What You Fire Is What You Forge

I have been letting ideas about practice, how to gain skill, how to gain mastery, and how to gain expertise percolate for some time now.  Because what’s the point of learning a new skill, like scientific discovery, if you can’t practice it until you can do it well consistently?  I’ve been very worried about this idea of practice.  Mainly because, although I know how to practice, I don’t know how to practice best.

When I was younger, especially as a student, I had time.  It was my job to practice.  Homework was built-in to my days.  Now that I’m a researcher, I don’t get allotted practice time.  I have to treat practice like a second, part-time, unpaid job.  That means every practice session needs to count.

I was feeling a little peeved and dispirited about this lack of time, which got me to thinking about adults who do have dedicated practice as part of their paid day job: professional athletes and professional musicians.  Initially, this led to binge watching documentaries on professional American football teams, just oozing jealousy as I watched them practice, practice, practice, both on and off season.

It turns out turning to sports proved to be a useful trigger for finding a new resource.  Whenever I get in a funk about discovery, my go-to solution is to read a nonfiction book.  They are easier to read than peer-reviewed journal articles, but more substantive than magazine and news articles.  The best non-fiction books give you references to research papers, so you can explore further once you’ve gotten an overview.  In other words, popular nonfiction books are a good place to start when you’re a beginner or have little time or energy.  It’s best to save the research articles for when you are more focused and more knowledgeable.

So, hot on the heels of envying American NFL football players with practice as part of their job description, I found a nonfiction book to soothe my temper, written by sports journalist Daniel Coyle and called “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born, It’s Grown”.  Primarily through an investigation of exceptionally skilled professional athletes, and in conversation with neurologists, Coyle devises the following hypotheses:

“(1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal travelling through a chain of neurons [in the brain] —a circuit of nerve fibers.  (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.  (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.”

(D. Coyle, The Talent Code, p. 32)

The myelin role works like this: when you first acquire a neural network the parts that carry signals are “bare”, like an exposed electrical wire that leaks signal.  As you use this network to execute the skill and fail, your brain recognizes the system needs improvement to meet the demands placed on it.  One of those improvements is wrapping a substance called myelin around the nerve fibers, like insulating an electrical wire.  The more times this occurs, the stronger and faster you can fire that skill.  Practice enough in this deep, thoughtful, responsive state, working in the zone where you make mistakes and correct them, and you can become “talented.”  As Coyle puts it, “Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological imperative” (p. 34).

In case you’re wondering about age:

“[We] continue to experience a net gain of myelin until around the age of fifty, when the balance tips toward loss.  [But we] retain the ability to myelinate throughout life—thankfully, 5 percent of [the needed cells] remain immature, always ready to answer the call.”

(D. Coyle, The Talent Code, p.45).

But the real beauty is that:

“Myelin is universal.  One size fits all skills…Myelin is meritocractic: circuits that fire get insulated…To put it another way, myelin doesn’t care who you are—it cares what you do.”

(D. Coyle, The Talent Code, p.44)

(Just another reason to “Feed the White Wolf” if you’re going spend time training your brain for discovery.)

This gave me an immediate possibility for how to make the most of my daily discovery practice sessions.  First, fire up those skills frequently.  Second, work at the edge of failure and correct those mistakes ASAP.  The idea of getting it wrong to get it right is contrary to my physics training.  Usually you get a lecture (or a seminar) and some training, read something, and then you hope to get the problems right–you don’t actively solve problems and rejoice at errors, let alone seek out opportunities to make errors.

But now I see it this way: at my daily practice sessions, where I take one discovery technique and apply it to a random physics question (at the moment, the questions I discuss with my physics students in classes), I need to push my ability to apply the technique until I make some mistake.  At that point the neurons are firing, the signal is sent that the system is failing, and by actively seeking out and correcting an error I am building a better brain for discovery.

So, my reading of Coyle’s book is that you want to handle your neurons this way to become “talented” at a skill:

1. Fire them frequently (practice)
2. Force them to fail (work at the edge of your skill level)
3. Feed them feedback (error correct on the spot; don’t move on until you’ve got it right)
4. Fire them again (do it right)

The more you fire your synapses at the edge of your discovery skill level, the more your brain will help you craft a better skill set with which to discover things.  It’s something iron smiths have known for millennia: what you fire is what you forge.