Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

By Matthew Syed

What are the real secrets of sporting success, and what lessons do they offer about life? Why doesn’t Tiger Woods “choke”? Why are the best figure skaters those that have fallen over the most and why has one small street in Reading produced more top table tennis players than the rest of the country put together.

Two-time Olympian and sports writer and broadcaster Matthew Syed draws on the latest in neuroscience and psychology to uncover the secrets of our top athletes and introduces us to an extraordinary cast of characters, including the East German athlete who became a man, and her husband – and the three Hungarian sisters who are all chess grandmasters. Bounce is crammed with fascinating stories and statistics.

Part I

Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.
What about Mozart the child composer rather than Mozart the child performer? The facts follow the same logic. Sure, he wrote compositions as a young boy, but they had nothing in common with the sublime creations of his later years. His first four piano concertos, written at the age of eleven, and his next three, written at sixteen, contain no original music: they are simply rearrangements of the music of other composers.
“My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.”
You have to work like crazy, regardless of your genes, background, creed, or color. There is no shortcut, even if child prodigies bewitch us into thinking there is.
“The only circumstances in which very early development seems to work is where the children themselves are motivated to clock up the hours, rather than doing so because of parents or a coach. The key is to be sensitive to the way the child is thinking and feeling, encouraging training without exerting undue pressure.”
One of the skills of a good coach is to tailor a training program to the mind-set of the individual.
Child prodigies do not have unusual genes; they have unusual upbringings. They have compressed thousands of hours of practice into the small period between birth and adolescence. That is why they have become world-class.
“Children have extraordinary potential, and it is up to society to unlock it,” he says when I meet him and his wife at the family apartment in Budapest, overlooking the Danube. “The problem is that people, for some reason, do not want to believe it. They seem to think that excellence is only open to others, not themselves.” Polgar
Why chess? “Because it is objective,” Polgar says. “If my child had been trained as an artist or novelist, people could have argued about whether she was genuinely world-class or not. But chess has an objective rating based on performance, so there is no possibility of argument.”
Shakuntala Devi, born in Bangalore in 1939, for example, stunned university academics in India by performing three-digit multiplications at the age of eight. She is now in the Guinness World Records for being able to multiply two thirteen-digit numbers (for example, 8574930485948 times 9394506947284) in twenty-eight seconds.
Binet gave the prodigies and the cashiers identical three-and four-digit multiplication problems and compared the time taken to solve them. What happened? You guessed it: the best cashier was faster than either prodigy for both problems. In other words, fourteen years of calculating experience had been sufficient, on its own, to bring perfectly “normal” people up to and beyond the remarkable speed of prodigies. Binet concluded that calculating ability is more about practice than talent—which means that you and I could perform lightning-quick multi-digit calculations if we had the proper training.
So, how is it done? As with most “miraculous” feats, there is a trick. Suppose, for example, that you had to multiply 358 and 464. Now, most of us can multiply 300 and 400 to get 120,000. The trick is to commit that number to memory while solving the next component of the problem, say, 400 times 50. This is 20,000, which you add to the running total to get 140,000. Now multiply 400 by 8 to get 320, and add that to the running total, to get 140,320. Eventually, by adding the remaining components of the calculation (there are eighteen separate steps), you get the answer: 166,122. This is still a formidable feat, of course, but it is no longer the calculation that is daunting; it is remembering the running total while performing the various steps.
But now consider how much more difficult it is to keep track of a narrative while reading a book. There are tens of thousands of words in the English language, and they are used in new and unforeseen combinations in every sentence of every page. To understand a new sentence, the reader must not only understand its specific meaning; he must also be able to integrate it with all sentences previously read. He must, for example, remember previously mentioned objects and people in order to resolve references to pronouns. This is a memory task of almost unimaginable dimensions. And yet most of us are able to get to the last word of the book—comprising hundreds of pages and tens of thousands of words—without once losing the thread of the narrative. The experience we have clocked up as “language users” enables us to do this in just the same way that the hours clocked up as “number users” enables mathematicians to get to the end of a multi-digit multiplication by keeping track of the “narrative” of the calculation. The difference between calculators and the rest of us, then, is that calculators have spent lives immersed in the vocabulary of numbers, while the rest of us have wimped out by using electronic calculators.
Is it any wonder that, after a while, numbers begin to have “meaning” for mathematicians in the same way that words have meaning for us? As Brian Butterworth, professor of cognitive neuropsychology at University College London and widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost expert on mathematical ability, observes: Calculators from an early age develop a kind of intimacy with numbers.
Put simply, calculating prodigies are made, not born. As Butterworth has said, “There is no evidence at the moment for differences in innate specific capacities for mathematics” (my italics). Flannery agrees: “I am not a genius,” she has written. “I simply had the benefit of a childhood steeped in numbers.”

Chapter 3

This is why (as dozens of studies have shown) length of time in many occupations is only weakly related to performance. Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence.
“When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”
That is worth stating again: 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 once again.
In the 1990s researchers conducted a revelatory study into figure skating. They found that the major difference between elite skaters and their less elite counterparts is not to be found in genetics, personality, or family background. Rather, it is to be found in the type of practice. Elite skaters regularly attempt jumps beyond their current capabilities; less elite skaters do not. Note that elite skaters do not merely undertake more difficult jumps—after all, that is what you would expect from better performers. No, the point is that elite skaters attempt jumps that are more difficult even when measured relative to their superior abilities. The conclusion is as counterintuitive as it is revealing: top skaters fall more often during their training sessions. Purposeful practice is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again. Excellence is about stepping outside the comfort zone, training with a spirit of endeavor, and accepting the inevitability of trials and tribulations. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance.
As Dr. Miranda [professor of soccer at the University of São Paolo] summed up, “No time plus no space equals better skills. Futsal is our national laboratory of improvisation.”
You are also on the path to personal transformation. Literally. One of the most striking things about modern research on expertise is how the body and mind can be radically altered with the right kind of practice. “When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated,” Anders Ericsson has written. “Over time the cells of the body reorganize in response to the metabolic demands of the activity by, for example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to the muscles.” Long-distance runners have larger hearts than average, not because they were born with them, but as the consequence of training. Table tennis players have more supple wrists, typists have more flexible fingers, and ballet dancers are able to rotate their feet through more degrees.
But while the adaptability of the human body is impressive, it is the plasticity of the brain that has astonished researchers. In an experiment led by Thomas Elbert of the University of Konstanz, Germany, for example, it was found that the region of the brain responsible for controlling fingers in young musicians grew in direct proportion to the number of years of training. Further studies have uncovered similar transformations. In a study of London taxi drivers—who must pass a famously stringent set of examinations to gain a license—it was discovered that the region of the brain governing spatial navigation was substantially larger than for non–taxi drivers and that this region continued to grow with additional time on the job.
key aspect of brain transformation is myelin, a substance that wraps around the nerve fibers and that can dramatically increase the speed with which signals pass through the brain. A 2005 experiment that scanned the brains of concert pianists found a direct relationship between the numbers of hours practiced and the quantity of myelin. But myelin is not the only theme in the brain change story. Purposeful practice also builds new neural connections, increases the size of specific sections of the brain, and enables the expert to co-opt new areas of gray matter in the quest to improve. All this speaks directly to the hardware-software distinction touched upon in chapter 1, but takes it a step further. We have seen that in any complex task, it is knowledge, above all, that determines excellence; the kind of knowledge built through deep experience and encoded in the brain and central nervous system.
Think back to Rudiger Gamm, the mathematical “prodigy.” In a neuroimaging study, it was found that he not only used conventional neural networks when making calculations, he also used a system of brain areas implicated in episodic memory (this is the immensely powerful memory used to store autobiographical experiences). Needless to say, your skull also contains this system, and you too can corral it into action when performing multi-digit calculations. But there is a catch: you can purchase access to this prime neural real estate only by building up a bank deposit of thousands of hours of purposeful practice.
That is the way most of us operate. When we learn a new task, like driving a car, we concentrate hard to master the skills. At first we are slow and awkward, and our movements are characterized by conscious control, but as we get more familiar, the skills are absorbed in implicit memory, and we no longer give much thought to them. We cruise along, attending to other things while at the wheel. This is what psychologists call “automaticity.” This is the way many of us play sports, too. We go to the driving range, buy a bucket of balls, rip a few drives, and then trundle off to the first tee, supposing that we have done something that will reduce our handicap.
Top performers have an entirely different approach, taking active steps to stretch their limitations in every session.
Take music. There was a time when it was believed that the world record for holding a note had just about reached its limit when a musician managed to get up to a pretty impressive sixty seconds. Then a musician called Kenny G, a saxophonist, invented an innovative method of circular breathing, inhaling through the nose while exhaling through the mouth in a constant stream, thus managing to hold a note for a staggering forty-five minutes.
But careful study has shown that creative innovation follows a very precise pattern: like excellence itself, it emerges from the rigors of purposeful practice. It is the consequence of experts absorbing themselves for so long in their chosen field that they become, as it were, pregnant with creative energy. To put it another way, eureka moments are not lightning bolts from the blue, but tidal waves that erupt following deep immersion in an area of expertise.
The ten-year rule for creativity has been found across the spectrum of human endeavor. In a study of 66 poets by N. Wishbow of Carnegie Mellon University, more than 80 percent needed ten years or more of sustained preparation before they started writing their most creative pieces. In an exhaustive study of eminent scientists, Anne Roe, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, concluded that scientific creativity is “a function of how hard you work at it.”
Similarly, soccer and table tennis standards are rising, at least in part, because technique is improving. So are the training systems, as we have seen. It all adds up to one inexorable conclusion: human performance in complex tasks will continue on an upward trajectory into the distant future, punctuated by innovations that are not merely unforeseen but unforeseeable.
Feedback is, in effect, the rocket fuel that propels the acquisition of knowledge, and without it no amount of practice is going to get you there.

Chapter 4

As Dweck puts it: “In the growth mind-set, you don’t feel the need to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. The hand you’re dealt is just the starting point…. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”
Dweck’s research hands us the answer: it is because she did not interpret falling down as failure. Armed with a growth mind-set, she interpreted falling down not merely as a means of improving, but as evidence that she was improving. Failure was not something that sapped her energy and vitality, but something that provided her with an opportunity to learn, develop, and adapt.
In 1998, Carol Dweck and a colleague took four hundred fifth-graders and gave them a series of simple puzzles. Afterward, each of the students was given his or her score, plus something else: six words of praise. Half the students were praised for intelligence: “You must be smart at this!” The other half were praised for effort: “You must have worked really hard!” Dweck was seeking to test whether these simple words, with their subtly different emphases, could make a difference to the students’ mind-sets; whether they could mold the student’s attitude to success and failure; whether they could have a measurable impact on persistence and performance.
Finally, the experiment came full circle, giving the students a chance to do a test of equal difficulty to the very first test. What happened? The group praised for intelligence showed a 20 percent decline in performance compared with the first test, even though it was no harder. But those in the effort-praised group increased their scores by 30 percent: failure had actually spurred them on. And all of these differences turned on the difference in six simple words spoken after the very first test. Dweck and her fellow researcher were so stunned by these results that they repeated the experiment three times with students in different parts of the country and with very different ethnic backgrounds. On all three occasions the results were identical. “These were some of the clearest findings I’ve ever seen,” Dweck said. “Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation, and it harms their performance.”
The implications of Dweck’s research are profound. Many educators have argued that lowering standards will boost the self-esteem of students and ultimately improve attainment. This was, indeed, the philosophy of the educational establishment in the United States and across Europe for much of the 1970s and 1980s, and it continues to exert a lingering influence. But we can now see that, however well-intentioned, it is corrosive as an educational creed. “It comes from the same philosophy as the overpraising of students’ intelligence,” Dweck has written. “Well, it doesn’t work. Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.”
Bollettieri has become a byword for excellence since his academy was established in 1978 on Florida’s west coast. But as I stride around the courts—indoor and outdoor—it becomes clear that it is not the quality of the coaching that sets this place apart from other tennis centers around the world. Rather, it is the quality of the attitude. Here the youngsters train with devotion; they undertake physical training as if it is a privilege, not a chore; they eat food like it is fuel. This is simply not what it is like at other tennis centers. Sure, there is an appetite for practice and hard work at other venues, but it is not so visible, so raw, so voracious. It does not blow you away.
He praises effort, never talent; he eulogizes about the transformational power of practice at every opportunity; he preaches the vital importance of hard work during every interruption in play. And he does not regard failure in his students as either good or bad, but as an opportunity to improve. “That’s fine,” he says as his student hits a forehand long. “You are on the right track. It’s not the mistakes; it’s how you respond to them.” This is Bollettieri’s published creed, which must be signed by all residents: “Every endeavour pursued with passion produces a successful outcome regardless of the result. For it is not about winning or losing—rather, the effort put forth in producing the outcome. The best way to predict the future is to create it—therefore, we believe we have the best training methods to help each athlete achieve their dreams and goals and ultimately reach their ability level in the arena of sports and life.”
The only way for a growth mind-set to bed down is for effort-oriented praise to be constantly repeated—not easy in a world where the talent myth rules supreme.
Peter Keen, a leading sports scientist and the architect of Great Britain’s success at the 2008 Olympic Games, told me. “In the British Olympic movement we have a stated goal of trying to create places where the culture of personal transformation is so deeply embedded it rubs off on aspiring youngsters.
Dweck’s praise experiment. In one of her studies, Dweck told the students that she would be conducting the same study at another school and that the children there might like to hear from students who had already taken the test. She gave the students a sheet on which they could record their thoughts along with a space where they could record how many problems they had got right. When she looked at the children praised for effort, Dweck found that almost all of them had told the truth about their performance. Only one child in the group had doctored his score. But in the group praised for intelligence, an extraordinary 40 percent had lied about their scores. “Doing well was so important to them that they felt compelled to distort their performance in order to impress unknown peers,” Dweck said.
Successful decision making in any situation characterized by complexity—whether in sport, business, or wherever—is propelled not by innate ability but by the kind of knowledge that can be built up only through deep experience.

Part II

Placebo experiment with surgery- Would come to shake the medical world. Beecher found that the soldier was not merely comforted by the injection of salt water; he was able to tolerate the agonies of surgery as well as if he had been injected with “real” anesthetic. Over the next few weeks Beecher was to replicate the result with dozens of wounded soldiers, each of whom could bear, with seemingly miraculous stoicism, the trauma of surgery with nothing more than salt water running through their veins. When he returned, Beecher wrote a paper called “The Powerful Placebo.”
The key point in all this is that the power of the mind is exercised through the medium of belief, and it doesn’t matter whether the belief is true or false or how the delusion is created—so long as it is created successfully. It doesn’t matter if it is created by a reassuring doctor, slick packaging, price, advertising, color, invasiveness, ritual, or any of countless other possibilities. It does not matter if it is supported by fabricated evidence or no evidence at all. All that matters is that the patient believes.
In my scientific observations, I have observed that no matter what name you give the Infinite Absolute you worship, no matter what theology you ascribe to, the results of believing in God are the same.” Indeed, it could be argued that religion is the ultimate placebo. Instead of the authority of a doctor, belief is based on the authority of God, who is both infallible and omnipotent. Where belief in the medical placebo is based on slick advertising and snazzy packaging, belief in the healing power of God is derived from Holy Scripture. And it does not matter if your particular God is real or not (in the same way that it does not matter if a sugar pill has genuine pharmacological properties or not), so long as your belief is sincere.
Karl Marx called religion the “opium of the masses.”
But Peale, despite his Protestant background, also makes it clear that the reader’s religious background is irrelevant to the success of positive thinking. “It’s not necessary to be born again,” Peale said. “You have your way to God; I have mine…. Christ is just one of the ways.”
Peale makes this point in The Power of Positive Thinking: “I am now convinced that if you expect the best, you are given some strange kind of power to create the conditions that produce the desired results.” Anne Harrington of Harvard University makes the same point: “There is an innate capacity for our bodies to bring into being, to the best of their ability, the optimistic scenarios in which we fervently believe.” This is what we might dub the “performance placebo,” but the trick of sports psychology has been to divorce it from religion; to ground optimism not in the interventionism of the Almighty but in an exaggerated belief in the efficacy of the self; to remove uncertainty by building conviction in one’s capacity to achieve. That is why athletes refuse to entertain the possibility of defeat—they are aware that doubt is as dangerous a thing when entering the field of play as it is when swallowing a sugar pill.
“Doubt is the fundamental cause of error in sports,” Timothy Gallwey, author of the best-selling sports psychology book The Inner Game of Tennis, writes. “The power of doubt lies in its self-fulfilling nature. When we entertain a lack of faith that we can sink a short putt, for example, we usually tighten, increasing the likelihood of missing the putt. When we fail, our self-doubt is confirmed…. Next time the doubt is stronger and its inhibiting influence on our true capabilities more pronounced.” Gallwey’s solution is to eliminate doubt with a variety of mental techniques, the most important of which is a form of mental association. “The technique is simply to remember or associate with a seemingly difficult task (in this case the golf shot) some action that is simple, preferably one that has never failed. For example, when addressing a ten-foot putt, you might remember the action of simply picking up a ball out of the hole.
As Nicholas Humphrey, professor of psychology at the London School of Economics, puts it: To discover a new placebo, all you need do is to invent it, and to invent it all you need do is change your beliefs. So it seems the way might well be open for everyone to take voluntary control…. Yet, the truth is that—fortunately, perhaps—it’s not that easy. When it comes to it, how do you change your own beliefs to suit yourself? No one can simply bootstrap themselves into believing what they choose.
“I am going to take the positives out of the defeat and focus on the ways my game has improved,” Henman said. You may have heard this expression quite a lot—“ taking the positives”—from top sportsmen and sportswomen. It is a psychological technique so universal that it has become a part of the lexicon. What does it mean? Well, it means what it says: it is about ignoring aspects of a performance that contradict one’s prior optimism while focusing on the good tactics, the winning shots, etc., that support it. To put it another way, top athletes have learned to filter out unwanted evidence in order to sustain an exaggerated belief in their own abilities.
“Taking the positives” is not the only psychological paradox at work with top performers. Reconsider the mental technique advocated by Timothy Gallwey in The Inner Game of Golf. You’ll remember that he advises the golfer to associate a difficult putt with some action that has never failed, such as simply picking up a ball out of the hole. “By vividly associating with this easy act there is no room left in the mind to associate the upcoming putt with failure,” he writes.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. [T] o forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed… all this is indispensably necessary.
According to Ben Goldacre, when patients received a placebo for Parkinson’s they showed extra dopamine release in the brain, just as they would if they had taken a “real” drug. But how does the brain state we call “belief” cause this outcome? Nobody has any idea.
The lesson in all of this, however, is that beliefs are aimed not solely at truth, but at what works. This lesson applies not just for athletes, of course: none of us can get by without beliefs that veer away from reality. We accentuate the positives; suppress the negatives; block out the traumas; create mini narratives about our lives and loves that, on honest reflection, have little basis in reality. We do this not merely to win, but to survive. Uninhibited reason can be a perilous thing, as anyone who has studied the lives of the philosophers will testify.
The difference is that world-class performers—often in conjunction with sports psychologists and “mind coaches”—take these mental manipulations to greater extremes. They have taught themselves to ratchet up their optimism at the point of performance; to mold the evidence to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around; to activate doublethink. And it is proficiency in these skills that often separates the best from the rest.

Chapter 6

Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at UCLA, has conducted a number of brain-imaging experiments to trace the transition from explicit to implicit monitoring that occurs over many hours’ practice. He has discovered that the prefrontal cortex is activated when a novice is learning a skill, but that control of the stroke switches over time to areas such as the basal ganglia, which is partly responsible for touch and feel.
This migration from the explicit to the implicit system of the brain has two crucial advantages. First, it enables the expert player to integrate the various parts of a complex skill into one fluent whole (this “motor chunking” is akin to the perceptual chunking described in chapter 1), something that would be impossible at a conscious level because there are too many interconnecting variables for the conscious mind to handle. And second, it frees up attention to focus on higher-level aspects of the skill such as tactics and strategy.
Their problem was not a lack of focus, but too much focus. Conscious monitoring had disrupted the smooth workings of the implicit system. The sequencing and timing of the different motor responses were fragmented, just as they would be with a novice. They were, effectively, beginners again.
Choking is a problem of psychological reversion: the flipping from a brain system used by experts to one used by novices. Why does it occur? Consider what happens when executing a simple task, like keeping a cup of coffee upright under pressure—say, because you are walking across a very expensive carpet. In these circumstances, explicit attention is just what you need. By focusing on keeping the cup vertical, you are far less likely to spill the contents because of inadvertence or a lack of concentration. On simple tasks, the tendency to slow down and take conscious control confers huge advantages. But precisely the opposite applies when executing a complex task. When an expert hits a moving table tennis ball or strikes a fade on a golf shot, any tendency to direct attention toward the mechanics of the shot is likely to be catastrophic because there are too many interconnecting variables for the conscious mind to handle (this is another example of combinatorial explosion).
Choking, then, is a kind of neural glitch that occurs when the brain switches to a system of explicit monitoring in circumstances when it ought to stick to the implicit system. It is not something the performer does intentionally; it just happens. And once the explicit system has kicked in (as anyone who has been afflicted by choking will tell you), it is damned difficult to switch out of.
This outcome has been demonstrated by Charles Kimble, a psychologist at the University of Dayton. He took some highly skilled players of the Tetris video game and also some novice players and then created a high-pressure environment by getting them to play in front of a big audience. The expert players got worse, exhibiting clear choking effects; the beginners actually improved.
During my prematch routine, I would spend a few minutes in a deeply relaxed state, filling my mind with these thoughts, finishing with an affirmation just like that used by Lindsay: “It’s only table tennis!” By the time I reached the court, my beliefs had altered: the match was no longer the be-all and end-all.* Sometimes, the ruse worked brilliantly. At other times, I still experienced some interference from the explicit part of my brain, with partial choking effects. But I never again choked in the graphic and overwhelming way I had in Sydney; I never again suffered the humiliation of being virtually unable to hit the ball during a career-defining contest. To use the wonderfully evocative phrase of Steve Davis, six-time World Snooker Champion, I had learned the art of “playing as if it means nothing when it means everything.”

Chapter 7

To put it another way, a tendency to perceive causal connections that don’t actually exist can confer huge evolutionary benefits, providing a cocoon of safety in a turbulent and dangerous world. The only proviso (according to some devilishly complicated game theory) is that your superstitions must not impose too much of a burden on those occasions when they are without foundation.
In the late 1960s, Paul Ekman, an American psychologist, took a trip to Papua New Guinea to conduct a series of interviews with the Fore, an isolated tribe living in an ancient, preliterate culture. He was seeking to test the cultural theory of emotion: the idea that emotions are learned behaviors that are picked up from family and friends, like languages. According to this theory—which was almost universally accepted at the time—in order to experience joy or bitterness, you first need to see others being joyful or bitter. Without that social transmission, you would never experience those emotions.
As Dylan Evans writes in his book Emotion: A Very Short Introduction, “Our common emotional heritage binds humanity together in a way that transcends cultural difference.” Seen in this evolutionary context, emotions start to look very different. So-called negative emotions, while they may seem unnecessary and unpleasant, are vital mechanisms that guard our long-term health and survival (rather like physical pain, which warns of damage to our bodies). Indeed, according to Evans, it would be impossible for anyone to make it far through life without emotions: “Lacking fear, the creature might sit around and ponder whether or not the approaching lion really represented a threat or not. Without anger, it would be picked on mercilessly. Lack of disgust would allow it to consume faeces and rotting food.”
Other so-called negative emotions can also be seen from this perspective: anxiety facilitates escape from dangerous situations and helps us to avoid them in the future; mild depression enables us to disengage from unattainable goals; humiliation is triggered when we are faced with the threat of losing social status; sexual jealousy is aroused by the imminent (or perceived) loss of a partner’s fidelity.
If goal fulfillment induced indefinite periods of contentment, we would be robbed of all future motivation.
At one time the answer seemed to be inexplicable, lost in the unfathomable mysteries of the human psyche. But we can now see that the answer may hinge on something far simpler: an evolved capacity to experience anticlimax faster, sharper, and deeper than the rest of us. After all, anticlimax is something we have all experienced, but it is striking just how quickly top performers come down to earth after winning a major title; remarkable how rapidly they emotionally disengage from a goal they may have spent years striving for.

Part III

Chapter 8

Think about the mechanics of vision for a moment or two. We all have an intuitive understanding of how this works: light bounces off objects, enters our eyes, and is focused on the retina by the lens. This retinal image is then sent to the brain, where it is “experienced.” In this account of perception, the eye operates as a kind of camera, with the brain getting access to the picture via the delivery system of the optic nerve. But a little reflection shows that this account must be flawed. After all, if the retinal image is like a photograph, which is sent to the brain, who is sitting in the brain to “see” the incoming picture? This is the Terminator fallacy: These reflections hint at the rather surprising truth that the information provided by our eyes and ears is only very loosely connected to the way we experience the world. Retinal images, for example, are vague, fragmentary, and highly ambiguous, and it takes a huge amount of work by the brain to transform them into the vivid, three-dimensional “movie” that constitutes waking experience.
To get an idea of just how much work the brain does in perception, consider a remarkable acoustic experiment by Makio Kashino of the NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan. He recorded a voice saying “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” then removed short chunks and replaced them with silence, thus making the sentence virtually unintelligible. But when he filled the gaps with loud white noise, the sentence—astonishingly—snapped back into focus. “The sounds we hear are not copies of physical sounds,” Kashino said. “The brain fills in the gaps, based on the information in the remaining speech signal.” It is our knowledge of language—drawn from many years of experience—that enables us to renovate the sensory information into a comprehensible form.
As psychologist Richard Gregory, who has conducted some of the most pioneering research on illusions, puts it: “Bottom-up sensory information is overridden by top-down knowledge.” The role played by top-down knowledge can be seen in the “plumbing” of perception: in the case of vision, there are more downward fibers from the cortex to the brain’s relay stations than there are bottom-up from the eyes. So when we look at, say, a face, there is more data traveling downward from the knowledge areas of our brains than traveling upward from our eyes. Perception is what happens when the two interact.
What would the perception of faces be like without top-down knowledge? We can get an idea from the remarkable cases where blind people gain sight late in life. Sidney Bradford, a British man, developed sight at the age of fifty-two after receiving corneal grafts at the Wolverhampton and Midland Counties Eye Infirmary. Here is how researchers reported his experience when he looked at the face of his surgeon after the bandages were removed: He heard a voice coming from in front of him and to one side: he turned to the source of the sound, and saw a “blur.” He realized that this must be a face. Upon careful questioning, he seemed to think that he would not have known that this was a face if he had not previously heard the voice and known that voices came from faces. That’s right: When Bradford looked at a face, he saw a blur. He had access to the same visual information as everyone else (the light entering his retina was identical, as was the retinal image), but he saw it differently because he lacked the knowledge—drawn from experience—to mold the sensory data into a meaningful form. Even after a few months, Bradford was unable to recognize people through vision alone, even when meeting them for the third or fourth time. Instead, he had to rely on acoustic information such as tone of voice. This may sound bizarre, but it is actually familiar. Precisely the same phenomenon happens to the rest of us when we hear people talking. When we listen to a conversation in our own language, we hear a series of distinct words separated by tiny gaps of silence. But no such silences actually exist.* It is our knowledge of the grammatical structure of our language that enables us to retouch the acoustic information so that we hear it in a neatly structured form.
Now contrast this with listening to people talking in a foreign language: this time we hear a confused and undigested influx of noise without any noticeable gaps or structure. That is what it is like for a blind person who has recently attained her vision trying to see a face. She is looking at her friend, but she sees only confusion and haziness because she lacks the top-down knowledge with which to create a meaningful perception. The key point in all this is that knowledge is not used merely to make sense of perceptions; knowledge is embedded in perception. As the great British philosopher Sir Peter Strawson put it, “Perception is thoroughly permeated by our concepts.”
A key difference between experts and novices is that experts are better at extracting information from what is going on around them, as we saw in chapter 1. Roger Federer, for example, can anticipate the movement of a tennis ball more efficiently than the rest of us, not because he has better eyesight but because he knows where to look and how to interpret the movement patterns of his opponent.
The ability of experts to see things that are invisible to the rest of us may sound a little weird but is actually quite familiar. It is the reason why Eskimos, with their long experience of arctic conditions, can discern shades of white invisible to westerners; it is why Charles Revlon, head of the cosmetics chain, was able to see four shades of black; it is why highly trained musicians are better than nonmusicians at detecting very small differences in the pitch and loudness of notes. It also explains the seemingly miraculous skills of chick spotters. Poultry owners once had to wait until chicks were five to six weeks old before differentiating male from female (gender became visible only when adult feathers started appearing). But they now hire expert spotters, who are able to instantly determine the sex of day-old chicks, even though, to amateurs, they look identical. This is of serious commercial value, enabling egg producers to avoid feeding unproductive males.
But none of these expert spotters have superior eyes or ears; rather, they have the knowledge drawn from long experience with which to sculpt sensory information into a dramatically new form. These insights help to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of sport. It is why top table tennis players are able to spot variations of spin that novices cannot see even when they are looking at them. It is why Wayne Gretzky is able to perceive patterns of movement in the players around him that are invisible to the rest of the world. It is why Garry Kasparov is able to see the right move just by looking at the configuration of a chessboard.
Most of us have roughly the same amount of bandwidth available for conscious processing, but experts, by automating perceptual and motor programs, are able to create spare capacity. When the gorilla basketball experiment was repeated with basketball experts, for example, they had no problem seeing the gorilla. Their deep knowledge of basketball meant that they had spare capacity to devote to tasks beyond merely counting the passes.