Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.

Research has also shown that skilled adult chess players—even grandmasters—do not have systematically higher IQs than other adults with similar levels of education. Nor is there any correlation between the IQs of highly skilled chess players and their chess ratings. As strange as it seems to those of us who have grown up with the tortured-but-brilliant fictional characters who excel at chess, all of the evidence says that higher intelligence is not correlated with better chess playing among adults.

One benefit that a young student—or anyone, really—gets from developing mental representations is the freedom to begin exploring that skill on his or her own.

you don’t build mental representations by thinking about something; you build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over.

If you teach a student facts, concepts, and rules, those things go into long-term memory as individual pieces, and if a student then wishes to do something with them—use them to solve a problem, reason with them to answer a question, or organize and analyze them to come up with a theme or a hypothesis—the limitations of attention and short-term memory kick in. The student must keep all of these different, unconnected pieces in mind while working with them toward a solution.

creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time

First, while the adult brain may not be as adaptable in certain ways as the brain of the child or adolescent, it is still more than capable of learning and changing.

The most obvious performance issues are those that involve physical abilities. In the general population physical performance peaks around age twenty.

Not surprisingly, Bloom reported that very few families could afford to have more than one child pursue this level of performance. Not only is it expensive, but it can be almost a full-time job for a parent to support the student in this pursuit—driving to and from practice during the week, providing transportation to competitions on the weekend, and so on

The best teachers didn’t focus on the rules for solving particular problems but rather encouraged their students to think about general patterns and processes—the why more than the how.