Learning About Learning
By: Barry Leybovich
Tags: Learning, Self Improvement, Growth, Self, Childhood

Learning About Learning

In the Spring of 2016, Stephen Dubner released a series of podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio feed under the theme of self-improvement. He featured prominent personalities like Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Ferris during the series, but the series kicked off with an interview with Anders Ericsson, a Swedish research psychologist who got his start studying nuclear engineering. Unbeknownst to me (and long before I knew what a podcast was), a full decade prior Dubner and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt wrote a profile of Ericsson in The New York Times Magazine, and Dubner had the perfect opportunity to bring Ericsson on the podcast with the release of Ericsson’s new book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, co-written with Robert Pool.

The magic of the episode — which led me to immediately secure a copy of the book and begin devouring it — was as such: Ericsson’s research overturns nearly all conventional wisdom we have about talent. The episode (and book) start with a simple story about perfect pitch. Technically called absolute pitch, it is the ability to identify a musical tone without being given a reference tone. Perfect pitch is an extremely rare ability that is incredibly prized in the music industry and the arts. Perfect pitch is also often thought of as a talent that you’re born with, and one that you’re extremely lucky to have if you do. Interestingly though, researchers noticed that in many parts of East Asia, prevalence of perfect pitch is higher — that might not be completely surprising to some though, if you believe that there could be a genetic explanation. Curiously however, people of East Asian descent who grew up in the United States don’t seem to have a higher prevalence of perfect pitch. The explanation for this discrepancy? Tonal languages. People who grow up speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and certain Korean dialects (and surely other languages that weren’t examined) are much more likely to have perfect pitch regardless of their race. This was followed up with experimentation and it turns out that you can teach children perfect pitch.

For me, learning about this line of experimentation is best described by 🤯, the mind blown emoji. It so handily takes conventional wisdom — that perfect pitch is something you’re born with — and completely turns it upside down. And then the book overturns conventional wisdom over and over and over again. Conventional wisdom says humans can only hold seven digits — think, a phone number’s length — in memory at a time; Ericssons earliest experiments nearly forty years ago got that up to 80. Today, that number (with digits spoken one second at a time), is 547!

We tell ourselves myths about supernatural abilities but in fact these are teachable skills — you could get to dozens of digits with several hours of practices. And this focus on teachable and learnable skills, over some intangible and ethereal ‘natural born ability’, is refreshing and much needed.

One of my favorite stories in the books relays a conversation between ten-time NBA All-Star (and now Hall of Famer) Ray Allen and ESPN columnist Jackie MacMullan. “I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life,” Allen told MacMullan. “When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day.” If you need an example of Allen’s beautiful and clutch jump shot, take a gander:

Source: NBA via YouTube

And I know, one clutch shot is easy to find for nearly any player, but here’s nine more minutes of just clutch shots if you need more convincing. Ray Allen brings up the flip side of heavily emphasizing talent as natural born — frankly, it’s insulting, as it undermines the hard work that we don’t see. It is easier for observers to think something is easy ‘if only you’re born with that talent’, because it absolves us of making excuses for why we don’t put in that work themselves.

I have experienced this first hand with math. I am someone who you could conventionally say is ‘good at math’. Though I did not struggle with math through most of school, it was not fueled by some innate gift, but rather because of how much time my mother spent teaching me math at the kitchen table while she cooked dinner or while she circled deals in that week’s ShopRite circular. Claiming that my talent is inborn or luck unjustly cheapens my work, but also my mother’s. Further, there is an insidious flipside to this: we keep telling people that they cannot achieve something because they were not ‘born with it’ or it does not come easily.

I have seen this side of things also. Foreign languages — French specifically — seemed impossible to me. Truly so much so that, after five years of French classes, I dropped it in my senior year of high school. In this regard also, I was told that I took after my mother, who is ‘bad at languages’. The irony of this is multifold given that my parents raised my brother and I to be bilingual, but nevertheless trilingual was a step too far for my mother and I.

How many times do kids give up on math or science or a foreign language or art or music because they are told “you know what, you are just not cut out for this”? Angela Duckworth, author of the aptly named book Grit talks about just that: how working hard is a better measure of success than ‘talent’. Fostering a growth mindset gets us to believe in our ability to grow, and helps us succeed. In a recent Character Lab newsletter Duckworth’s daughter reflects on how she struggled in math during middle school, only to grow to love it and even apply to math programs for college.

Beyond highlighting what we can learn, Ericsson and Peak focus heavily on how we gain mastery. He finds that the best predictor is what he dubs ‘deliberate practice’ — a form of systematic practice that has specific goals or skills in mind. Coaching or self-awareness are needed also, to understand the difference between where you are and where you are going (The Inner Game of Tennis is a particularly good guide to becoming more mindful in skill acquisition).

Less than a year after after reading Peak, I put deliberate practice to the test with Italian. After five failed years of French, I was able to learn Italian — from nil to conversational — in less than a year. Since then I’ve learned to sing, improved my guitar skills, and have recently been binging on chess (a post-Queen’s Gambit addiction).

Ericsson’s work entered the mainstream first with Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and the 10,000 hour rule which Gladwell repeatedly referred to, noting that that was roughly how many hours of practice were required to master something (Ericsson and Pool pushed back a bit on Gladwell’s oversimplification). Later books like David Epstein’s Range speaks to the value in diversifying pursuits.

But Anders Ericsson will be remembered not only for his contribution to our understanding of learning and mastery, but also for his humility, curiosity, and enthusiasm. He was known for opening his replies in correspondences with “Thank you for your email!!!!!”.

Thank you, Anders.