The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (47 page)

“Though physiology may indicate respiratory and cardiovascular limits to muscular effort,” commented Bannister, “psychological and other factors beyond the ken of physiology set the razor’s edge of defeat or victory and determine how closely the athlete approaches the absolute limits of performance.” (Bannister, “Muscular effort,” pp. 222–25.)

There’s also a national pride that works both to give Kenyan runners a psychological boost and to intimidate non-Kenyans. The emergent aura of invincibility around the Kenyan runners “cannot be overestimated,” says sports psychologist Bruce Hamilton. (Hamilton, “East African running dominance,”. p. 393)

    
“The past century has witnessed a progressive, indeed remorseless improvement in human athletic performance
”:
Noakes, “Improving Athletic Performance or Promoting Health Through Physical Activity.”

Actual record times for the mile: 4:36.5 (1865), 3:43.13 (1999).
Infoplease.com
.

    
The one-hour cycling distance record increased from 26 kilometers in 1876 to 49 kilometers in 2005
.

March 25, 1876, F. L. Dodds, 26.5 kilometers (Burke,
High-tech Cycling
.)

July 19, 2005, Ondrej Sosenka, 49.7 kilometers (Willoughby, “Czech Ondrej Sosenka Sets New World One-hour Cycling Record of 49.7 km.”)

    
The 200-meter freestyle swimming record decreased from 2:31 in 1908 to 1:43 in 2007.

Actual times: 2:31.6, 1:43.86. (Agenda Diana swimming records Web site.)

    
Technology and aerodynamics are a part of the story, but the rest of it has to do with training intensity, training methods, and sheer competitiveness and desire
.

University of Cape Town sports biologist Timothy David Noakes lists his “15 Laws of Training”:

1. Train frequently all year round.
   

2. Start gradually and train gently.
   

3. Train first for distance, only later for speed.
   

4. Don’t set yourself a daily schedule.
   

5. Alternate hard and easy training.
   

6. At first, try to achieve as much as possible on a minimum of training.
   

7. Don’t race in training, and run time-trials and races longer than 16 km only infrequently.
   

8. Specialize.
   

9. Incorporate base training and peaking (sharpening).
   

10. Don’t overtrain.
    

11. Train under a coach.
    

12. Train the mind.
    

13. Rest before a big race.
    

14. Keep a detailed logbook.
    

15. Understand the holism of training.
    

Noakes, “Improving Athletic Performance or Promoting Health Through Physical Activity.”

    
They are participants in a culture of the extreme, willing to devote more, to ache more, and to risk more in order to do better
.

   In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the extreme athletic culture has yielded both short-term dangers (such as “overtraining syndrome”) and long-term dangers such as premature skeletal aging and psychological damage. (Budgett, “ABC of sports medicine,” 465–68.)

CHAPTER 7:
HOW TO BE A GENIUS (OR MERELY GREAT)

PRIMARY SOURCES

Oyama, Susan, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray.
Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution
. MIT Press, 2003.

Csikszentmihályi, Mihály, Kevin Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen.
Talented Teenagers
. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER NOTES

    
“Are [people] conceived with the capacity to play a number of qualitatively different developmental tunes
”:
Bateson, “Behavioral Development and Darwinian Evolution,” p. 153.

    
“SKYLAR: How did you do that
?
”
Good Will Hunting
. Directed by Gus Van Sant. Big Gentlemen Limited Partnership. 1998.

    
Neighbors of the Beethovens … recall seeing a small boy
:
Morris,
Beethoven
, p. 16.

    
Today, talk of giftedness still pervades our language, even among scientists who know better
.

David Moore writes:

It appears that merely comprehending what genes actually do does not necessarily lead to a rejection of genetic determinism, because in spite of evidence to the contrary, even some biologists continue to write as if developmental processes can be genetically determined. (Moore, “Espousing interactions and fielding reactions,” p. 332.)

    
Even in a land of free choice, we are mostly shaped by habits, messages, schedules, expectations, social infrastructure, and natural surroundings that are not exclusively our own
.
Many of these elements are passed down from generation to generation with little or no change and are difficult or impossible to alter.

   Many people who stand out as being extraordinary do so because of choices they have made to stand radically apart from cultural norms: they may allocate time and resources in a very different way from their friends and neighbors.

    
“talent is much more widely distributed than its manifestation would suggest
”:
Csikszentmihályi, Rathunde, and Whalen,
Talented Teenagers
, p. 2.

    
The source of motivation is often mysterious, but not always
.
One of the quirks of human emotion and psychology is that deep motivation can have more than one possible origin. A person can become joyfully inspired, spiritually devoted, or deeply resentful; motivation can be selfish or vengeful, or arise out of a desperation to prove someone right or wrong; it can be conscious or unconscious.

Mihály Csikszentmihályi suggests two very different points of origin:

The relationship between early family environment and later creative achievement is rather ambiguous. On the one hand, a context of optimal support and stimulation seems necessary. On the other hand, the lives of some of the greatest creative geniuses contradict this notion, being full of early trauma and tragedy. On the basis of longitudinal studies of young artists and talented adolescents, as well as a retrospective study of mature creative individuals, we explore the outcomes of various family environments. It seems that the two extremes of optimal and pathological experience are both represented disproportionately in the backgrounds of creative individuals. However, creative persons whose childhood was more traumatic appear less satisfied with themselves and their work. So, although a difficult childhood might be more conducive to creative achievement, it does not seem to lead to a serene adulthood. Our study of talented teenagers showed that students who came from a “complex” family environment that provided them with both support and stimulation were more likely to take on new challenges in their area of talent and to enjoy working on and developing their skills. Such students reported feeling happy more often than those from other family types, and were significantly happier when spending time alone or in productive work. (Csikszentmihályi and Csikszentmihályi, “Family influences on the development of giftedness,” pp. 187–200.)

    
They wish they had done more
:
gotten more education, worked harder, persevered: Hattiangadi, Medvec, and Gilovich, “Failing to act,” pp. 175–85.

    
“I wake up sometimes and say, ‘What the heck happened to me?’ It’s like a nightmare,” American runner Abel Kiviat told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1990 about his disappointing silver medal in the 1,500-meter Olympic run
.
Kiviat was ninety-one when he made this statement—his performance had occurred more than seventy years earlier: Medvec, Madey, and Gilovich, “When less is more,” p. 609.

    
Charles Darwin had so little to show for himself as a teenager that his father said to him, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family
.
”

   At age twenty-two, Charles Darwin set out on the HMS
Beagle
, embarking on a voyage that would lead to one of the most important scientific theories in human history. (Simonton,
Origins of Genius
, p. 109.)

    
To know the particulars of a favorite artist or athlete’s ordeal is to be continually reminded of uncharted paths and oddball ideas that only later become recognized as genius
.
This experience is magnified by examining rough drafts of masterpiece books, paintings, and albums.

   Prime examples of a great work of art in progress:

• Peter F. Neumeyer’s
  The Annotated Charlotte’s Web—
  a line-by-line look at all the work that went into E. B. White’s
  Charlotte’s Web
  .
  

• The Beatles’ legendary “Strawberry Fields” demos.
  

    
“how beautiful things grow out of shit
”:
Brian Eno, in the Daniel Lanois documentary
Here Is What It Is
.

    
“Most students who become interested in an academic subject do so because they have met a teacher who was able to pique their interest
”:
Csikszentmihályi, Rathunde, and Whalen,
Talented Teenagers
, p. 7.

   As for me, I’ve been lucky enough to have several life-changing teachers: