Musicians, actors, artists, athletes, and mathletes alike all find themselves pondering the same question from time to time: what IS talent? In an age filled with prodigies that seem to be growing in ability by each generation and each minute, success and ability are areas that occupy many people’s thoughts. What is it that creates a sensational talent? Is it something about that person? Is it something about that person’s training? It seems that every book and every expert has different opinions on the matter. Ranging from Malcolm Gladwell’s work-ethic and practice-driven perspective in the best-selling book Outliers to the general opinion that talent is inborn, there are a dizzying array of perspectives on the matter. While it has seemed that the recent zeitgeist is tending toward work-based perspectives–tending to say that experts are made, not born–a recent study has planted a flag firmly in the camp of born talent.
David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University and Elizabeth J. Meinz of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville have published a study in Current Directions in Psychological Science that indicates that, while practice is important, certain general abilities, such as working memory capacity, the ability to store and process information at the same time, which correlates with success in many cognitive tasks, from abstract reasoning to language learning, are all, in the words of the article, “highly heritable.”
Here is a taste of the findings:
In one experiment Hambrick and Meinz tested 57 pianists with a wide range of deliberate practice under their belts, from 260 to more than 31,000 hours, to see how well they did on sight-reading—playing a piece from a score they’d never seen before. Those who had practiced more did better. In fact, practice—even specific sight-reading practice—predicted nearly half of the differences in performance across the subjects. But working memory capacity still had a statistically significant impact on performance. In other words, regardless of amount of deliberate practice, working memory capacity still mattered for success in the task. The psychologists surmised that the capacity influences how many notes a player can look ahead as she plays, an important factor in sight-reading.
The findings were not limited to music, either. In a study of Ph.D holders’ SAT math scores, the study found that those who scored in the 99.9th percentile at age 13 were 18 times more likely to go on to earn a PhD than those who scored better than only 99.1 percent of their teenage peers. “Even at the highest end, the higher the intellectual ability—and by extension, the higher the working memory capacity—the better,” says Hambrick.
So what’s a hard-working musician to make of this study in conjunction with all of the other studies? Is it practice or ability? Is it nature or nurture? Practice is important, and general abilities are there to be made the most of–there’s no recipe for talent outside of what you make of it.
There’s practice, and there’s genetic stuff, but there’s also the reflexive processes of self-idenitity, which I’ve written a bit about here: http://www.helpingyouharmonise.com/talented
The problem, I tend to think, with theories of talent that are focused on heritability is that they encourage people to give up early if they hit a bump in a road, because they believe they ‘haven’t got it’. And, whilst genetic stuff may play a significant role, it’s not something we can do anything about, so we might as well ignore it for educational purposes and focus on the areas we can affect.