Talent: A difference that makes a difference

A young Andre Agassi
A young Andre Agassi
Studying sports training and skill acquisition, I often run headlong into the concept of ‘talent.’ When I suggest that athletic achievement demonstrates the extraordinary malleability of the human nervous system, the ability of our muscles to remodel, the refinement of athletes’ perceptual acuity, and even how our skeletons can be reconfigured by training, audience members often respond, ‘Yeah, but what about innate talent?’

Or, confronted by the yawning gap between elite athletes’ performances and the ability of the average person, sceptics still want to focus on the slight differences among elites athletes (for example, Jon Entine’s book Taboo), suggesting that this tiny fraction of difference is the ‘innate’ part, the ‘talent.’ I can describe the years of arduous labour that go into producing elite-level achievement, the countless hours of training and sophisticated coaching, and someone will inevitably say, ‘Okay, but some people are just inherently good at sports, aren’t they?’

But as psychologist K. Anders Ericsson said in an interview in Fast Company (cited here by Dan Peterson), ‘The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that’s different is their innate abilities. There’s little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level.’

Obviously, certain dimensions of the body can affect one’s ability to participate in a sport like basketball or sumo at an elite level, or a genetic abnormality may create an unusual wrinkle in a metabolic or even a neural process, but research like Ericsson’s suggests that these sorts of traits are likely the exception rather than the rule. That is, even if there is a genetic trait that helps some Kenyan runners to excel, or gives an individual with photographic memory, or helps a free diver to endure oxygen deprivation, these cases do not confirm the folk idea that talent is innate (and thus likely genetic).

In this post, I want consider the difference that makes a difference. That is, how the concept of talent itself actually affects the unfolding and compounding of developmental variation, helping extreme ability to emerge (and de-motivating those who don’t demonstrate early ‘promise’). Whether or not ‘talent’ exists—and I’m profoundly skeptical—believing that it does is a good foundation for exaggerating variation in skilled ability.

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Triune Ethics: On Neurobiology and Multiple Moralities

Darcia Narvaez
Editor’s Note: The following essay by Darcia Narvaez is based on her paper Triune Ethics: The Neurobiological Roots of Our Multiple Moral Personalities, which was part of the Notre Dame Symposium on Character and Moral Personality. You can obtain all the conference papers online, including Daniel Cervone, Ross Thompson, Dan McAdams, and others.

Darcia Narvaez is associate professor of psychology at Notre Dame and executive director of the Notre Dame Collaboration for Ethical Education.

Triune Ethics: The Neurobiological Roots of Our Multiple Moral Personalities

By Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D.

Triune Ethics is an interdisciplinary theory whose goals are to link moral psychology to affective neuroscience, help explain individual differences in moral functioning, and suggest some initial conditions for moral development. It is also an approach that can be linked to social relationships, conditions and situations, thus providing a biosocial view of moral action.

Three types of ethics can drive human morality, as I outline in this 2008 paper on neurobiology and our multiple moralities (pdf). These are based on different affectively-based moral stances that persons can take: one oriented to security (the Ethic of Security) and focused on self-preservation through safety, and personal and ingroup dominance. Another is oriented to emotional engagement with others (the Ethic of Engagement), particularly through caring relationships and social bonds. The third I call the Ethic of Imagination, which is focused on creative ways to think and act socially. While these labels are not all inclusive, they do seem to capture three different ways of co-existing with others in the social landscape.

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Wednesday Round Up #63

Favs, brain and anthro this week. Enjoy.

Top of the List

Jonah Lehrer, Don’t! The Science of Self Control
Lehrer delivers a great essay in The New Yorker, based primarily on the work of Walter Mischel and his studies with kids working at delayed gratification. Or if you want to see the marshmallow test in action, check out youtube videos: marshmellow struggles #1 and marshmellow struggles #2

Benedict Carey, Judging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets
Finally someone who says that all the facial tick/eye movement stuff about lying is overblown. Focusing on content matters. Which actually sounds rather similar to good interviewing technique in ethnography.
Don’t miss the podcast, The Takeaway, which is embedded on the left side of the page (can’t find a link myself) – Carey explains the technique in more detail there, even showing it in action.

Tom Simonite, Innovation: Software to Track Our Emotional Outbursts
“Sentiment analysis” tools – analyzing the emotional content of what we write. I’m actually thinking this could develop into data analysis for social science researchers. In other words, we’re seeing the emergence of automated content analysis.

Daniel Brown, Nature Walk #4.4 – Plants and Fungi
Some beautiful photos from a recent walk by the man behind Biochemical Soul

Mark Hoofnagle, Obesity – A New Study and What It Means to Be a Healthy Weight
Really good overview of a recent meta-analysis. Gives a very clear outline of what science says about being overweight and health consequences. Basic conclusion – being morbidly obese is really bad, but most people will probably choose to live with the more minor consequences of being overweight.

NPR, “Self Comes to Mind”: Your Brain on Music
Hear the concert by Antonio Damasio and Bruce Adolphe!

Brain

Nagraj Sambrani, New Tree of Animals Suggests Nervous System Evolved Only Once in Animal History
Hoxful Monsters shares research on how we are all just like sponges

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Daphne Merkin: A Journey through Darkness

Daphne Merkin

It is a sparkling day in mid-June, the sun out in full force, the sky a limpid blue. I am lying on my back on the grass, listening to the intermittent chirping of nearby birds; my eyes are closed, the better to savor the warmth on my face. As I soak up the rays I think about summers past, the squawking of seagulls on the beach and walking along the water with my daughter, picking out enticing seashells, arguing over their various merits. My mind floats away into a space where chronology doesn’t count…

So opens Daphne Merkin’s recounting of her life with severe depression. A Journey through Darkness is the feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine. On that sparkling day in mid-June, Daphne was on a “fresh air” break in The Patients’ Park & Garden, the all-concrete highlight of her latest clinic.

Merkin recounts her life, an intractable life, in this moving essay. She mixes in recounting her latest stay in a clinic with reflections on depression and how this illness has shaped her life in such fundamental ways. Here are two pieces that spoke to me.
Daphne Merkin 2

This is the worst part of being at the mercy of your own mind, especially when that mind lists toward the despondent at the first sign of gray: the fact that there is no way out of the reality of being you, a person who is forever noticing the grime on the bricks, the flaws in the friends — the sadness that runs under the skin of things, like blood, beginning as a trickle and ending up as a hemorrhage, staining everything. It is a sadness that no one seems to want to talk about in public, at cocktail-party sorts of places, not even in this Age of Indiscretion.

–//–

This was enraging in and of itself — the fact that severe depression, much as it might be treated as an illness, didn’t send out clear signals for others to pick up on; it did its deadly dismantling work under cover of normalcy. The psychological pain was agonizing, but there was no way of proving it, no bleeding wounds to point to. How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism.

Link to A Journey through Darkness