topics: |  cognitive | neuro-psychology | brain | subconscious

This book ties up two threads - a. your birth age cohort affects your interest in sports, and b. if you spend enough time at it you can be a genius in any sport. Enough time = 20 hour per week for 20 years.

The heart of the argument is that success breeds success. As a child you find X interesting. You work at X. You become good at it. You receive feedback, you become better at it.

X may be violin playing, soccer, or chess.

It is not an inborn talent that drives you towards X. It may also be your relative age w.r.t. your cohort at school. Say, the boys who are somewhat older (just below the age cutoff imposed in most cultures) - tend to be better at sports than the others who are a few months their junior. Then these boys do a bit better, are coached a bit more, find themselves happier doing more of it, and end up becoming the greats. This is empirically validated by the finding that more Canadian ice hockey players have birthdates in the Jan-Feb range than in other months -and it drops as you get younger. [see figure below]

In the end, if you get to have 1000 hours a year of practice for 10 years, you become a genius in that area. This is a key result from research in the area of expertise. It is certainly true of chess grandmasters. In fact, it has been validated in wide ranging studies of expertise.

image: wiki: Relative age effect

The nature of expertise

In his 1991 book, Toward a general theory of expertise Karl Ericsson compiles evidence that the development of expertise in chess, physics, medicine, dance, sport, music, etc - all involve processes that build more and more compact representations of complex processes involving many strands of input and the complex responses to it.

You show a grandmaster a complex chess position for about 5 seconds and
she will reconstruct the whole board.  Do this for an average good chess
player, they won't be able to do it even after double the time.  This
suggests that the grandmaster doesn't think of the board as 30-odd
pieces.  She sees some groupings or formations, technically called
"chunks" - and she has thousands of chunks memorized.  So every board is
a set of 3 or 4 chunks that can be recognized in an instant.

It's like storing phone numbers or reading.  You can't remember ten
random digits.  But if your area code is 518, and the exchange is 845,
then most of us can remember 1-518-845-2136 as a set of six chunks - 518,
845, and the four digits.  As we become better and better at a task,
e.g. reading, our subconscious - which is really the boss - learns to
cluster elements (letters) together to form chunks (syllables, words).  

Also it learns what to expect, so the choices of possible inputs becomes
narrower. 

That's hwo we cna rdea sntenecs taht hvae tberrile sllpenigs.

And that's how sports heroes seem so superhuman.  It's just that they
have prepared their bodies (and brains). 

And while on the theme of expertise, here is a movie that underlines
the point, which traces the chess development of grandmaster Susan
Polgar.  It also shows a number of other experiments including one by
Anders Ericsson: My brilliant mind - Make Me A Genius, by National
Geographic: 



And as for the birth-month, it simply makes things easier to get those
incredibly many hours of practice.

So may be there is more to sun signs than we had thought of!

Excerpts

1. The Matthew Effect

	For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have
	abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that
	which he hath.  --Matthew 25:29.

the rich shall get richer and the poor, poorer yet.
similarly, early success breeds bigger and bigger successes.

but it must all begin with a piece of good fortune.  MG starts by
recounting how in sport after sport, the top athletes tend to be born
just after the school-year cutoff - so they are just a shade bigger
than their cohorts.


distribution of birth-months of players in two Canadian major junior hockey
leagues (the Ontario Junior Hockey League and the Western Hockey League).

 	Source: Barnsley RH, Thompson AH, Barnsley PE (1985). Hockey success
	and birth-date: The relative age effect. Journal of the Canadian
	Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation,
	Nov.-Dec., 23-28.
	image from http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/Relage.htm

Werner F. Helsen, Janet L. Starkes, and Jan van Winckel, 2000, 
Effects of a Change in Selection  Year on Success in Male Soccer Players,
American Journal of Human Biology 12, no. 6 (2000):729-735

Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey found a "huge effect in
4th grader math scores in Trends in International Mathematics
and Science Study, (TIMSS).  ... among fourth
graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between
four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest
children. - p.10

	At four-year colleges in the United States — the highest stream of
	postsecondary education — students belonging to the relatively
	youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6
	percent. That initial difference in maturity doesn't go away with
	time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial
	disadvantage is the difference between going to college — and having a
	real shot at the middle class — and not. 29

[Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey, 2006, _The Persistence of Early Childhood
  Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects_, Quarterly
  Journal of Economics 121(4): 1437-72. ]

3. The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1

Lewis Madison Terman
Terman's Termites: A group of genius school-children studied by . His study surprisingly showed that intellect is not a good indicator
of future success.

Henry L. Minton, "Charting Life History: Lewis M. Terman's
Study of the Gifted" in The Rise of Experimentation in American
Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988); Joel N. Shurkin, Terman's Kids (New York: Little, Brown,
1992); and May Seagoe, Terman and the Gifted (Los Altos: Kauffman,
1975).


see also:
Liam Hudson, 1967: Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English
Schoolboy (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967).
: discusses the limitations of IQ tests.  "is an absolute delight to read."

NYT: The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly

Stephen J. Dubner  / Steven D. Levitt
May 7, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

On recent English youth teams, half of the elite teenage soccer
players were born in January, February or March, with the other half
spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth
players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4
players born in the last three. 

the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson
determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a
C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until
your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting
specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on
technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers
in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano
playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and
darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics
and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory
experiments with high achievers.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to
choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't
love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most
people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they
often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent
for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire
to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them
better.

"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is
that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were
born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone
could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot
of time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal
potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the
gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of
us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the
player he was.

Ericsson's conclusions seem to have broad applications... e.g. for
medical training.  Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform
worse the longer they are out of medical school.  Surgeons, however, are
an exception.  That's because they are constantly exposed to two key
elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific
goal-setting.

The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a
mammogram, she doesn't know for certain if there is breast cancer or
not. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or years
later, when no cancer develops. Without meaningful feedback, a doctor's
ability actually deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of
training. "Imagine a situation where a doctor could diagnose mammograms
from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for
each case," he says. "Working in such a learning environment, a doctor
might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of
normal practice."

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