Bounce — Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success; Summarized

A book summary of Bounce by Matthew Syed.

Bounce by Matthew Syed

286 pages

A book about high achievement and what we can learn about it by studying some of the world’s highest achievers both past and present. Talent isn’t what we think it is. Most examples were from sports, since Syed himself was a table tennis master. His book is divided into two parts. In Part I, Syed really crystalizes the work of other researchers in this field such as Anders Ericsson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Carol Dweck, in order to prove the point that purposeful practice, intrinsic motivation, [and a little luck] create world-class performers. In Part II, he covers subjects of the mind that relate to psychology, performance, and misconceptions, while asking very thought provoking questions.

The Myth of Meritocracy

Matthew Syed illustrates an important point about the influence circumstances, such as being born in a particular place or into a specific family, have on the early development of people that end up becoming high achievers by talking about the particular set of circumstances that enabled him to eventually become the number one British table tennis player in 1995. {this was fascinating and makes one ask questions related to destiny}

He introduces 4 key circumstances that ultimately created an environment that enabled his success in table tennis.

1. His parents bought a regulation sized table tennis table and put it in their garage in 1978 while Syed was young. Basically, his parents made the choice for him that he would at least experiment with table tennis (this is a theme that will repeat later). He claims his parents did/do not have a proper explanation for buying the table in the first place.
2. His brother, Andrew, who is older than he, came to love table tennis as much as Syed. They would play and practice incessantly.
3. He went to a school with a teacher named Peter Charles who was obsessed with sports and, most of all, table tennis. “He was the nation’s top coach and a senior figure in the English Table Tennis Association.” Charters would actively recruit any youth with potential in any sport to join the local table tennis club, Omega.
4. There was a local tennis table club (“a one-table hut”) , called Omega, open 24 hours a day for the exclusive use of its members where Syed would train incessantly with his brother.

The Syeds uniquely shared the first two circumstances, but his neighbors also shared the last two which is increasingly important. He notes that on his street in the UK, Silverdale Rd., and the neighboring vicinity “produced more outstanding table tennis players than the rest of the nation (UK) combined”. His and his brother’s advantage of the first two circumstances gave them both a head start on their journey toward table tennis high achievement. (Syed became a two-time olympian and his brother, Andrew, won three national titles as a junior player).

Here he asserts that meritocracy — that achievement is driven by ability and hard work — is a myth. He believes practically everyone “who triumphs against the odds is, on closer inspection, a beneficiary of unusual circumstances.”

He notes that serendipity/luck/fate/destiny or whatever you’d like to call it, played a large hand in his success. He was born at the right place and at the right time, essentially. He cites Malcolm Gladwell who writes in his book, Outliers, about people of extraordinary ability — “[…] they are invariably beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”

Where does talent come from?

Practice, Syed asserts.

Alma mater shout out by Syed for the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson (FSU) in 1991 who sought to understand outstanding performance by gathering as much data as he could about three separate groups of violinists of differing ability from the Music Academy of West Berlin.

The result of his and his colleagues research was clear. While the differences in backgrounds, exposure, and interests were not statistically or systematically different, as he says,

“…there was one difference between the groups that was both dramatic and unexpected; indeed, it was so stark that it almost jumped out at Ericsson and his colleagues — the number of hours devoted to serious practice.”

The difference between the best violinists(a), good violinists(b), and those hoping to become music teachers(c), in terms of hours practiced, differed by 2,000 hours from good(b) to best(a) and 6,000 hours from music teachers(c) to best(a). In other words, the best violinists, on average, had practiced more than 6,000 hours more than those violinists who aspired to solely become music teachers by the time they all reached the academy.

/* This is something that I’ve heard over and over again from numerous sources. Gladwell makes note of this in Outliers, as does Syed in his book, when introducing the 10,000 hours of practice to get to mastery of any complex task, which he also notes in an interview with TFerriss is actually just the minimum amount of time he found, though his point often gets misconstrued as being the magic threshold when being quoted. Deliberate practice, as I’ve so often heard it said, or purposeful practice, as Syed eventually calls it, is what creates mastery, excellence, and real proficiency. Syed here is arguing just that and builds off the work of other researchers to synthesize this philosophy to the creation of high-achieving persons. */

Syed: “ The key point is that these improvements have not occurred because people are getting more talented: Darwinian evolution operates over much longer time span. They must have occurred, therefore, because people are practicing longer, harder (due to professionalism [SL: discipline]), and smarter. It is the quality and quantity of practice, not genes, that is driving progress.

/* The argument is not to be overlooked. All three things working together compound the effectiveness of practice. Time spent is just the minimum factor for improving performance in a given task. The other two are just as important, if not more. You may have heard the original saying modified to perfect practice makes perfect instead of just practice. Both the aspects of harder practice and smarter practice are keenly important to maximizing the time spent practicing and accelerating one’s practice. Just like in fitness, the body reacts almost exponentially better to high intensity training over steady state training. You have to push much harder to train at a high intensity and, furthermore, it is also your smartest way to train because you maximize the results for your time spent training. This is just one narrow example, but the point remains the same. */

Syed elaborates on these points and uses evidence from his own experiences and others to expound upon it later.

When dissecting the performance of someone like Roger Federer returning a service, Syed makes note of how ridiculous amounts of practice allow someone like him to chunk information based on experience and repetition in order to think and react so much faster than someone who lacks that experience. Chunking, the process by which the brain recalls sets of information instead of individual pieces, allows people to recognize patterns and literally think faster.

He also points out that most of the time, this experience and ability to think quicker doesn’t extend far from that person’s learned discipline. Putting a master table tennis player (Syed) on a regular tennis court with Michael Stitch (former Wimbledon champ) does not mean that Syed was then capable of returning Stitch’s service, despite needing reflexes in table tennis that are even faster than what is needed in tennis (when measuring reaction time to hit the ball from a table tennis service vs tennis service).

He uses other examples to further the point that people who have achieved mastery in some area, particularly a sport, are demonstrating knowledge and coordination that is almost exclusively a result of practice and not innate natural abilities.

Combinatorial explosion. Relating or understanding the entirety of information [sets] is “possible” because the cues being processed by experts are so subtle and relate to each other in such complex ways that it would take forever to codify them in their mind-boggling totality.

…Basically: there are too many combinations of different factors and information to analyze it all in order to make decisions (like a regularly programmed computer would; not AI). Instead, we make good decisions by “compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience.” A result of practice.

This concept was related by Syed to the 1996 chess match between IBM computer Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov, the best chess player in history. Although the machine (Deep Blue) could analyze tens of millions of moves a second, it was beat by the sentient Kasparov who could only analyze about 3 moves a second. It was Kaspy’s knowledge from experience that allowed him to discard much of that analysis and focus on what his experience and intuition was telling him.

Deep Blue would later be reprogrammed with greater processing power and, more importantly, data from opening games played by grandmasters over the last 100 years, in order to beat Kasparov.

The Myth of the Child Prodigy

/* I found this personally important because it humanized people we otherwise think of as vastly different from us. I develop Syed’s writing about Mozart and briefly cover Woods and Venus Williams, though Syed makes notes of the bios of others like Beckham, Bobby Fischer, Andre Agassi, and more.*/

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Began composing pieces for violin and piano at AGE 5. 10,000 hours of practice? The boy had barely been alive 10,000 hours.

Facts:

1. His father was Leopold Mozart — famous composer and performer.

2. His father started young Wolfgang in an intensive training program for composition and performance at the age of THREE.

3. Leopold was a pedagogue, meaning a teacher usually characterized by an emphasis on formalities and being strict, and was also “deeply interested in how much was taught to children.”

4. Leopold published a book on violin instruction same year Wolfgang was born. That book was “influential for decades.”

5. Wolfgang, naturally, lived with Leopold, aka his instructor.

6. According to psychologist Michael Howe, Wolf had accrued 3,500 hours of practice before his sixth birthday.

7. Mozart’s first work regarded as a masterpiece is his Piano Concerto №9, was composed at twenty-one.

“Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.”

Syed asserts that child prodigies are viewed in such an awe-struck manner because we compare them with other children who have not undergone the same training rigor and devotion to a practice, because “normal” kids are happily being a kid, playing games, riding a bike, and now, playing on an iPad.

Mozart’s first four piano concertos were written at the age of 11 and next three at the age of 16, but contained no original music. They were simply rearrangements of music of other composers. Syed asserts that his sickening dedication throughout his life led him to eventually become one of the greatest composers of all time, not some innate ability.

Tiger Woods

Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, was a maniac. He gave Tiger a golf club 5 days BEFORE HE TURNED 1. [dude, are you kidding me?]. Earl took him on his first outing when he was EIGHTEEN months olds. He was in his first competitive setting, a pitch and putt tournament in Cypress, Cali, at the age of TWO. When Tiger was FOUR, Earl hired a PRO to train him. The end of practice sessions would include competitive drills such as making 70 puts three feet from hole in a row. 10,000 hours ladies and gents. It is worth noting that Earl Woods was a former baseball player and Green Beret (#discipline).

Venus Williams:

Richard Williams, two years before Venus was born, DECIDED he would create a tennis champion [dude, what the {fuck}?]. Richard BECAME a tennis coach and watched videotapes of tennis stars, spoke to psychiatrists and tennis coaches.

“He taught himself and his wife to play tennis so they could hit with their daughters.”

Major key with ‘child prodigies’: the kids themselves have to have internal motivation and make an independent decision to devote themselves to that area. Venus and Serena were reported to constantly make it to the court before their father would. Tiger would ask his dad to play golf; not the other way around.

// The following is my favorite part of this book

Laszlo Polgar and human experimentation

Syed tells the mind-boggling story of a literal human experiment, as Syed calls it, where a couple, Laszlo and Klara Polgar from the small Hungarian town of Gyöngyös, decided they would prove the practice theory of expertise by having children and training them to become world-class chess players. They chose chess because it was an objective game based on performance and their results would be hard to refute. Polgar undertook this mission as an educational psychologist and an advocate of the practice theory of excellence — so much so that “a local government official told him to see a psychiatrist to ‘heal him of his delusions.’

The result?

Well, they had three daughters: Susan, Sofia, and Judit

You be the judge…

Susan “became the first woman player in history to reach the status of grandmaster.”

Sofia “won eight straight games in the Magistrale di Roma against many of the greatest male players” and had her performance rated “as the fifth greatest, by man or woman, in history.”

Judith “became the youngest-ever grandmaster — male or female — in history” & won the Hungarian championships in the same year (1991)

/* This story BLEW MY MIND. First of all, these girls had the chips stacked against them being women growing up in the 70s 80s and 90s in eastern Europe. The first daughter Susan was barred from playing in the 1986 World Championships (for men) even though she qualified. Classic older men with fragile egos thinking. Polgar KNEW children had the potential to unlock excellence through devotion to practice. He declared before any of his daughters were born that he would nurture world-class performers in something — which he chose to be chess after Susan was born. It is important to note that all of the girls had the intrinsic motivation to play chess and found it fun throughout their early development. */

He did it as you might expect. In a manner similar to Earl Woods, the children were bred to be chess players through rigorous deliberate practice, coaching, and experience.

The Path to Excellence

As noted earlier, hours practiced does not equate to excellence. If time were the only factor we would all be excellent drivers [I must humbly admit i’m an amazing driver ;].

“Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate to excellence.”

The concept of purposeful practice (i’ve been calling it deliberate) is identified by Syed, where practice that has the aim of the specific and never changing purpose of progress, is the kind necessary to achieve excellence. In other words, the quality of practice makes a huge difference whether or not you will actually improve at some complex task.

Expert practice “entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well — or even at all.”

Syed further ties in his own experience in table tennis to advance this point.

A famous Chinese table tennis player had retired and moved to England where he ended up coaching Syed using techniques that consistently pushed Syed’s limits of speed, movement, technique, anticipation, timing, and agility. He would make him react to multiple balls and increased the width of his end of the table creating an even greater strain. Syed explains he ended up training smarter.

This, you might recall, is one of the original elements he puts forth on the reason people improve to such high levels where high-achievers practice longer, harder, and smarter. High achievers aren’t just training longer than everyone else, but they are also pushing their limits more than non-achievers and training in ways that allow for more practice and skill development in the same training time (thus almost making their practice time even greater) // relate this back to the point I made earlier about high intensity training for fitness.

“World-class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach, but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached. Over time, through constant repetition and deep concentration, the gap will disappear, only for a new target to be created, just out of reach again.”

Syed cites various examples of training that push the limits in various sports like soccer, figure skating, table-tennis, and basketball. All examples to further the point that purposeful training / deliberate practice is directly correlated with high-achievement.

Practicing Smarter

The last and critical piece is the training/practicing smarter piece. An important theme in the high-achievers mentioned is the right training system: the knowledge (from a coach or instructor) and the environment (facilities, equipment, etc).

The right training system isn’t available to everyone and this is a key point. Syed had access to two top-level coaches for table tennis, basically by what can be classified as luck, consistent access to a table and people to play with, for instance. Most people don’t have those same advantages, so, again, there is a high influence on your success by your circumstances. In sports, there is no getting around having a good coach, because their knowledge on better training techniques and systems is indispensable for someone looking to progress.

Grey Matter Matters

Syed explains that our brains undergo actual physical transformations from sustained deliberate practice.

That, in effect, purposeful practice “also builds new neural connections, increases the size of specific sections of the brain, and enable the expert to co-opt new areas of gray matter in the quest to improve.”

He cites studies that have shown that the brain’s of high achievers are different than yours and I’s. Looking at concert pianists in 2005, brain scans found a “direct relationship between the numbers of hours practiced and the quantity of myelin,” “a substance that wraps around the nerve fibers and that can dramatically increase the speed with which signals pass through the brain.” The point, however, is not that these high-achievers, in this case concert pianists, were born with greater amounts of myelin, but that it is a response from the brain from all of the practice they have undergone.

Improve Feedback to Improve Practice

Specific to improving your practice (making it smarter), feedback on what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right is fundamental for overall improvement.

Having too many changing variables eliminates proper feedback. For instance, if you want to drive the ball in golf you might change your stance, but if you also change your alignment and backswing, you’ve eliminated the possibility of registering effective feedback on your shot. Having things you control for and measure against is critical for identifying weaknesses and strengths.

Measuring effectively is key to getting the best/most amount of feedback. Continuing the golf example, being videotaped or watched by a coach is an example of improving the feedback mechanisms.

Key: The expert in anything can purposefully reproduce some action and easily identify errors because there is no noise in the data. I.e. Tiger can reproduce a shot and identify his particular weaknesses.

Brain bite: We’ve got it backwards

Syed makes a rather important note that purposeful practice is only a zero-sum game in sports, where one person improving relative to his or her competitors equates to a win for him or her and a loss for the others. In all other fields, however, a person improving from purposeful practice, say at their job, can earn them more income and thus stimulate the economy. This is especially true if everyone at the workplace also practices purposefully and the entire company profits along with the individual employees, benefitting society as a whole. The irony, as Syed states, is that

“this is precisely the area in which purposeful practice is pursued [sports] with a vengeance, while it is all but neglected in the areas where we all stand to benefit.”

Mysterious Sparks and Life-Changing Mind-Sets

Introducing ‘Sparks’

Shaq: Momma told him “Later doesn’t always come to everybody” in response to him saying he would try harder later.

‘Those words snapped me into reality and gave me a plan.”

{he cites various other examples}

Psychologist Michael Rousell calls it a ‘spontaneous influence event’.

It takes thousands of hours to get to mastery… “but it is only those who care about the destination, ‘ whose motivation is internalized,’ who are ever going to get there.”

/* I believe this to be true. Sometimes, you hear the right thing at the right time and that can radically shift a person’s mindset, which shifts everything in that person’s life. */

On the theory of motivation:

Motivation by association. A small, barely noticed connection seeping deep into the subconscious and sparking a motivational response.

More important than a spark of motivation or motivation by association is sustained motivation…

It’s the difference between a growth and a find mindset.

Syed uses the work of famous psychologist and author of the book Mindset, Carol Dweck, to explain the insurmountably important point of why some people make it to mastery and others do not — having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.

Dweck ran an experiment to measure the differences in mindsets by measuring the performance of fifth and sixth grade students on a math questionnaire. She identified two groups of students: one that possessed a fixed-mindset and the other that possessed a growth mindset. The difference in the two was how students from each group responded to the difficult puzzles in the questionnaire.

The fixed mindset students blamed themselves and their abilities for an inability to answer the problems. They blamed their memory, intelligence and aptitude. The growth mindset kids didn’t blame anything for their failure and also didn’t view their failures as such.

More than 80% ‘maintained or improved the quality of their strategies during the difficult problems.’

In both groups, the questionnaire was set up to give easy problems for the first 8 questions followed by 4 hard ones, and despite performing well on the first eight, the fixed mindset group subsequently blamed their intellect for their difficulty. That was not so in the growth mindset students who remained optimistic and found ways to improve to answer the questions.

Deck ran a further experiment on framing things to young students again on the basis of intelligence vs performance.

“praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation, and it harms their performance.”

The difference between praising a child in Dweck’s experiment by saying things like “You’re smart at this” vs “You worked hard at this” made clear and drastic differences in their performances on tests they took for the experiment. To be sure, Dweck repeated her initial experiment three more times in different parts of the countries and increased variance in ethnic backgrounds.

…she also found that praise for effort is short-lived, and unless nurtured correctly, children will settle back into their default mindset before the praise.

Citadels of Excellence

Syed talks about environments that foster a growth mindset, which he calls citadels of excellence. He cites The Bollettieri Tennis Academy in FL that has produced champions like Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Anna Kournikova, and more.

/* Sharapova talks a lot about her time spent in the Bollettieri academy where she was nurtured to rise to her potential having just arrived from Europe with her father and no game plan at the age of 7, both in interviews [like TFerriss] and the book she “wrote”. */

He also cites the National Centre in Beijing where the China table tennis team practices, which is, as the various stories about it indicate, an atmosphere of “more intensity, more devotion, and a more vivid belief in how hard work translates into medals than any other table tennis team in the world.”

Counter example: Enron

To illustrate the opposite kind of environment, Syed talks about Enron [{fuckers}], and how they bred a culture of a fixed mindset that placed far too high of a value and importance on talent than hard work and growth. Based on how the culture of Enron is described in the book (which is taken from a few other examining sources, including, again, Gladwell) they sucked so hard because people were promoted solely based on how talented they were perceived at being. They adopted the philosophy of McKinsey consulting which placed too high an importance on talent in the workplace being the single factor that determined performance in relation to the competition. By making talent worshipped, Dweck explains

“Enron did a fatal thing: it created a culture that worshipped talent, thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented.”

It’s that kind of environment, as is asserted, which breeds behavior that will ruin a company. If you’re fired for your performance in relation to others as an indication of your talent (which was done routinely), you start hiding things, just as the company hid the truth about their earnings from investors and shareholders.

PART II — Paradoxes of the Mind

Drawing on experiences of top athletes and the research of Michael Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), Anne Harrington (Harvard), Timothy Gallwey (The Inner Game of Golf), Nicholas Humphrey (LSE).

Beliefs are potent. The placebo effect is real in sports and complex tasks just as it is true with medicine.

Religious belief has a powerful effect on believers. It is believing in something beyond the self. It helps remove doubt in critical moments.

“[…]excellence is not, on it’s own, sufficient for success. It is also necessary to translate one’s abilities into peak performance in the cauldron of competition with one’s livelihood, or at least one’s ego, on the line.”

Syed asserts that this art ‘…separates the best from the rest’.

The Psychology of Performance

Examining the relationship between mind and body under pressure.

Syed concludes that people who achieve success compared to non-achievers have “a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective.”

Medical Placebos

• US soldier Henry Beecher who wrote about using a saline solution when he ran out of anesthetic on the battlefield and yielded the same results. Described in his paper called “the Powerful Placebo.”
• Swiss doctor Ben Goldachre who successfully performed 1,600 thyroidectomies without anesthesia.
• Pills have different colors because they psychologically induce different effects in patients (as indicated by trials).

Dan Ariely “has shown that cheap painkillers are less effective than painkillers identical in every respect except for a more expensive price tag.”

Religious Placebo

Syed asserts that religion too has it’s own placebo effect. It is not the belief in a certain God that nets someone benefit in comparison to non-believers, but all people who have a sincere and proportional belief in that God receive the health and performance benefits of belief.

Karl Marx called religion “opium of the masses.”

Performance Placebo

“Doubt is the fundamental cause of error in sports,” Tim Gallwey.

Don’t listen to self-doubt.

Uses Tiger Woods as an example of someone with seemingly unparalleled self-belief.

…But performance, medical, and religious placebo effects have their limits too. The medical placebo’s have their limits for treatment. Performance placebo won’t suddenly make you beat Rafael Nadal in a tennis match.

Key: Like athletes, take the positives from a performance, identify the weaknesses to grow from them and, afterward, discard them [weaknesses] altogether from memory.

Syed identifies effective use of Doublethink — “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” — in top performing athletes, who, for instance, have to acknowledge weaknesses and the scope for failure when analyzing their movements/shots/execution, but switch to a mindset during execution that contradicts the possibility of failure and become convicted in its success.

/* Agreed. This is acknowledging the importance of using both mindsets and not executing blindly or irrationally because of a conviction for success, while adopting it at the exact moment that it is necessary. */

Choking

Usually occurring under conditions of serve pressure and a career defining moment.

There is a migration in the brain when moving from learning to automizing (or encoding) a task; a migration from an explicit system to an implicit system. When you can chunk together parts of a task, you can free up mental space to focus on higher level things.

At ASU (Arizona), psychologist Robert Gray ran a study with outstanding baseball players asked to hit a pitch while listening to a random tone.

They performed with ease when the task was to listen to a tone that was either high or low in frequency and asked to identify that. The reasoning, he concludes, was because it didn’t interfere with their swing.

When the new task was to identify if the player’s bat was moving up or down when the tone was presented, the performance plummeted.

He reasoned that when they started explicitly monitoring a swing, which before was just automatic, they over-focused unnecessarily on their swing, just like the novice that hasn’t yet chunked together all the necessary pieces and is thinking about all the moving parts like, rotate your hips, point your feet, time your swing, etc. This is the difference between the implicit and explicit system.

// cool!

“Choking is a problem of psychological reversion: the flipping from a brain system used by experts to one used by novices.”

On simple tasks, Syed says, you want explicit monitoring and attention (say, walking across the carpet with your coffee). But, the opposite is desired for complex tasks.

Experts can choke because they use their implicit thinking system and not the explicit system, the latter of which is used by novices.

An athlete should use doublethink to get to the final stage of performance (relatively for them, at least — could be semi-final round of a local tournament if you’re a novice) by caring as much as possible, and then switching to the mindset of not caring/less pressure so that you avoid choking.

Baseball rituals, Pigeons and Why Great Sportsmen Feel Miserable After Winning

Baseball takes the cake when it comes to superstitions and rituals that actually affect a player’s performance.

Pigeons exhibit similar behavior — in a controlled study, the pigeons, who received food at set intervals by the experimenters, associated the behavior immediately before receiving their food with the reason they were receiving it, despite it having nothing to do with receiving the food. This led to strange behaviors in the birds like thrusting their head into a corner of the cage for instance.

People mistake weak correlation with causation (although it probably has nothing to do with it) and hence a superstition is born.

Despite any relevance in truth, superstitions do serve the purpose of relaxing the believer and exerting a placebo effect. Superstition is probably a leftover of evolutionary caution.

Anticlimax

When you reach success and face reality. You did it, you won — ‘now what?’. Many top athletes have reported to face this somewhat disappointment.

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

Optical Illusions and X-Ray Vision

Key point: Knowledge is embedded in perception.

Syed uses research around how we interpret spoken language at the neurological level. When we hear a language we know, our experience allows us to hear the language as it is intended. Silences and gaps fit in with our context of the language and we can arrange what we’ve heard in neatly structured form. If we listen to a foreign language, however, we are unable to draw on grammatical knowledge and experience to know how spoken words are supposed to fit.

He also uses our visual capacities as an example. Do you think you would recognize a face if you’ve never seen one before? We are well versed in the general structures of faces and that they are the homes of 4 out of our 5 perceived senses other than touch. A blind person gaining their sight later in life, like a British man who received corneal grafts, saw a blur when looking at faces. He lacked context, knowledge, and experience of seeing faces and therefore saw the man’s face speaking to him as a big blur. [neat right?]

The point trying to be made is that we cannot separate knowledge from perception. We perceive everything by drawing on our knowledge of what we are perceiving, even if our knowledge is inadequate to perceive it correctly.

Because of this point, we can conclude that experts literally see things that a novice cannot yet see. So many things that are invisible to the person without experience can be seen clearly by the expert. I.e. an experienced doctor vs the medical student both looking at a mammogram or x-ray; the doctor will easily recognize inconsistencies or patterns that will lead to better and/or quicker diagnoses than the medical student [duh]. We can’t hear what the trained musician can hear or see the subtle spin on the ball the expert table tennis player can see when it’s coming at him.

This is evolutionary. Evolution taught us to ‘sculpt perceptions using top-down knowledge’. We don’t have to infer all of our perceptions. Instead we save time by drawing on all of our experiences.

Inattentional Blindness

“Attention is a resource with severe limited capacity limitations.”

If we overload attention, we will surely miss out on perceptions right in front of us. Experts have automated many perceptual and motor processing so it’s like they have a spare tank of attention to use.

Syed cites a grave example of an attention deficit at precisely the time that it was needed, and it cost the lives of 101 people. Eastern Airlines Flight 401 flying from NYC to MIA on Dec. 29, 1972 crashed because the pilot and co-pilot were fixated on a fault light that usually indicates that landing gear has correctly deployed. Their fixation caused them to miss warnings that their altitude was dropping fast (the autopilot was disengaged). The warning system worked, but their lack of attention to everything but whatever was causing their landing light not to work left them without enough time to save the plane from crashing. [wow]

Drugs in Sport, Schwarzenegger Mice, and the Future of Mankind

Deep State Drugging

Seriously dark drugging scandal was happening in East Berlin in 1979.

A 13 year old girl, Heidi Krieger gets accepted to an exclusive Berlin Dynamo Club for shot-putting. 2 years in, because she showed a lot of promise, she began to be given a blue pill. She was told they were vitamin tablets to keep her healthy. She started to change. Physically, her muscles expanded. Emotionally, she began suffering from depression and aggression. Hair sprouted in unexpected places. Her, her friends, and their parents were all assured that it was temporary and due to their training regimen. Threats were issued to parents who continued questioning them #communism. This persisted for years while doses increased. Her shot-putting ‘soared’. She won a gold medal at the European Championship in Stuttgart in 1986. She retired in 1990 a broken woman, with crippling mood swings and chronic knee pain.

The State was systematically feeding it’s athletes powerful anabolic steroids called Oral-Turinabol. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was estimated that over 10,000 athletes were doped over a 20 year period.

This story is introduced to set the context for asking very important questions in relation to doping.

Everyone can agree that what happened to Heidi was an egregious and despicable violation of her human rights. It’s another stain against communism.

But, Syed brings up cyclists who raise a marker (HCT) that improves oxygen transportation to muscles from red blood cells either artificially or through training at high altitudes. There’s an issue with enforcing no cheating around this marker because it’s almost impossible to test for it.

He makes the great point that the problem with unenforceable rules is that they reward cheaters and penalize the honest. Science always moves faster than the testers in this space.

“drugs are not safe or unsafe; is is the quantities in which they are taken that are either safe or unsafe.”

“prohibition […] forces the problem underground, with athletes taking unlicensed drugs in collusion with dubious suppliers. The pressure in the market, isn’t exactly around safety, but to create undetectable drugs. {bad}.

People condemn cheating on a philosophical level. True.

Are you against doping? ( I think I am…until the next questions)

What if there were artificial means not to improve your strength and recovery for performing better at sports, but to increase longevity and intelligence to perform better in life and live longer? Would you continue to be opposed? Would you want them to be banned on the basis or morality or philosophy? It is a ‘debate about the extent to which it is legitimate to enhance human beings though artificial means.’

Genetic Enhancement

Are you for it or against it? On what basis?

This chapter [9] is very worth the read. It is not worth summarizing here.

Are Blacks Superior Runners?

Syed writes this chapter to refute the pervasive belief that genetics play the defining role explaining the superiority of blacks in running and in sports in general. He directly refutes the American author, Jon Entine, who wrote about some of these “genetic differences.”

Genetic Variation Misconceptions

Jon Entine asserts that East Africans are superior distance runners. Specifically, Kenyan runners. He also asserts that West African runners, or more specifically African Americans and Jamaicans that can trace their roots to West African coastal states are superior sprinters.

Syed refutes both of these points, even using Entine’s own research. When examining a map of Kenya and the distribution of top Kenyan runners by region, an important data point is easily seen. There is a disproportionate amount of all top Kenyan runners that come from the same area, the Nandi District, home of the city Eldoret. It’s occupied by the Nandi tribe, a subset of the Kalenjin tribe. The vast majority of the continent is otherwise underrepresented in high achieving long distance runners.

Syed attributes most of what ails people’s perceptions, even in scientific communities, is something like a cognitive bias — that we have a natural inclination to regard “black” as a biological type distinct from white. In reality, research conducted on genetic variation, the kind of research that could identify if certain populations of people differed genetically in a way that could be explanatory of many of the differences we conceptualize individually, finds that the minority of genes found in humans do have genetic variation and around 85% of that variation exists between individuals within population groups. Basically, genetic variations that we would expect to see between population groups is present within the population group, not between them. Even if we were to examine one small population group, we would find the majority of all genetic variation present in one isolated group.

So, when examining the “black” phenomena of success in long distance running at the olympics we are actually witnessing a “Nandi phenomenon concentrated around the town of Eldoret.”

Nandi’s Special Circumstances

What makes the Nandi superior is related to the central thesis of this book…a particular set of circumstances that creates a training environment (although indirectly) to condition people to become the world’s top athletes. According to the greek researcher Yannis Pitsiladis, “the top Kenyan athletes are predominantly from areas of high altitude, even relative to the rest of East Africa.” Even the top runners from Ethiopia are concentrated from the Arsi region, which, like Eldoret, is one of the highest altitudes in East Africa. Couple that with the following finding: “many of Kenya’s top runners tan extraordinarily long distances to school, sometimes in excess of twenty kilometers per day.

A study ran on East African school children to measure their maximum oxygen uptake (V02 Max) found that they were approx. 30% higher than those who didn’t run to school. Syed then has the juice to make his point:

“it was not their genes that created this aerobic advantage but thousands of hours of running.”

The Sprinting Gene

Syed then refutes the sprinting logic. He brings up what European research in 2003 found to be “the sprinting gene”: ACTN3. Apparently, 98% of Jamaicans have it….but so do 82% of Europeans, and, even better, that the Kenyans, who are underrepresented in successful sprinters, have +98% incidence of the so-called “sprint” gene. Syed doesn’t have a clear counter rationale for the apparent success of Jamaicans and other African Americans, but he attributes general overrepresentation of African Americans in professional sport to barriers of entry in other spheres of economic life.

Historical Biases are keeping us stupid

The fact that people in today’s culture believe that blacks are superior at physical performance but lack in mental performance is rooted historically. The unqualified premise that blacks are closer to their primal roots having had to reinforce genetic code to keep them alive for longer than europeans and whites have had to, prevailed in the 20th century and beyond.

He brings up historical context to illustrate that Black superiority in sports has, throughout time, actually reinforced a belief in “white superiority” for those who wished to advance that kind of thinking. That, basically, physical prowess in African Americans was positively correlated with intellectual inferiority. He cites a few studies where people’s inherent biases, willfully or not, affect the way people select people to interview for a job despite having the same qualifications and “black sounding” vs “white sounding” names.

Even when assessing the performance of a black athlete vs a white athlete, people’s perception of a player’s performance was directly linked to them believing they were either black or white although they were listening to the exact same broadcast for each (they thought those who were black performed better). This is infectious thinking as a whole, Syed asserts (me too), and it infects all ethnic groups, including blacks.

[fin]