Anders Ericsson on Peak Performance
What if we could imagine a world where there are far more experts in far more fields than we have today. Where doctors, teachers, engineers and computer programmers improve their skills the same way as olympians and chess players do now.
Every four years, we tune-in to our TV and/or mobile devices and observe feats of amazing human performance. We watch how in the Summer Olympics athletes from all over the world break records of what is believe the human threshold to be. Every four years a new record is set by a younger and faster athlete raising the bar and making a path for future generations to follow. We look at them and — amazed by their physical prowess — state how “gifted” they must be.
Anders Ericsson through his new book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, wants to break this popular notion. Through years of arduous research he has proved how the secret for high performance is not given by an innate ability or a gift bestowed upon birth, but by the effort of deliberate practice and continuous improvement.
Throughout his book he goes from the example of a chess player who while blindfolded simultaneously beat 24 other players in a world tournament, up to one of his students breaking the world record of memorization through deliberate practice. He argues, that the key attribute that differentiates world-class performers is the amount and quality of mental representations they have for a given task or activity.
What are these mental representations, and why are they so important ?
For the example of the chess player, Herb Simon and Bill Chase asked a simple question, do they actually recall the position of each piece, or are they remembering patterns where the individual pieces are seen as part of a larger whole. They answered this question by comparing a national-level chess player, a mid-range player and a chess novice on different types of boards. They arranged the board in different ways and asked each of the participants to memorize the position of the pieces and recall them later. It turned out that expert players were able to remember the position of about two-thirds of the two dozen pieces after five seconds, while the novice could only remember four pieces.
If you ask someone to memorize “was smelled front that his the peanuts he good hunger eating barely woman of so in could that him contain” — the average person would only remember six of those words. While if you read the same words arranged as “The woman in front of him was eating peanuts that smelled so good that he could barely contain his hunger” most adults will remember the words in perfect order.
What’s the difference, then? The second arrangement carries meaning for us. It allows us to make sense of the words using preexisting “mental representation”. They’re not random and they mean something, and meaning aids our memory.
Our ability to recognize and remember meaningful patterns arises from the same way that chess players develop their abilities. Through deliberate practice, they spend countless hours studying games, analyzing a position and predicting the next move. If they get something wrong, they go back and figure out what they missed.
Proof behind the “Mental Representations”
Research has shown that the amount of time you spend in this sort of analysis — not the amount of time spent playing chess with others — is the single most important predictors of a chess player’s ability. Through years of practice, it is possible for most practitioners to recognize patterns of chess pieces, not just their positions, but how they interact. These patterns are called “chunks”, and the important thing is that they’re held in long-term memory.
By the time a chess player has reached master level, he has accumulated around fifty thousand of these chunks. The way they begin to see the board is different than how a novice player would see it. These mental representations allow a chess master to glance at a game and immediately get which side has the advantage and determine the weaknesses on each player.
Mental representations on our daily lives
We all use mental representations. Whenever we mention the Mona Lisa, people will immediately see an image of the painting in their minds, that image is the mental representation of the Mona Lisa.
Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations we can use in whatever activity we’re practicing. Even when the skill being practice is primarily physical — as in Olympians — a major factor of their performance is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
A key factor of Mental Representations is that they’re very domain specific, that is, they only apply to the skills for which they were developed. You don’t train to be an “athlete” you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a swimmer. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a pathologist or neurosurgeon.
These representations in essence provide preexisting patterns of information — facts, images, rule and so on — that are held in long-term memory and helps us respond effectively to certain types of situations.
How can I use Mental Representations to develop a skill or become a better professional ?
As we discussed, Mental Representations are built by purposeful practice and thorough examination of specific areas we can improve. It is not the amount of time you practice something but how mindful you are of your practice and how are you getting feedback from other people on your performance. It is how much are you stretching yourself out of your comfort zone and finding new limits for the skill you want to develop.
Principles of Purposeful Practice
- Purposeful practice is focused. While performing a task you want to improve, you must give it your full attention. Marathoners, unlike regular runners are not distracted while running, they are thoroughly examining their posture and how they can alter it in order to reach their training objective.
- Purposeful practice involves feedback. Commonly championed in the business world, feedback is they keystone towards your personal improvement. By actively seeking feedback from peers, experts and even people outside of the skill domain you improve on your short backs and become better.
- Purposeful practice requires you leaving out of your comfort zone. Only when you dare to achieve greatly and to see short-term obstacles as paths of grow can you ever hope to improve. If you’re only practicing in an area of familiarity you will never advance to your desired professional or fitness objective.
“We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat — over and over again. Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.”
A parting thought for the reader of this article would be, what if we could imagine a world were there are far more experts in far more fields than we have today. Where doctors, teachers, engineers and computer programmers improve their skills the same way as olympians and chess players do now. What would be the impact on our health care, our educational system and our technology?
Sources & Further Reading:
