The Talent Code

The Talent Code is a book by Daniel Coyle.  It’s got some good stories in it.  But I think it’s terribly misleading.

For one thing, Coyle tries to make a case for myelination of nerve circuits as being a key to talent.  But that’s actually backwardly-causal.  An increase in practice causes increased myelination of nerve circuits, not vice versa.  Myelination of nervous cells is essentially similar to the formation of callouses on palms after repeated heavy labor.  The repeated exposure to stress causes the cells to protect themselves by increasing their buffer.  It’s adaptation…but not causation.

Coyle tries to attach early-childhood experience to increased myelination, which would lead to increased activity.  But his arguments are incredibly weak, statistically speaking.  He says that highly motivated people in history lost a parent at an early age, hence their heightened drive to survive.  However, up until the advent of modern medicine, many people (I’d like to say “most”) lost a parent at an early age, either through war, illness, or the labor of childbirth itself.  How meaningful is the statement?

Coyle also suggests that perhaps it’s the child’s place in the family.  Younger children have to “keep up” with their elder siblings.  Maybe.  But how many successful only children have there been?

While he admits that his approach isn’t scientific, it leads me to wonder, then, exactly what his approach is, and how and why it got published.

It seems that these types of science books come out in waves.  Some journalist catches onto a nice idea, gets approval for a book deal, and other publishers jump on the bandwagon.  Coyle’s book is one of three that I have read in the past three years about talent – the other two being Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and “Talent is Overrated,” by Geoff Colvin.

Gladwell’s book presented some interesting stories about the amount of luck behind the life-history of the people we often think were “born great” think of as “successful.”  Colvin’s book places the entire onus of greatness on practice.

All three books were released within a year of each other, and all three suffer from the same problem – none of them were written by anyone with expertise (or “talent”) in the field of motor learning, learning, or movement science.

What you get are some vague ideas about what talent might be.  You’re told to practice more.  And even then, you might not be in the right place at the right time, or get the right breaks to really “succeed.”

In the end, it’s completely meaningless.  While you may be enlightened about the factors contributing to what you used to attribute to “talent” (maybe some genetic predispositions, deliberate practice over years, lucky breaks through life), you leave with no specific understanding of how to increase your own talent at the things you want to do.

I highly recommend all three of these books.  I thought they were each great in their own way.  But if you’re looking to improve your talent at something, go out and find a good teacher, and start practicing.