The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (8 page)

But what about apparent exceptions to this rule—the handful of famous memory experts (“mnemonists”) who’ve been able to recall prodigious amounts of new and disconnected information? Ericsson and Chase wanted to know if these remarkable performers had innate memory gifts or if they had somehow acquired their extraordinary skills. To answer that question, they embarked on an unusual and ambitious experiment.

They attempted to create a mnemonist from scratch.

Could an ordinary person’s short-term memory be trained, like a juggler, to handle a much larger amount of information? There was only one way to find out. Ericsson and Chase recruited an undistinguished college student for an epic experiment. The student, known by his initials, S.F., tested normal for intelligence and normal for short-term memory performance. Memory-wise, he was just like you or me. Then they began the training. It was grueling work.
In one-hour sessions, three to five sessions per week, researchers read sequences of random numbers to S.F.
at the rate of one digit per second:
2 … 5 … 3 … 5 … 4 … 9 …
At intervals, they stopped and asked him to echo their list back. “If the sequence was reported correctly,” the researchers noted, “the next sequence was increased by one digit; otherwise it was decreased by one digit.”
2 … 5 … 3 … 5 … 4 … 9 … 7 …
At the end of every session, S.F. was asked to recall as many of that day’s numbers as possible.
2 … 5 … 3 … 5 … 4 … 9 … 7 … 6 …

Instead of jumping off a bridge or transferring to another college, S.F. kept returning to the memory lab. In fact, he continued to participate most days of the week for more than two years—more than 250 hours of lab time. Why? Perhaps because he was seeing results. Almost immediately, his short-term memory performance started to improve: from seven digits to ten after a handful of sessions, then to an amazing twenty digits after several more dozen training hours. Already he had clearly escaped the normal bounds of short-term memory.
From there, the improvements continued unabated
: to thirty digits, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, and finally to a staggering eighty-plus digits before the team concluded the experiment.

Courtesy of Hadel Studio

S.F.’s progress
is represented on the graph above.

There was no indication as the sessions ended that he had reached any sort of boundary. “With practice,” Ericsson and Chase concluded, “there is seemingly no limit to memory performance.”

How did he do it? Through interviews with S.F., Ericsson and Chase realized that their subject had neither tapped into a hidden memory gift nor somehow transformed the brain circuitry of his short-term memory. Rather, he had simply employed clever strategies that enabled him to get around his—and all of our—natural limits.

Here’s how:

S.F. happened to be a competitive runner. Early on, after trying in vain simply to remember as many random numbers as possible, he realized that when he pictured an unconnected string of three or four digits as one single race time—for example, converting the numbers 5–2–3–4 into five minutes and twenty-three point four seconds—the numbers would come back to him quite easily.

This was not a new technique; attaching disconnected pieces of information to older memories goes back all the way to the Greek “memory palaces” of the fourth century B.C. The trick is to assign new information to some system or image that’s already in your head. For example, a classroom teacher could mentally “place” the face and name of each new student in a different room in her home: Lucas in the dining room; Oscar in the pantry; Malcolm standing by the kitchen sink. The advantage of this technique, explained Ericsson and Chase in their report, “is that it relieves the burden on short-term memory because recall can be achieved through a single association with an already-existing code in long-term memory.” S.F., like every impressive mnemonist before him, had not transformed his natural memory limit; instead he had changed the way he formed new memories to take advantage of a different, less restrictive memory system.

But how did the researchers know for sure that S.F. had not actually altered his short-term memory capacity? Simple: between number sessions, they also tested him with random alphabet letters:
U … Q … B … Y … D … X …
Whenever they did this, his memory performance immediately reverted to normal. Without special mnemonic tricks and lots of contextual practice, his short-term memory was again as ordinary as yours or mine.

Ericsson and Chase published their results in the prestigious journal
Science
, and their results were subsequently corroborated many times over
. They concluded:

These data suggest that … it is not possible to increase the capacity of short-term memory with extended practice. Rather, increases in memory span are due to the use of mnemonic associations in long-term memory. With an appropriate mnemonic system and retrieval structure, there is seemingly no limit to improvement in memory skill with practice.

It was a double lesson
: when it comes to memory skills, there is no escaping basic human biology—nor any need to. Remembering extraordinary amounts of new information simply requires the right strategies and the right amount of intensive practice, tools theoretically available to any functioning human being.

So began Anders Ericsson’s remarkable talent odyssey
. He quickly suspected that the importance of his discovery went far beyond mind puzzles like geometry and chess. There were implications here, he imagined, for playing the cello, shooting a basketball, painting a canvas, brewing sake, reading a CT scan—any skill where real-time performance is dependent on one’s knowledge and experience.
Though he couldn’t be sure at the time, Ericsson suspected he had just discovered the hidden key to the veiled domains of talent and genius
.

He was right.

Truly great accomplishments are inherently mysterious, awe inspiring, even intimidating to witness. What daunting thoughts course through the mind of any listener as ten-year-old Midori plays
Paganini’s Sauret cadenza
with such startling grace and finesse? Beyond the feeling of amazement is the inevitable comparison with oneself—the acknowledgment that if you drew that same bow across those same strings on that exact same violin, such squeaks and squawks would fill the room as to make people run for cover.

By the same token, one watches David Beckham bend that ball into the goal, or Michael Jordan fly through the air toward the hoop, or Tiger Woods knock a tiny ball 325 yards to within inches of the hole, and one experiences an exhilarating but also deflating feeling:
these extraordinary performers cannot possibly belong to the same species as you or me
.

Call it the greatness gap—that sensation of an infinite and permanent chasm between ultra-achievers and mere mortals like us. Such feelings beg for a reassuring explanation: This person has something I do not have. They were born with something I wasn’t born with. They are gifted.

It is an assumption built right into our culture.
“Talent” is defined in the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “mental endowment; natural ability” and is sourced all the way back to the parable of the talents in the book of Matthew
. The words “gifted” and “giftedness” date back to the seventeenth century.
The term “genius,” as it is currently defined, goes back to the tail end of the eighteenth century
.

Recent centuries are peppered with evocative statements reinforcing the idea of inborn gifts:

• “Poets and musicians are born,” declared the poet Christian Friedrich Schubart in 1785
  .
  

• “Musical genius is that inborn, inexplicable gift of Nature,” insisted the composer Peter Lichtenthal in 1826
  .
  

• “Don’t ask, young artist, ‘what is genius?’” proclaimed Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1768
  . “Either you have it—then you feel it yourself, or you don’t—then you will never know it.”
  

In the twentieth century, the presumed source of a person’s natural endowment shifted from God-given to gene-given, but the basic notion of giftedness remained substantially the same. Exceptional abilities were things bestowed upon a very lucky person.

Notably, Friedrich Nietzsche dissented along the way. In his 1878 book
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
(
Human, All-Too-Human
), he described greatness as being steeped in a process, and of great artists being tireless participants in that process:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration
… [shining] down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, and bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects … All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

As a vivid illustration, Nietzsche cited Beethoven’s sketchbooks
, which reveal the composer’s slow, painstaking process of testing and tinkering with melody fragments like a chemist constantly pouring different concoctions into an assortment of beakers.

Beethoven would sometimes run through as many as sixty or seventy different drafts of a phrase before settling on the final one
. “I make many changes, and reject and try again, until I am satisfied,” the composer once remarked to a friend. “Only then do I begin the working-out in breadth, length, height and depth in my head.”

Alas, neither Nietzsche’s nuanced articulation nor Beethoven’s candid admission caught on with the general public. Instead, the simpler and more alluring idea of giftedness prevailed and has since been carelessly and breathlessly reinforced by biologists, psychologists, educators, and the media. Three essential ingredients have kept it alive:

1. The unexplained phenomena of child prodigies and “savants”:
   tiny Mozarts and Midoris in possession of spectacular abilities that seem to come from nowhere.
   

2. The myth of genes as blueprints:
   a simple and compelling account of where giftedness comes from, not substantially refuted until recently.
   

3. No compelling alternative:
   no sweeping contrary evidence from scientists, and no effective rhetorical substitutes from writers.
   

All of which left “giftedness” as the only acceptable explanation for exceptional ability. Few psychologists or educators resisted the temptation to use it as a shorthand when discussing talents.

But Anders Ericsson did resist.

After his 1980 memory experiments, the old giftedness dogma just didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Though he was not a geneticist and, at the time, had no way to know just how bankrupt the gene-blueprint myth truly was, he defied convention and proposed a radical new conception of talent: talent is not the
cause
but the
result
of something. It doesn’t create a process but is the end result of that process. If true, this would mean that high achievement in many physical and creative realms is much more attainable among human beings than is implied by the notion of giftedness.