Peak - Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool - Chapter 2

Chapter – 2

Harnessing Adaptability

According to Ericsson, if you are body builder it’s easier to track the changes in your biceps, triceps. quadriceps, pecs, delts, lats, traps, abs, glutes, calves and hamstrings.

If you are running, biking or swimming to enhance endurance, you could track your progress by your heart-rate, your breathing, and things like that.

But how could you measure your mental advancement? Let’s say, you have become an expert in algebra or some music instrument?

Difficult, right? Because you can’t develop six-pack on your forehead.

And, in case you think, there isn’t much going on in your brain, you are not alone.

But then, make no mistake. There’s a growing evidence of that suggest that brain muscles expand in response to various sorts of training just like your muscles and cardiovascular systems in response to physical training.

The Brains of London Taxi Drivers  

It’s not easy to become a London taxi driver. (And by the way, if you have landed in London for the first time it’s better to hire a Taxi, as the roads are really criss-crossed that could even baffle a GPS system.)

You need remember no fewer than twenty-five thousand streets all within the six-mile radius of Charing Cross. On top of it, you also need to remember small and big landmarks as well.

Given that taxi drivers have to remember so much information, these folks have to appear for one of the toughest exams administered by Transport of London

To master the knowledge of streets, cabbies are known to spend years driving from place to place, usually by motorbike, taking notes of places. However, the first step is master 320 runs in the guidebook provided to taxi-driver candidates. And, they so go around all these 320 places, which fall within the 6 miles radius of the Charing Cross

Half of the prospective drivers end up dropping out, but those who have earned their licenses have internalized London to a degree that Google Maps won’t match up.  

And even after earning their license, the cabbies keep honing and increasing their knowledge of the London streets.

The eventual memory and navigational skills developed by these taxi drivers is pretty astonishing, and so it comes as no surprise that psychologists are quite astonished by the minds of London Taxi drivers, particularly those interested in honing of navigational skills.

Eleanor Maguire, a scientist at University College London studied the brains of sixteen male taxi drivers and then compared them with the brains of 50 other males who were non-tax—drivers. She particularly studied the hippocampus (sea-horse shaped part of the brain involved in the development of memories).  The part of the brain is particularly used in remembering the location of things.

Hippocampus and Hippocampi

Hippocampi is part of the Hippocampus that helps in remembering the location of things. A person actually has two hippocampi, one of either side of the brain. And birds, that store food at different locations, apparently have 30 percent more hippocampus than birds that don’t. This means hippocampus is flexible.

Maguire also found that a particular part of the hippocampus – the posterior or rear part – was larger in the taxi drivers than in any other subjects. And if one compared the brains of taxi drivers with that of the London bus drivers it was found that posterior hippocampi of the taxi drivers were significantly larger than the same parts of the bus drivers. Why? Because, unlike the Taxi drivers, the bus drivers plied in the same route over and over again and never had to look for an alternate route.

The years spent by taxi drivers in mastering the knowledge had enlarged precisely that part of the brain that is responsible from navigating from one place to another.

Maguire’s study, published in 2011, is considered to the most dramatic evidence we have that the human brains grows and changes in response to intense training.

Adaptability

It’s possible to shape the brain – your brain, my brain, and anybody’s brain – in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate training.

One study on rats, wherein 112 different genes were turned on when the workload on a particular muscle in the rear legs of the rats was sharply increased. The eventual result was that rat’s muscles got strengthened so they could handle the increased workload. They had being pushed outside the comfort zone, and the muscles responded by getting strong to establish a new comfort zone. Homeostasis had been reestablished.   

That is how the body’s desire for homeostasis could be harnessed to drive changes – push it hard enough and long enough and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.

However, to keep changes happening you need to keep upping the ante: run farther, run faster, run uphill. If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.

Shaping The Brain

Could it be possible that Einstein was born with beefier-than-usual inferior parietal lobules which contributed to his mathematical geniuses? You might think so, but the researchers who carried out the study on the size of that part of the brain in mathematicians and nonmathematicians found that the longer someone had worked as a mathematician, the more gray matter he or she had in the right inferior parietal lobule – which would suggest that the increased size was a product of extended mathematical thinking, not something the person was born with.

Bent-twig effect

If you push a small twig slightly away from its normal pattern of growth, you can cause major change in the ultimate location of the branch that grows from the twig; pushing on a branch that is already developed has much less effect.

Building Your Own Potential

We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop gray matter or white matter or to rewire entire sections in the way than an aspiring London Taxi driver or violin student might. And, for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.