Dr. Treffert has published two books on savant syndrome: “Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome” in 2006 and “Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired and Sudden Savant” in 2010. […] In his efforts to raise public understanding about autism and savant syndrome he has regularly appeared on programs such as 60 Minutes, Oprah, Today, CBS Evening News and many others. Dr. Treffert was a technical consultant to the award-winning movie Rain Man that made “autistic savant” household terms and he maintains a very popular website at www.savantsyndrome.com hosted by the Wisconsin Medical Society.

Dr. Treffert was gracious enough to have a wide-ranging conversation with me. Over the course of a few days, we had a delightful time chatting about autism, savantism, genius, nature, nurture, intelligence, creativity, lessons learned, recent advances, and the future.[…] In my view, this interview demonstrates quite clearly the need for more compassion and research on all different kinds of minds and ways of achieving greatness. In this seventh part, we discussed the inner savant in all of us.

SCOTT: A common theme running throughout your books is the idea that hidden brain potential and memory capacity may lie buried and dormant within each of us. Of course, the million dollar question is how such dormant skills can be accessed naturally without having to endure a catastrophe. Is there evidence that this access is possible in all of us?

DAROLD: In my book, I make reference to Betty Edwards’ work, on her book “The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. What Betty Edwards has done, for years now, is teach people to draw like you would teach somebody a second language. I’m not good at drawing, but I could take one of her courses, and I might be surprised that I’m able to draw better than I can.

I know I’m not going to be any genius at that, but if you read her book, the reason that she is teaching people how to draw is not because she wants them to be able to draw better. What she wants them to do is to shift gears a little bit and spend a little bit more time in the right hemisphere.

There are companies, major corporations, that send their executives to Betty Edwards’ courses, not to have them learn to draw better but because the vision, seeing the bigger picture, and creativity itself is more likely a right-brain-dominant domain than a left-brain one. So what these executives come away with, hopefully, is an increased ability to see the big picture of their company, or the big picture of their industry. It’s a convincing book, to me at least, and her examples show that in terms of getting people to shift gears a little bit.

Another reference I would use is Jill Taylor’s work. I mentioned her book earlier, and she was certainly a left-brain scientist and a very successful one, but now she’s able to make that shift and she is making the argument that all of us are able to do that more, if we think about it, and if we work at it, and if we consciously try to shift to the right.

I think we’re showing that not only when one does meditation that one is getting into a different realm, cognitively, but if you look at the imaging that’s done on people when they’re meditating, they indeed are entering a different portion of the brain which is activated. So I think that those are some ways that one can do that. And then there’s Allan Snyder in Australia who uses transmagnetic stimulation (see “Conversations on Creativity with Allan Snyder” and “Thinking Cap Stimulates Insight”).

He continues his work in trying to address that, and uses a technological way of doing that. From my own conclusions or observations, it takes me back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of being able to simply shift focus in a conscious deliberative way and without seeing that as being frivolous or a waste of time, or “hobby”, if you want to call it that. And many times I think the extent to which their particular area comes out surprises the individual.

In my own case, I think if I’m not musical, mechanical, or artistic, well, where does that leave me. I can’t count or calculate, but I do have a pretty good mechanical sense, and a sense of nature. And I was impressed with many of the patients that I had through the years in my practice who were farmers, many of whom had not gone beyond the eighth grade, and yet they had a knowledge about the earth, and about nature, and about growing, and seasons, and the whole huge domain of knowledge about their industry of farming and earth and growing things, and I was simply amazed at some of the observations that they had.

We had a fellow one time doing some landscape work for us, and he had some rather unusual behaviors, but his knowledge of the earth, and his knowledge of what grows where and when, and his little secret potion that he put on each of the bushes, which I never could, like Colonel Sanders’ recipes for spices. Everything that he touched grew. So, it’s that kind of capacity, I think, that we need to discover within ourselves and to nourish them.

Now, we’re not all going to be Einsteins, or Picassos, or Rembrandts, but I think it enriches our life when you find some of those things and don’t see them as frivolous or just as hobbies but more central to our being.

For a review on this topic, see “The Rain Man In All Of Us”.

SCOTT: That was actually very poetic! Do you ever write poetry?

DAROLD: No, I haven’t written poetry, but I had written in a whole different area of what I call mellowing, or becoming more mellow, which means becoming relaxed, at ease, and pleasantly convivial. It’s just a booklet, but it talks about this not from a standpoint of savant syndrome, but I was into this long before, or as a parallel track of, and you’ll see the analogies here in terms of getting into the right hemisphere. So when I read Jill Bolte Taylor’s work, I said, you know, what she’s talking about is what I call mellowing, and it is a shift in emphasis. So, that’s where I’ve done a fair amount of writing in that area.

SCOTT: Do we all have this autobiographical memory ability that savants have but they’re just better at accessing those memories?

DAROLD: Yeah. In my my experience, I’ve come to that conclusion. Again, these are conclusions I’ve come to, as opposed to starting out with. That we all have a running tape of our existence is not something which I would have espoused before I got into some of the things with the savant. A couple of things have made me wonder about that.

One is that there are savants with tremendous autobiographical memory, not just memory for dates, and places, and calendar calculating, but actually can recall what they had for dinner on Thursday, July 20, whatever year, and know July 20 was on a Thursday.

And then there is this condition called hyperthymestic syndrome, which is not in savants. These are neurotypical people who have vivid autobiographical memory, and there are some cases described now, I think four or five such cases, that seem to meet the criteria for hyperthymestic memory but working with several things have colored my observations about that.

One is, in my practice, when I did sodium amytal interviews on some patients, I remember one patient in particular had panic attacks and anxiety disorder, and she was convinced that something had happened to her because when she got in certain places with certain reminders she would be more likely to have this panic attack. And she was convinced that something had happened to her on a particular day in her life. She couldn’t retrieve the memory, but she was convinced that that’s when it started.

I don’t do hypnosis in the usual way. I use sodium amytal, which is chemical hypnosis, because it’s quicker and easy to administer. Anyway, I took her back to that particular day, and she remembered driving down the street, she remembered the street names on the street signs, she remembered the light turning green from red, remembered the trip to this particular place, and details which she never could have recounted before this sodium amytal. It turns out that there was an event that took place.

It was not nearly as drastic or traumatic or as awful as she imagined it might have been, but there was an event which did occur, and she was able to retrieve that. When she woke up from it, she said, what did I tell you, or, you know, what did you find out? And I told her, and she then had no recollection except as I recited the route. So it was all stored there and the sodium amytal made it possible to retrieve that.

I just kind of tucked that away, but then I came across the work of Wilder Penfield, who was a neurologist in Canada, and really a pioneer in mind brain research in those days and his trying to find the epileptogenic foci in the person, which we still do, by the way. If somebody has epileptic seizures which are not controlled by medication, and they seemed to be triggered by a particular scar in the brain, you can, in fact, expose the brain, and use a probe to put it down in different places on the brain, trying to find out where is that scar, and when does the patient have a seizure. And if you can find that scar, it can be removed surgically and the person will not have seizures, so there’s a real valid search.

We can search now for those foci with the neuroimaging that we didn’t have before, and so you don’t actually have to do the kind of thing that Wilder Penfield did. But in his doing that, he would put the probe down on the cortex trying to find the scar, and the person is like, “oh, my God, it’s my 3rd birthday, and there’s Aunt Mildred, and Uncle Tom, and my cousins”, and as we are able to probe down, we come to these vivid, colorful memories which were just buried there and were there but in real life unable to be accessed.

Well, fast forward a little bit to about two years ago when a physician, a neurologist, decided to try to treat morbid obesity by finding the appetite center in the hypothalamus and maybe being able to implant an electrode which would change the hunger, and therefore the person would be able to lose weight and so forth, but as he put the probe down to find that spot in the hypothalamus, the same thing happened.

As that probe went down, he was finding all sorts of autobiographical memories flooding forth in these individuals which were simply not available to them when they were awake. So those things all raise that possibility that there is a continuous tape, but we simply don’t have access to it.

Another thing which makes me think that is that many times in our dreams, or at least maybe I should just speak from my own dreams, but many times in dreams, I will find myself in a situation that I hadn’t thought about for ages, and if you would ask me about it early when I was awake, I wouldn’t be able to recollect who was there, or what it was, but it appears.

And dreams are kind of crazy because everything is out of time sequence. This may be a little boy scene now that I’m grown up and the kind of craziness of dreams but the recollection of events that we just, “Oh, my God, where did that come from, I had not thought about that for years”. So I have come to the impression that we indeed do have a continuous tape and that we simply don’t have access to it, but it is there.

SCOTT: Yeah. I would tend to agree. In my cognitive psychology class I taught a lecture on memory, and I posed to the students, “Do you think that we have a store of every single trace in our memory system, somewhere in some neuron of everything we ever experienced”, and they were like, “Oh, of course not, you know, there’s no way, like, if you just look at the ceiling you can remember all the dots that are there”. And then I posed the example of Stephen Wiltshire who can go in an aerial view and paint everything from memory. I think his talent raises a lot of interesting questions because he’s not supernatural. I mean, it’s not like he’s Superman.

DAROLD: Yeah. Precisely. It’s interesting with Stephen. We haven’t tested him on this, but he says that if he were asked to reconstruct one of those drawings, that he could do that. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but the point is that it’s not just a fleeting recollection but that it may remain. The capacity of the brain is astounding as it is, but then in that one section of the book where I have the one image of this gentleman who just has a thin rim of cortex and nothing else except fluid in the brain, and yet his IQ is 80, he’s married, he has a successful job, and he’s not in any way disabled.

So that means there’s an awful lot of excess capacity that I think we don’t use, or maybe we do use and it’s simply stored and not available. But whether it’s an actual bit-by-bit, continuous tape, or whether it’s relatively so, the point is there’s just so much more information.

Another indication of that, to me, is dealing with some patients with Alzheimer’s disease. As the short term memory disappears early in the Alzheimer’s patient, what I call “the onion” unpeels, you learn things that they have never talked about before, and family members will say, “I never heard that story before”. And yet if you went back to childhood, or adolescence, or back on the farm, these are good stories, interesting things, but they had never heard them before. It’s as if the onion unpeels in Alzheimer’s, and these things come to the surface.

SCOTT: You know, the more and more we learn about memory and how it works, it seems like retrieval cues are the really important thing and that without those cues it can seem as though we just don’t have that memory anymore, but maybe with some sort of retrieval cues we can access things we never thought we knew.

DAROLD: That’s right. I think that’s what the probe is, a technological retrieval cue. I think I mentioned this in the book. I did a 45 year follow-up on this young lad who had memorized the buses in Milwaukee. He was on the unit, and he remembered every patient that was there, and he remembered when they came, when they were discharged, remembered things about their family, and remembered each staff person who was on the unit by name, and by description, and so forth and so on.

We had lunch together, and then he said, “do you remember such-and-such a patient”? And I was like “yeah, now that you mention it, I do”. And then he started to mention each of the staff people and their characteristics, and I remembered each of those people too. But if you’d asked me before who’s who, or the names of the patients on the unit, and the names of the staff people, I can remember some, but as he provided these retrieval cues, by George, each of those people came to memory. And so it’s there, but it took his remarkable memory. I mean, he remembered all those things that most of us would have just simply discarded.

And then I actually had kept the patient names in a folder because I was doing a couple of studies on the unit, one of which was the epidemiology study, and another had to do with enuresis, of all things. I tend to keep things, and so I went back and, by God, that’s exactly each of those people that he mentioned, to the extent that there was an admission and discharge. He was correct!

So, he was able to trigger that in me, and that made me even more convinced that there is an awful lot down there, or up there, that we need retrieval cues, and the people with autobiographical memory, the hyperthymestic, for whatever reason, is able to have much more access to that than the rest of us.

SCOTT: What factors determine whether or not high abilities will surface? What factors determine the skills, once accessed, will be spectacular? In other words, what caveats are there to the inner-savant-in-all-of-us idea, if there are any caveats?

DAROLD: Well, I think one caveat is that we are not all little Mozarts, or Einsteins in waiting. The differential endowment issue is one which plays into that, and that’s something over which we really don’t have any control. That’s just there. I think the acquired savant caveat is that it depends on where an entry occurs and it depends on the differential endowment, and what I call the bell shaped curve phenomenon is certainly there.

So when I talk about the inner Rain Man within us all, I’m not suggesting that we can all sit down and memorize the telephone book as Raymond Babbitt did, or all the things that he did, but I think that if you take into account the differential endowment issue, the bell shaped curve, and to some extent our family, or the people around us, if they are supportive of our parallel or sometimes even odd interest that might help.

If somebody decides they want to investigate UFOs in more depth, or if somebody gets deeply into religious studies, then some people would just discount that out of hand and be skeptical, or cynical, saying that’s preposterous. Depending on where their thinking is, they may not support that in the same way as they would if they had some other parallel interest.

I think the caveat would extend too, in terms of the third part of the stool and the savant which has to do with the family, and the support system, and the reinforcement that they get, and so I would put that into this equation as well.

SCOTT: You raise the intriguing suggestion that dormant skills may be present in all of us as a child, but they get reverted to some obscure, I think you call it spot of storage, through under use. In what ways can schools and society minimize this from happening?

DAROLD: We tend to be a left-brain society. I don’t mean to demean that or to knock it because it serves us well, because we depend on logical, sequential thinking and language to make many advances, but I think we establish those well worn paths because they serve us well, and we reinforce them because they are going to serve us well when we get into the work world and so forth.

I think some of the other endeavors in school are seen, and you can see it now when the budget cutting is occurring. They’re cutting the budgets not in language, they’re cutting them in arts, and music, and athletics, and other kinds of things that are seen as not central to the educational purpose of the school. So that’s one thing that I think we tend to deemphasize for the broader term of right brain kind of skills, or right-brain endeavors.

And not only do we do that somewhat at our peril because we tend to minimize those skills that can be valuable, but also there are a fair number of youngsters in school who are having trouble with left-brain learning and may be very adept and very skilled in right-brain areas.

Now, I think that’s changing to some degree. I think we’ve drifted a little away from the fact that college education is always superior to vocational education, and being a nurse is better than being a carpenter in terms of the life skills, or being a computer programmer is better than being a plumber, and I think we’re seeing some change in that.

Again, I think most things, it comes in a pendulum, but when I was in grade and high school, those of us that were successful, and sort of behaved ourselves, continued in school and those that didn’t make it in the left-brain classroom or were not behaving themselves would go to what was called a vocational school.
And it really was clearly a second-tier education and a second relegation kind of thing. Now, we’re finding that many of the technical schools, as they’re called now, are competing actively with colleges in vocational skills and training people for vocational skills instead of academic skills and learning that that may be just as important and just as successful, in terms of income, than some of these other areas.

I think that in some of our schools they are building houses in the vocational classes and doing some very useful kinds of things and seeing that as valuable. So I think there’s some recognition of that. However, I think, particularly in the arts, there tends to be a minimization of that as you can see by what’s getting dropped. Also, I think there’s a tendency now, with the budget cutting, to do away with the gifted and talented programs, which I think is a mistake because there are kids who are gifted and talented who do learn at a different pace and in an accelerated way.

And in some school systems, we’re finding that the savants are now being included in the gifted and talented classes, which they should be, even though their IQ may not be as high. So I think we need different ways of educating. There are a fair number of kids in school who have a nonverbal learning disorder, and they just don’t do well until they finally are educated in a way that taps their style of learning, and I’ve seen them take off and just fly away once that happens.
So I think that we need to be looking at more versatile kinds of educations and different educational populations, and we need to rethink a little bit how we’ve sort of tended to value academics over vocational kind of schools.

SCOTT: I’m completely with you. I wonder if we should not call people learning disabled but maybe learning different.

DAROLD: Yes. Indeed. Right. I think, as you know, Daniel Tammet wrote that in the foreword to my book.

SCOTT: Yeah.

DAROLD: And in there he suggested just what we’re talking about. He doesn’t use the word disabled, he uses the word differently-abled.

SCOTT: I like that.

DAROLD: And that is a much better way of looking at it. You know, through most of our conversation, I have used the word disabled more than I should. I should have continued to say these differently-abled people because that’s really what savants are. I think it’s that they are differently-abled and we ought to look at that rather than their disabilities. Although I’m a bit guilty myself of not practicing what Daniel said, I think your observation is correct that instead of talking about a learning disability, we ought to call it like a learning-different ability or something, because the disability is only in a relationship to that which we stress.

See other parts of the series here:

Part II, Dispelling Myths about Autism

Part III, Inside the Savant Mind

Part IV, The Origins of Extraordinary Savant Skills

Part V, The Acquired and Sudden Savant

Part VI, What Savants Reveal about Greatness

Part VII, The Inner Savant in All of Us

—-  Scott Barry Kauf­man, Ph.D. is a cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and writer based in New York City. His lat­est Sharp­Brains articles are:

Our Brain on Music: We need to do more than listen

Take that Nap! It May Boost Your Learn­ing Capac­ity Among Other Good Things.

Reflec­tions on Cre­ativ­ity: Inter­view with Daniel Tammet

.What’s The Size Of The Mozart Effect? The Jury Is In.

In a now well-known 1993 paper in Nature called “Music and spatial task performance”, Frances H. Rauscher and her colleagues report that participants who were exposed to the first movement “allegro con spirito” of the Mozart Sonata KV 448 for Two Pianos in D major scored significantly higher on standardized tests of abstract/spatial reasoning ability than those who were instructed to relax or those who just sat there in silence.

Even though the participants in Rauscher et al.‘s study were college students, and they didn’t administer a full battery of cognitive tests to properly assess general intelligence, their findings translated into “play Mozart to your children and they will grow up smart.” A cottage industry was born.

Don Campbell created an online business selling CDs that purportedly enable the buyer to “discover the transformational powers of music for health, education, and well-being”, claiming that music is a “powerful catalyst for healing, creativity, and development”. He even went further, claiming that “innovative and experimental uses of music and sound can improve listening disorders, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, autism, and other mental and physical disorders and injuries”.

Others also hopped on The Mozart Effect bandwagon, including the makers of the UK bestseller “Baroque-a-bye Baby” CD, who claim that their “Slow Baroque music — 60 beats per min — same as mothers heartbeat, has a calming effect on babies, while its mathematical perfection and symmetry will stimulate your child’s brain.” Even the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, announced in 1998 that his state budget would include $105,000 a year to allow every newborn child in Georgia a chance to own and listen to a recording of classical music.

Make no doubt: listening to music, especially music that makes us feel good, does have salutary effects. Research does show that at least up to 10 minutes after the music stops, there is improvement on some tests that are most relevant to music. There is even research showing that listening to music that makes us happy can also make everyone around us look happy.

The questions though are a) whether it’s music that directly makes us smarter, or the positive mood the music puts us in and b) is there something special about listening to classical music over and above listening to Jay-Z or Rascal Flats that puts us in a better state of mind for working.

Since that original 1993 study, the majority of studies looking at exposure to the Mozart sonata KV 448 showed rather weak enhancement of performance on spatial tasks compared to conditions where participants were exposed to non-musical stimuli or sat in silence for the same amount of time as it took to administer the Mozart sonata (usually 8 minutes, 24 seconds). Research has also suggested that it’s the positive arousal that music affords rather than music in particular that has temporary effects on cognition.

When enough studies on a topic have been done, it’s important to combine all the studies and assess the overall effect, a technique called a “meta-analysis”. Some of the meta-analyses that have been conducted present contradictory results, however.

Chabris (1999) and Hetlan (2000) both conducted a combined analysis of a number of studies but found differing results. Based on published studies, Chabris found an effect size of d=0.14 (very small). They argue that the effects are very specific types of cognitive tasks and are explained neuropsychologically by “enjoyment arousal”.

A limitation of the Chabris study however is that they included in their meta-analysis studies that administered abstract reasoning tests as dependent measure in addition to spatial ability tests. Also, their effect size is based on only 15 study effects, not a particularly large number for a meta-analysis.

Based on unpublished studies (36 study effects), Hetlan (2000) found an effect size of d=0.46 (medium). They only included measures of spatial ability, however. For their effect size estimation, they also included studies in which the musical stimuli that was administered in the treatment conditions were not confined to the Mozart sonata, but instead consisted of any kind of (supposedly enhancing) musical stimulus.

In fact, neither of these meta-analyses included studies that administered the same Mozart sonata as Rauscher et al. did, and more importantly, neither study assessed the potentially confounding influence of publication bias. This is really important since studies that find an effect are more likely to get published whereas those that do not find an effect find tend to end up in the dustbin much faster. This can give a skewed impression of the true effect size.

Enter Jakob Pietshnig and his colleagues. In a recently in press article in the journal Intelligence, Pietshnig et al. present the results of what they claim is the biggest meta-analysis (nearly 40 studies, 104 independent samples, and over 3000 participants) ever conducted on the question of whether or not a Mozart effect exists. They hypothesized that there would be a significant influence of publication bias on the overall effect. What did they find?

1. Samples exposed to the Mozart sonata KV 448 scored significantly higher on spatial tasks than samples exposed to non-musical stimuli or no stimulus at all (d= 0.37, p < .011).

2. Samples exposed to the Mozart sonata KV 448 scored significantly higher on spatial tasks than samples exposed to any other kind of music (d=0.15, p = .02).

As for this small effect size, the researchers note that

“this finding can be explained by potentially differently activating music. Since general arousal affects cortical activation and thus performance on spatial tasks, subjects exposed to more arousing music are more likely to score higher on spatial tasks (Thompson, Schellenberg, & Hussain, 2001). As musical stimuli other than the Mozart sonata covered a wide variety of styles of music from popular music to minimalistic music pieces, less arousing musical stimuli may have played a moderating role in task performance, thus resulting in lower scores in samples exposed to other musical stimuli than in samples exposed to the Mozart sonata.”

3. Samples exposed to any other kind of music scored significantly higher on spatial tasks than samples exposed to non-musical stimuli or not stimulus at all (d=0.38).

4. There was strong evidence of publication bias for studies that compared the Mozart sonata condition to a non-musical or silence condition. In these particular studies, effect sizes for published studies were higher than for unpublished studies “emphasizing that studies showing strong effects in expected directions tend to be published more often, quicker, and more prominently…”

5. Effect sizes of studies that compared exposure to the Mozart sonata to no stimulus at all were three times higher among researchers affiliated with the labs of Rauscher or Rideout than for published studies performed by other labs. The researchers do note that minor procedural differences in studies performed by different labs could be the source of the differences. They point out Rauscher and Shaw (1998), who emphasized the necessity of exact replication of their original study design to observe the Mozart effect. Also, to be fair to Rauscher, she is on record saying that the results of her original study have been “grossly misapplied and over-exaggerated.” Nonetheless, the findings of this large meta-analysis are interesting since they found this difference in effect among labs even after looking at other possible moderating variables relating to task procedure.

The Jury Is In

The researchers conclude:

“This study clearly demonstrates that there is only little support for a specific Mozart effect in published as well as in unpublished work. Although results indicate a positive, significant effect of exposure to the Mozart sonata (KV 448) compared to no stimulus at all on spatial task performance, observed effects were only small in size. Moreover, exposure to other musical stimuli compared to exposure to no stimulus at all yielded a significant overall effect of about the same size…On the whole, there is little left that would support the notion of a specific enhancement of spatial task performance through exposure to the Mozart sonata KV 448.”

I think the jury is in on this one: The Mozart effect is weak, at best. Maybe the question can finally be put to rest.

Does this mean that music is not important? Not at all. People derive great pleasure from listening to music, and the benefits of being in a good mood for performance on any task can be quite beneficial, at least temporarily.

For more long-lasting effects, however, research shows that learning how to make music is more important for positive long-term changes than just listening to music. Music instruction literally changes the brain, possibly increasing the corpus callosum (the bit of the brain that enables cross-talk between the two hemispheres of the brain). Music instruction may increase working memory, and boost specific skills that are directly related to music such as fine motor skill.

Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University and her team of researchers have an ongoing active area of research where they have demonstrated among a number of studies the far-reaching impact of music instruction on the brain and cognition. In a recent study, Lappe, Herholz, Trainor, and Pantev (2008) musically trained two groups of nonmusicians  over the course of 2 weeks. People in the sensorimotor-auditory condition learned to play a musical sequence on the piano, whereas the people in the auditory group listened to and made judgements about the music that had been played by participants in the other group. Both groups significantly differed in their cortical responses after training. The sensorimotor-auditory group, however, showed a greater enlargement of the auditory cortex after training compared with the auditory group, indicating that there was greater enhancement of musical representations in the auditory cortex when there is sensorimotor-auditory training compared to mere auditory training. Their results suggest not only that sensorimotor and auditory systems are connected, but also that sensorimotor-auditory training can cause plastic re-organizational changes in the auditory cortex over and above the changes that occur with just auditory training alone.

But that’s just one example of the benefits of musical training. In general, music instruction, as compared to just listening to music may have long lasting effects because the skills that are learned when taking music lessons have real world transfer. According to Trainor, the very nature of learning to play an instrument potentially has many general benefits:

“The child has to hold an instrument, position his hands, listen to the sound the teacher’s making, reproduce that sound, hold in mind the sound and compare it, assess pitch and sound quality, and change that if necessary. All that takes a tremendous amount of attention. It trains kids how to accomplish things, and it trains memory as well. All that is going to make you better at learning.”

The point is this: there is no fast track to smarts. Long-term benefits require long-term training. Listening to music can be beneficial temporarily while you’re working, especially if it makes you feel good and inspires and motivates you to work harder, but be very skeptical of anyone who claims that 8 minutes of anything will have long-lasting effects on intelligence.

I’ll leave the last word to The Journal Times Online:

“If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you’ll need more than hype and a loaded iPOD.”

References

• Chabris, C. F. (1999). Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart effect’? Nature, 400, 826– 827.
• Hetland, L. (2000). Listening to music enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: Evidence for the Mozart effect. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34,105–148.
• Lappe, C., Herholz, S.C., Trainor, L.J., & Pantev, C. (2008). Cortical plasticity induced by short-term unimodal and multimodal musical training. The Journal of Neuroscience, 28, 9632–9639.
• Pietschnig, J., Voracek, M., & Formann, A.K. (2010). Mozart effect-Schmozart: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, doi:10.1016/j.intell.2010.03.001.
• Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365, 611.
• Rauscher, F. H., & Shaw, G. L. (1998). Key components of the Mozart effect. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86, 835−841.
• Thompson, W. F., Schellenberg, E. G., & Husain, G. (2001). Arousal, mood, and the Mozart effect. Psychological Science, 12, 248–251.

—-  Scott Barry Kauf­man, Ph.D. is a cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and writer based in New York City. His lat­est Sharp­Brains arti­cles are:

Take that Nap! It May Boost Your Learning Capacity Among Other Good Things.

Well, now science is on my side. I just love this new study, which was presented by Matthew Walker, assistant professor at UC Berkeley, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in San Diego this past Sunday (Feb. 2010).

Walker and his colleagues Bryce A. Mander and Sangeetha Santhanam split up a batch of 39 healthy young adults into two groups. One group napped, the other did not.

At noon, both groups took a learning task thought to recruit the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a region of the brain known to play an important role in the formation of new memories. Over the past few years, various researchers have found that fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before other regions of the brain can operate on the content, especially the regions of the brain responsible for higher-order reasoning and thinking.  At this point in the experiment, both groups showed similar levels of performance.

Then, at 2pm, the nap group took a 90-minute nap while the no-nap group stayed awake, presumably watching the nap group enjoying their nap. After nap-time both groups then took more learning tests. The nappers did better on the tasks than those who stayed awake, demonstrating their higher capacity to learn.

The researchers interpret these findings as supporting their hypothesis that a major function of sleep is to clear away all the clutter stored in the hippocampus to make room for new information. In the words of Walker:

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.”

Walker also likens the brain to a sponge:

“Sleep is critical for learning. It’s like the brain is a sponge. Sleep wrings certain key regions out so you’re able to soak up new information the next day.”

Short mid-day naps may be good because they get you into a particularly beneficial part of the sleep cycle. EEG studies (that measure the electrical activity of the brain) have shown that this memory-refreshing process occurs during Stage 2 non-REM sleep. We actually spend at least 50% of our sleeping time in this stage, suggesting an adaptive purpose for this stage of sleep:

“I can’t imagine Mother Nature would have us spend 50 percent of the night going from one sleep stage to another for no reason. Sleep is sophisticated. It acts locally to give us what we need,” says Walker.

Now, what about that cup of tea? Was my friend in England right? His advice is usually spot-on, but this time he may have been misguided.  Sara Mednick at the UC San Diego (and author of the book: Take a Nap! Change Your Life) divided her subjects into two groups: one group received 200 mg of caffeine and did not nap and the other group just took a nap. Then both groups underwent a battery of tasks, including measures of typing, and measures of memory recall, tapping into visual, verbal, and motor memory. She found that the day nappers did better on all the tasks than those who popped the caffeiene pill. “Of course, that’s bad news for Starbucks,” says Mednick. Mednick also notes: “Which would you rather be: wired or smart?”

Mednick points out that the time during the day a person should nap varies depending on the person’s age. She says that since teenagers and young adults have a slightly shifted sleep cycle, going to bed late and waking up early, their ideal napping window is in the afternoon, around 4p.m. The ideal napping window for adults, in contrast, is between 1 to 3 p.m., since adults usually sleep between 11 p.m. and midnight and wake up between 6.am. and 8 am.

Walker and his colleagues are also interested in the link between age and the function of sleep. They are now investigating whether the reduction of sleep as we age is associated with the well-replicated decrease in our ability to learn as we age. As noted in the official UC Berkeley University press release, this is fascinating research and could greatly improve our understanding of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Sleeping is Good for You

The Walker and colleagues study is one among a number that show that sleep, more generally, can be very beneficial for a wide range of positive outcomes. At UC Berkeley, both Walker’s research group and Allison Harvey’s group at the Sleep and Psychological Disorder Laboratory have found that getting a good amount of sleep at night is tied to a better immune system, metabolic control, memory, learning, and emotional functioning. Most of us are familiar with the often cited finding that pulling an all-nighter the night before an exam can decrease the ability to remember the information by roughly 40 percent, but it’s really cool to see all these other benefits of sleep.

I can relate. Sometimes when I am learning a new tune on my piano, I get frustrated in the moment when I think I am no longer making progress. Sometimes when I try to tackle the song the next day after a good night’s sleep, I realize I have learnt the whole thing the night before! In fact, research does show that people have 20 to 30 percent better recall of what they learned during a piano lesson if they are tested after a full eight hours of sleep than if they are tested right after the piano lesson.

There are also benefits of sleep for creativity. Multiple threads of research support this notion, and the link between sleeping and creativity has been noted by prominent researchers such as Jerome Singer as well as Walker:

“This starts to sound a lot like the basis for human creativity. The fusing of things that don’t seem to have any connection. That’s what sleep, particularly dreaming does. Like good cooking, when it comes to memory, it’s not enough to chop up the ingredients and put them together. The brain needs time to let things marinate.”

Sleeping may even have important affects on depression. Some researchers now believe that chronic sleep deprivation may lead to depression, rather than depression causing one to sleep less (which was what researchers used to think was the causal link).  In one study, which I believe is still ongoing, Harvey’s research group along with the Kaier Permanente Center for Health Research in Oregon recruited 60 middle and high school students to investigate whether more sleep can lower the risk factor for depression. In their study, the teens will report on their sleep habits for 12-weeks, undergoing 12 one-hour, once-a-week sessions of cognitive behavior therapy that will focus on sleep and mood patterns.

It’s clear then that sleep is adaptive for many positive outcomes.

“We are getting close to understanding some of the functions of sleep, yet society still treats sleep like a luxury. We say, ‘When I have two weeks’ vacation I’m going to allow myself to sleep eight hours.’ But we would never say that about water or food. If there’s something that gets shortchanged, it’s always sleep,” notes Walker.

In fact, it turns out that people who take regular naps and get a good night’s sleep may have the ability to learn twice as much as those who just get a good night’s rest. This is all important research, especially in light of the fact that about 40% of Americans get less than 7 hours of shut-eye a night (teenagers are advised to sleep about 9 hours a night) and two-thirds of women report having difficulty falling asleep more than three nights a week. As Mednick notes: “We are a sleep-deprived nation.” Mednick and other officials at UC San Diego even organized a “nap-in” last year during International Napping Day (don’t you wish every day was International Napping Day?).

So, to all the napping haters out there, check out the research. But really, doesn’t this research all really just confirm what mothers have been telling us all along? Walker thinks so: “My research is not revolutionary, because your mother knew it all along.

—-  Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. is a cognitive psychologist and writer based in New York City. His lat­est Sharp­Brains arti­cles are:

Last night I was eating dinner with my parents back in my hometown in Philadelphia. I was telling them about my interview with Daniel Tammet, and how I was working on a post about my reflections on the interview. My father, who reads everything I write (which can be awkward sometimes!), looked at me and said, plainly and simply, “I see a lot of similarities between you and Daniel, Scott.” Those words were a kind of crystallizing moment for me. I suppose I knew at an intuitive level that this interview was so meaningful to me, and I was aware that I had this great drive to get the complete interview out there for people to read, but with that comment by my Dad, it really hit me why the experience was so meaningful: this interview really was personal.

To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have Asperger’s syndrome. But I did have an auditory learning disability growing up that made me feel like an outsider most of my early childhood, a feeling which remains to this day. My interview with Daniel was so profound to me because I think it really made it crystal clear to me, at least clearer than ever before, that whatever the “disorder”- learning disability, personality disorder, attention deficit disorder, mood disorder, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, etc. — or life circumstance, anyone whose marginality put them on a different path from the rest of the kids, from the rest of the adults, from the rest of society, are united in that feeling of being different. Daniel Tammet’s feeling of a great loneliness and isolation growing up spoke to me, for sure. But I’m sure it also spoke to a great many people reading the interview.

There is a bit of Daniel Tammet in all of us. I think all of us, at one time or another, have felt different in a particular context, and have felt the intense conflict to simultaneously want to fit in while also wanting to just be accepted for being different. Not all of us may be able to calculate pi to as many places as Daniel can, or can automatically associate numbers with colors, or can write both prose and poetry as beautifully as he does, or can paint as he does. But what my interview with Daniel taught me is that it doesn’t matter if you can’t do everything he does. Life is not about deliberately practicing yourself down someone else’s path. It’s about staying true to yourself at all times, and being fully open to going down your own unique, unplanned, and unpredictable path.

Researchers have asked me whether, after my interview with Daniel, I think he is a “fraud”. I suppose they want to know whether he really is “autistic” or whether he really can truly do all the mind tricks he appears to be capable of. They saw his interview on Letterman, where he was very charismatic and socially engaging and they wonder whether he still has Asperger’s syndrome, since he didn’t seem to display all of the symptoms on the show.

I, too, saw the Letterman interview. What I saw in that interview was a very smart person who was capable of being social. There is no doubt that Daniel has gone through a great transformation over the years, becoming more socially adept and outgoing. He has learned quite a bit about life, love, and relationships. But still, talking on the phone with him, there were moments when I could tell he was struggling a bit to understand some of my more ambiguous phrases, that he still processed some of the things I said literally. Whether he would still be labelled “Asperger’s” today though, is in many ways missing the larger point.

The point is that there is something it means to be Daniel. Daniel was born with a unique mind, wired in a certain way, which contributed significantly to how he sees the world. He has been able to compensate quite a bit, but there still remains a core to him that makes him unique. And I saw absolutely no dishonesty in my interview with him– in fact, what I had the honor of witnessing was one of the most truest individuals I’ve ever met in my entire life, a person who lives his life always trying to stay true to himself in a society that labels him as different. In a lot of ways, a lot of people in this world every day of their own lives are trying to do the very same thing.

Throughout the interview, Daniel was very critical of IQ testing and the study of individual differences. I fully appreciate where his critiques were coming from. I agree with him that many things we do serve to reduce people to just one dimension, and in the case of a poorly administered IQ test, reducing a person to just a number. But as I’ve reviewed recently, the field of IQ testing is rapidly evolving. The major aim of most modern day IQ test makers I talk to is not to reduce, but to broaden– to identify a particular individual’s unique pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and to custom tailor an educational program for that person. This is a goal I think Daniel would agree with.

I think Daniel also underestimated the importance of investigating individual differences more generally. I study individual differences in my research program. The reason why I do so is because I fully believe that’s where most of the interesting aspects of human nature lie. It’s so fascinating to me how we can all vary so much from one another– on so many attributes like physical features, personality, intelligence, creativity, style of thinking, life experiences, etc.– and yet at the end of the day we are all part of the same species. We all have similar fears, desires, and foibles. I think the study of individual differences is important– not as a way of reducing people– but as a way of broadening the spectrum of ways people can differ and the ways in which both innate dispositions and culture shapes who we are.

It is clear from my interview with Daniel that he really was born with a unique brain wiring. It wasn’t solely deliberate practice that got Daniel Tammet to Daniel Tammet. It was the unique constellation of potentials that the body named “Daniel Tammet” was born with, and that, through a series of fortunate opportunities, allowed him to more fully express and realize his potential than could have easily been the case — unfortunately, many people have life circumstances that hinder them from realizing their potential, and they erroneously think that their current life is all that is possible for themselves. If anything, I’d imagine most of Daniel’s deliberate practice went toward trying to learn things that come more naturally to others (such as how to recognize faces), just so he could better fit in, than learning things that already came more naturally to himself (such as dancing with numbers).

In this new year, this new decade, and well into the future of humanity, let’s all try a little bit harder to appreciate each other’s differences. And by doing so, let’s also remind ourselves to remain true to ourselves, despite society. Like Daniel Tammet.

(Editor’s Note: what follows is a summary of the in-depth conversation between Daniel Tammet and Scott Barry Kaufman. Links to whole series below).

Interview Corner: Daniel Tammet
An autistic savant joins the wider world.

PROFESSION: Writer

CLAIM TO FAME: Vividly describes autistic savantism from the inside

Although their unusual abilities compel considerable attention, there are fewer than 50 autistic savants worldwide. Daniel Tammet is one of them. Over 30 years, the London-born mathematical and language whiz has transformed from an awkward, reclusive boy into a confident adult. His quiet, private life of strict routines gave way in 2006, when his memoir Born on a Blue Day became a best-seller, necessitating travel, self-promotion, and talk show appearances. His latest book, Embracing the Wide Sky, is a scientific exploration of his extraordinary abilities (reciting pi to 22,514 places, learning to speak Icelandic in a week) and a tour of autism.

Scott: How have you compensated for the challenges of Asperger’s?

Daniel: Growing up, I would have to watch the other children and learn from my mistakes. I would have to push myself to overcome the things most people don’t have to think about. Brushing my teeth was very difficult because of the noise of the brush. Today I use an electric toothbrush; the sound is repetitive and isn’t irritating. And making friends as well was very difficult. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I felt very close to numbers. Those were the things I understood very well. I also have synesthesia. While other children were playing with each other, I was playing with numbers in my head: visualizing the shapes and the colors I saw and seeing how they change and how they interact, doing sums and enjoying the rhythms and the colors and the kind of dance.

Scott: Do your earliest memories relate to numbers?

Daniel: My very earliest memory is of falling down the stairs and seeing colors as I fell. And not crying out loud, not realizing that I should cry in order to bring my parents out to look after me.

Can people change their personalities?

Yes, my own story illustrates that. In the last few years, I’ve seen a very big change in my own life. I’m now working on my third book, which will be a novel. Until several years ago, fiction didn’t interest me very much. Today I’m reading Dostoyevsky. I find the way he describes various emotions, characters, and events very dramatic. This appeals to me and helps me understand emotions.

How else have you changed?

I’m certainly much more confident in my social interactions. I travel much more. I live in the south of France in the beautiful city of Avignon. People with Asperger’s often grow up feeling like foreigners, and I feel today more comfortable in many respects speaking in French than in my native tongue. That’s another example of taking a plunge. I have traveled before and I have lived overseas before, but always on a temporary basis. I feel traveling does broaden the mind. It gives me a new perspective on the world. The life I describe in Born on a Blue Day was much more limited. I certainly have routines in my day-to-day life that are important to me and still give me feelings of security and control, but the capacity to break out of them every so often as I travel has given me a second wind.

Do you think anyone with autism can learn to lead a relatively normal social life?

It would depend on the extent of the autism and how we define a social life. If someone is very shy but isn’t autistic, is he more or less normal than someone who is very outgoing? One of the things that fascinates people about autism is that it makes them question what society teaches us about what normal is. I don’t know that there is any one-size-fits-all way of behaving.

Do you have any advice for people with Asperger’s who want to more fully engage with the social world?

How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I’m wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I’m very happy for people to look at my story and say it’s possible to achieve many things. One of the biggest challenges is to keep pushing back against the misconceptions about what autism is and showing the potential for people with autism to have a happy life or to have a successful career.

Has Asperger’s given you a window onto creativity?

I see many examples of creativity within the autism spectrum. This intrigues me because I read that until recently scientists believed autism and creativity was kind of an oxymoron. And that isn’t the case. What we see in very young children, where the brain in essence overdevelops the connections between cells and then radically prunes them back to prevent information overload, perhaps doesn’t take place in the same way for those on the autism spectrum. That hyperconnectivity is what drives creativity, because it allows the person to draw simultaneously from different parts of the brain. Being able to make unusual leaps is characteristic of creativity.

You have reported a high IQ—about 150. How much do you think your IQ has contributed to your extraordinary talents?

The number itself tells me almost nothing about myself and the things I’ve been able to achieve. The test is very banal and so bizarre. Answers more interesting and creative than the expected response get zero marks. My own experience going through it for the book was eye-opening, and it persuaded me that IQ as this precise figure is very silly.

Would you still be diagnosed with Asperger’s today?

I don’t know. Obviously it would depend on the person who was making the diagnosis. The person I am today bears very little resemblance to the person I was 10 years ago and even less resemblance to the child I was 20 years ago.

– Scott Barry Kaufman has published multiple journal articles and book chapters relating to intelligence and creativity and is the editor of two forthcoming books. Interview © 2009 by Scott Barry Kaufman. His latest SharpBrains article was Learning About Learning: an Interview with Joshua Waitzkin. Photo Credit for picture of Daniel Tammet: Rex USA.

You can read the 6-part interview series here:

Part I, Embracing the Wide Sky

Part II, How a Prodigious Savant’s Mind Works

Part III, Nature and Nurture

Part IV, IQ and Human Intelligence

Part V, Creativity, Mind, and the Brain

Part VI, Personal Transformation

After reading Joshua’s most recent book The Art of Learning, I thought of a million topics I wanted to discuss with him–topics such as being labelled a “child prodigy”, blooming, creativity, and the learning process. Thankfully, since I was profiling Waitzkin for an article I was fortunate enough to get a chance to have such a conversation with him. I hope you find this discussion just as provocative and illuminating as I did.

The Child Prodigy

S. Why did you leave chess at the top of your game?

J. This is a complicated question that I wrote about very openly in my book. In short, I had lost the love. My relationship to the game had become externalized-by pressures from the film about my life, by losing touch with my natural voice as an artist, by mistakes I made in the growth process. At the very core of my relationship to learning is the idea that we should be as organic as possible. We need to cultivate a deeply refined introspective sense, and build our relationship to learning around our nuance of character. I stopped doing this and fell into crisis from a sense of alienation from an art I had loved so deeply. This is when I left chess behind, started meditating, studying philosophy and psychology, and ultimately moved towards Tai Chi Chuan.

S. Do you think being a child prodigy hurt your chess career in any way?

J. I have never considered myself a prodigy. Others have used that term, but I never bought in to it. From a young age it was always about embracing the battle, loving the game, and overcoming adversity. Growing up as a competitor in Washington Square Park helped me avoid the perils of perfectionism-it was a school of hard knocks, and those guys always kept me on my toes for complacency. On this theme, I think losing my first National Chess Championship was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, because it helped me avoid many of the psychological traps you are hinting at. That year, between ages 8 and 9 was one of the most formative periods of my life. I had felt my mortality, came back strong, and went on to dominate the scholastic chess scene over the next 8 years. On some fundamental level, the notion of success in my being was defined by overcoming adversity-and it still is.

The truth is that throughout my careers in both chess and the martial arts, I often knew that my rivals were more naturally gifted than me-either with their mental machines or their bodies. But I have believed in my training, my approach to learning, and my ability to rise to the challenge under pressure.

S. In general, do you see any disadvantages to being labeled a child prodigy?

J. Yes, there are huge disadvantages if you buy into the label. The most perilous danger, in the language of Carol Dweck, is that we internalize an entity theory of intelligence. The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity. For that reason, it is incredibly important for parents to make their feedback process related as opposed to praising or criticizing talent. Think about it-if you tell a kid that she is a winner, which a lot of well-intentioned parents do, then she learns that her winning is because of something ingrained in her. But if we win because we are a winner, then when we lose it must make us a loser.

S. If the movie of your life hadn’t been made, do you think you’d still be continuing on in chess?

J. That’s a great question. My mother would say no. I hope she is right but I’m not sure. I really loved the game so deeply, and it was a wildly intense, exciting, and spiritually rewarding process. The movie definitely had a large role in the existential crisis that locked me up and moved me away from chess. But that period of transition taught me some incredibly valuable life lessons that have defined my growth in other arenas-so just to be clear, although it caused me some pain, I would never take back that experience. My hunch is that I would have stayed in chess for much longer and would have gone much further-but I think ultimately I would have felt like a lion in a cage sitting at a chessboard my whole life.

S. Do you think if you took up chess at a later age, you could have been a world champion in chess?

J. I have no idea.

S. Do you think you will ever return to chess? And if you do, do you think you are still capable of being the world champion? Or have you missed your boat?

J. I don’t think I will ever go back to competitive chess. I’m on to new mountains. Since winning the 2004 Tai Chi Push Hands Worlds, which is where my book ends, I decided to be a beginner again, and took up the martial art Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a fiercely competitive and physically brutal sport. I am training full time and aiming for the 2010 and 11 World Championships-the biggest challenge of my life. I’ve also recently opened an educational nonprofit-the JW Foundation, www.jwfoundation.com , and am devoted to helping kids discover their shine in the learning process. My plate is pretty full beyond chess.

S. Were you a good student in school?

J. I was a cut up in classes that didn’t excite me, and I was passionate about what did.

S. Did you like learning new subjects in school? Are there any subjects you had trouble with? Or that you just didn’t like?

J. I never liked math much although I was pretty good at it. And I hated geography in 3rd grade.

On Blooming

S. What does the term “late bloomer” mean to you?

J. To be honest, I haven’t thought much about the term, but in my mind it implies that someone came into their own later in their life or process than most would consider typical for exceptional achievers. Of course this definition leaves a lot to be desired because I tend to consider the deeper aspects of the learning process to be most interesting, and they often take quite a bit of time, hard work, and suffering to penetrate.

S. Do you consider yourself a late bloomer in Tai Chi Chuan?

J. Well, I didn’t start studying Tai Chi Chuan until I was 21, so from a competitive athletic perspective, I was certainly a late starter-at a world-class level most of my rivals in Asia had trained full time since early childhood. I had a lot of ground to cover, and I did it essentially by taking my lessons learned in other arenas of life, chess to a large degree, and transferring them over into this new art. As for blooming, I’m still working on that.

S. In reading your book, it seems as though your major strength in Tai Chi Chuan is the way you put your mind into the game. You were able to beat players much stronger than you by “getting into their mind.” I find this fascinating. Why do you think you were so good at psyching people out? Was it because of your early chess experiences?

J. Sure, my chess experience taught me a lot about the psychology of competition. World-class chess players are incredibly brilliant people who have spent their lives figuring out ways to get it your head, to break you down. Usually every high level chess error is accompanied by a psychological break of sorts-to survive, you have to understand the inner game. I am always looking for where the psychological and the technical collide-that surely comes from my chess study. But frankly, I think I really got good at the psychological game after chess. Chess taught me how to be relentlessly introspective, how to unearth tells in myself and in opponents, but then I really took that foundation and put it into dynamic action in the martial arts. I work on being a heat seeking missile for dogma. If you unearth or instill a false assumption in an opponent, they are in a lot of trouble unless they feel you getting into their head and kick you out fast. Of course this eye for false constructs is an important tool in the learning process as well.

S. Do you think part of your ability to psych people out may have to do with your extraordinary intelligence compared to other players? You said something interesting in your book regarding your match with Buffalo. You say: “He was surely the greater athlete. But maybe I was the better thinker.” Is it possible that you were just smarter than Buffalo (even though he was stronger)?

J. I don’t think I have an extraordinary intelligence. Buffalo had cultivated his body his whole life, and he had that edge. I had cultivated my mind. My chance lay in making the mental game dominate a physical battle. At a high level of competition, success often hinges on who determines the field and tone of battle.

S. In your book you discuss Carol Dweck’s work on how perceptions of the fixed nature of ability can affect ability itself. I do think that Carol’s work is important and I appreciate you citing it in your book. I was wondering though: to what extent do you think so-called inborn ability determines success in learning a new craft like chess or Tai Chi Chuan?

J. I am a nurture over nature guy. While I would tend to disagree, some might argue that I was an extremely gifted chess player. Fair enough. But there is no way you could argue that I am an athlete of world-class talent. I am able to compete at the highest levels because I have cultivated an approach to learning and performance that maximizes my strengths, tackles my weaknesses through the prism of my strengths, dissolves crippling false constructs and divisive mental barriers, and allows me to express myself through my art in as unhindered a manner as possible.

S. How much do you think people can compensate for weak natural ability? It seems like a major component of your learning technique is learning how to play up your strengths, and exploit the weaknesses of others. Could you perhaps elaborate on this idea?

J. I tend to feel that there is something a bit self-destructive in believing you have to compensate for weak natural ability, because it implies that there is one ideal way to learn something and because of natural deficiencies we are forced to take a different, much longer road. On the contrary, I have found that people at the highest levels of Quality in virtually all pursuits are somewhat unusual minds-and their “brilliance” has usually evolved from working with their natural strengths. There is this terrible tendency in education to box all kids into the same mold-this is one of many problems with all these standardized tests. The paved road is often the dogmatic one (of course we cannot believe this dogmatically) and there is something wonderful about building a learning process around the uniqueness of your own inspirations.

On Learning

S. I read your book and thought to myself, “Wow, Joshua gets it. He really mastered the art of learning.” Your writing is so good and your points are so well made that it seems by reading your book that what you’ve discovered can be taught to anyone (although, as you mention, customized to each individual’s unique style). I can’t help but notice though how fast you learn things, even in comparison to others who are attempting to learn (and I assume with equal determination). To what extent do you think raw IQ contributes to your fast learning ability? Research does show that those with a high IQ can learn nearly anything at a faster rate than others.

J. Thank you for the compliment, but my guess is that I wouldn’t have a terribly impressive IQ. And I don’t learn so fast, I just have a lot of passion and throw my heart and soul into things that move me. Learning happens to have been an art that moves me and that I have worked very hard to understand.

S. Have you ever had your IQ tested? Would you be open to me testing you sometime?

J. I haven’t. I guess I might be open to it, but I tend to find these standardized tests to be somewhat limiting. My greatest strength lies in finding hidden harmonies-discovering connections where others might see chaos or disconnect. That is a way of thinking that I have cultivated for many years. It is one that was not ingrained, and that most people could develop if they wanted to.

S. To what extent do you think your fast learning rate is due to your disciplined technique to learning?

J. I would say that the depth of my learning (and it has a long way to go) is a result of passion, hard work, an introspective honesty, and beyond all else, a love for the search.

S. How much do you think passion and devotion to learning contributed to your success?

J. It would be hard for me to overstate it.

S. In what ways did your chess skills help you with Tai Chi Chuan? What skills were transferable?

J. This is a deep question that was at the core of my inspiration for writing The Art of Learning. It will be hard to answer this quickly, but, in short, all of the skills were transferable. The two arts became one in my mind and it felt like I was transferring my sense of Quality from chess over into Tai Chi Chuan. And this had nothing to do with these particular disciplines-they couldn’t really be more different-the translation process can be applied to anything. At the core of my relationship to learning is breaking down the barriers in our minds that divide our disparate pursuits. These walls are false constructs. If we cultivate a thematic eye, then growth in one area of life will immediately inform our other pursuits.

In truth, this is a big reason I took up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu-I am currently taking the essence of my chess and Tai Chi understanding, and transferring it over to a third art. This receptivity to thematic interconnectedness is a muscle I hope to cultivate for the rest of my life.

S. In reading your book, I wondered if you could become world-class at anything. You discovered that there are many similarities between Chess and Tai Chi Chuan. And it’s clear that your abilities are well suited to whatever is common across these two domains. But to what extent do you think you could take your insights into learning and use them to become an expert in any field?

J. This is an interesting question. I think my ideas could be applied to just about any field, and I would have a lot of confidence taking on most arts. I think there are obviously some things that we are weakest at, and it would be absurd to spend a lifetime in those arenas-in my case, anything related to neatness–that said, our strengths can be applied to disciplines that might seem as unrelated as possible. Just to be clear, I don’t think my approach has anything to do with what happens to be common ground between chess and Tai Chi Chuan. The connections were in my process, and that process, or anyone’s personalized variation of it, could be applied across the board.

S. In your book you describe a moment in your match with Buffalo where you say: “I reached deeper than I knew I had and won the most dramatic point of my life.” You then say: “I saw parts of myself I didn’t know about.” Could you please elaborate? In other words, can you demystify “reaching deeper” for me? Do you think most of us are capable of more than we realize?

J. Yes, I do-no question about it. Growth only really comes at the point of resistance, but that is the moment that we tend to stop. Because it hurts. Whether we are confronting our psychological foibles or our physiological limits, it is much easier to turn back from the challenge than to push through the discomfort. I think digging deeply into ourselves, pushing our limits, is a muscle that can be cultivated like any other–incrementally. If we embrace these outer limits of our ability as something malleable that can expand with training, and if we embrace the discomfort of these moments of growth, then we start to love the richness of the self-discovery. The discomfort becomes exquisite. Learning becomes life.As for that moment against Buffalo, I had lived as a competitor for over 20 years and had no idea what I could really do when pushed so far past my “limit.” Fortunately I had trained to be able to meet the challenge, even if I had no idea how big the challenge would really be. We have remarkable reservoirs.

S. What does it mean to “feel space left behind”? You use that phrase a lot in your book, but I’m honestly not 100% clear on what it really means.

J. This is an idea that applies to most disciplines. Every movement, be it mental or physical, tends to both take space and leave something behind. We are conditioned to see what something does more than what it doesn’t do. This tendency is a construct. Dogma. Training yourself to see newly created emptiness can be quite powerful.

S. In your book you say: “The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised.” Can you please elaborate a bit on this?

J. Sure. I wrote those words reflecting back on the ups and downs of my competitive careers thus far and more specifically on the 2004 World Championships, the most brutal experience of my life. I have learned that in those rare moments of truth in our lives, we have to be willing to let go of the comfort of our knowledge, our preparation, our sense of control, and we have to flow with an improvisational spirit that embraces chaos, turns adversity to our advantage, and digs into our deepest reservoirs of energy and creativity. Our relationship to the learning process, in my opinion, should be one that prepares us for that freedom under pressure-or more truly, that liberates us to live every moment with that openness to unexpected beauty. Learning and peak performance aren’t about control or memorization or perfection-they are about something much deeper, something more essentially human.

S. What role do you think intuition and the unconscious plays in the learning process?

J. A tremendously important one. A huge part of my process involves breaking down the walls between the conscious and unconscious minds, so technical growth sparks creative leaps, and perhaps more importantly, creative leaps can inform the direction of technical growth. The chapter entitled Slowing Down Time and the second to last chapter of my book in which I was training for the 2004 World Championships really go into my system for cultivating the intuition. Opening up communication between these different components of our minds is another muscle that we can all develop if we understand how.

S. What role do you think flow plays in the learning process?

J. It plays a critical role. People often make the mistake of dividing the learning process from performance psychology in their minds-as if they can learn for a lifetime and then perform at their level of ability whenever necessary. I believe this is short-sighted from two perspectives. One, the ability to perform under pressure is an art of its own that must be cultivated as a way of life. And perhaps more importantly, if we are not deeply present in the day to day learning process, then we will not be learning at a high level. The ability to enter a state of flow is one that should be integral to every aspect of our life in learning. And again, it is not so hard as long as we take it on systematically.

S. Do you think you’d ever consider taking up breakdancing? I have enjoyed learning how to breakdance and think you’d be quite good at it!

J. Thanks man. No breakdancing for me yet. One thing at a time.

– Scott Barry Kaufman has published multiple journal articles and book chapters relating to intelligence and creativity and is the editor of two forthcoming books. Interview © 2008 by Scott Barry Kaufman.

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