The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
Where does extraordinary talent come from? Daniel Coyle comes up with an intriguing answer in this highly readable account of the neuroscience of skill and talent.
Though popular perception has often regarded talent as something otherworldly — a gift from a higher power, perhaps, and certainly nothing that anyone could do anything about — in fact, according to modern neuroscience, talent is much more mundane, being nothing more than the wiring of chains of neural circuits inside the brain.
According to the most-recent theories of talent presented by Coyle, it all has to do with myelin, the substance that insulates the synaptic connections among the neurons. Every human skill is the result of the formation of such synaptic chains of nerve fibers. When brain circuits are fired the right way, myelin is generated, insulating those connections, making the signal flowing through them clearer, stronger, faster.
According to Coyle, the degree of this insulation is what is responsible for talent — the more time and energy you put into the right practice, the more myelin is deposited on those neural circuits associated with that practice, the more talent you achieve. It is as if the brain builds more broadband for those circuits that are activated in the right way. The right way is that of deep practice, one of the three key ingredients responsible for the creation of the neural architecture of talent. The other two identified by Coyle are ignition and master coaching.
Read more of the review here, or get a copy of The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
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