuroscience. In one experiment, the brains of concert pianists were scanned and there was a direct relationship between hours practised and the quantity of myelin. Purposeful practice also creates new neural connections and increases the size of specific areas of the brain. For instance, there’s evidence to show that the area of the brain responsible for spatial navigation is larger in London taxi drivers, who have to pass a very difficult test to get a licence. So two things seem to be happening: it’s as though you download software that contains specific knowledge, and that very process of downloading seems to change the hardware, the physical geometry of the brain.
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