The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

  That we can be aware of our prejudices and correct them means that prejudice is a form of laziness. I mean prejudice in every form, not just bigotry, but “idea prejudice.” Every thought that we discard because it doesn’t immediately match a pattern that we’re comfortable with could have led to something great. We could have been contenders! Suppression of ideas is the antithesis of creativity, and idea prejudice is suppression, suppression of ourselves.

  Mirroring helps us develop our theories of other people’s minds. Knowing that other people think and relating to how they think fits patterns of others to our pattern of ourselves and, as we’ll see, forms the basis for the value of everything created, engineered, and available for sale at a retailer near you.

  Feedback seems to be the key to how all this stuff works. The brain does more than create reality; it makes us actors on the stage by controlling our bodies—those extended pieces of our reality interface where we reach out and change reality itself.

  If we’re all actors, are some of us more talented than others? What are we born with, and what can we change? Do we lean more toward nature or nurture?

  To investigate the tangled web of talent and skill, we turn to a man of considerable talents—a real person this time.

  4

  TALENT & SKILL

  ON AN AUTUMN DAY IN 1962 NEAR THE NORTHERN border of South Sudan in the town of Turalei, a woman named Okwok gave birth to a remarkable boy. Like most boys of the Dinka tribe, he spent his childhood tending the family cattle. One day, legend has it, as the boy guided cattle among patches of grass across the lightly treed plains, a lion attacked. The boy leapt to action, killing the lion with a wooden spear.

  In his forties, the Dinka tribesman became a political activist who helped his homeland recover from civil war. He promoted peace and reconciliation, especially in Darfur. He considered education the key to peace and prosperity and built a school in his hometown.

  He was a special guy, right? He didn’t have a royal lineage, but was treated like a Diinka Duke when he visited Sudanese refugee camps. He never practiced politics and he wasn’t a member of any religious clergy, but in the 1990s, American congressional representatives welcomed him to discuss problems that he believed would emerge from Islamic fundamentalism and, in particular, Osama bin Laden.

  What made him special was neither a knack for diplomacy, a flair for oratory, nor success in business or academia.

  No, Manute Bol stood 7-foot-7 (2.3 m). Being of this stature, Manute Bol had an enormous advantage over others in the court of basketball. But Manute’s greater talent came as a defender. Defense in basketball generally involves the defender attempting to obstruct the path of the ball as it flies from the shooter’s hands toward the hoop. Manute’s outstretched arms spanned 8.5 feet (2.6 m), providing an immense range for blocking shots. And so it was that Manute Bol set a National Basketball Association record for blocked shots in his first season and became one of the league’s most imposing defenders.

  4.1 TALENT

  To discuss talent and skill we need to be precise because this feedback loop is one tight knot. Talent is what you bring to the game before you start playing. Skill is what you acquire through education, training, and practice, whether you have any talent or not. Talent without skill will rarely ascend someone to the top of their field, but talented people start with an advantage over the untalented. It is in this sense that Manute Bol’s height served as basketball talent. That he used this talent to develop into a great statesman might demonstrate an even greater talent, but there’s no observable or measurable demarcation between a physical predisposition and a desire, so we can’t say for sure—that’s the knot!

  Certain physical traits, if valued by society, give people an advantage that facilitates the person’s ability to develop a skill: Elizabeth Taylor had violet eyes and the genetic “disorder” distichiasis, which provided her double rows of eyelashes to set off her eyes. Now, if oddly colored eyes with extensive framing were not deemed valuable in society, she might not have survived in Hollywood and she might not have developed her talents into acting skills.

  4.1.1 Whence talent?

  Kip Keino started winning Olympic gold medals in long distance races in 1968, six years after his first international competition. If Keino had been a pure talent phenomenon, that is, if his abilities were based on sheer talent devoid of skill, he’d have won his first race. Instead, like all great athletes, musicians, painters, physicists, brick layers, brewers, etc., he improved with training.

  The conditions where he grew up encouraged running. His success drew a crowd of coaches and trainers to the region and lo and behold, the environment was ripe for finding talent.

  The first few Major League Baseball greats from the Dominican Republic, Ozzie Virgil, Julian Javier, and the Alou brothers—Felipe, Matty, and Jesus—had the same effect. Radios took to the air, kids took to the field, scouts took to the bleachers, and an oasis of talent and skill was produced.

  Yes, those “talent” oases were produced by a confluence of events just as much as they were discovered by scouts, and there’s no way to tell how much of the oasis is talent and how much is skill.

  Like an epic Monty Python skit, we see hordes of treasure seekers hunting for sand on a beach. Hands shading their eyes, these intrepid talent forty-niners search the horizon for sand, glorious sand, and all the riches that come with it. Marching for months along the coast, they search, and then, finally, one of them looks down and sees that his feet are buried in the treasure of silicon dioxide. Rather than looking at their own feet, the others rush to that one discovery, that sand Sutter’s Mill. Instead of realizing that the whole beach is covered in sand, that the whole planet is teeming with talented humans, the talent scouts push and shove their way to the discovery.

  Should humanity’s lemming-like behavior come as a surprise?

  Remember the scene in Life of Brian where Brian tries to dispel the crowd by telling them that they’re all different, all individuals? And then one guy says, “I’m not.”

  People! You don’t have to go to Kenya to find a great marathoner! You don’t have to go to Romania to find a great gymnast! You don’t have to go to the Caribbean to find the next Willie Mays! You don’t have to follow the deer off a cliff to get a nice steak! The circular feedback loop of scouting for talent is a macroscopic example of the disproportionate impact of first impressions from chapter 2 and the perils of stereotyping that we discussed in chapter 3.

  4.1.2 Skill

  Manute Bol’s height provided a formidable advantage, but there have been other 7-foot-7 basketball players, and none of them were as adept at shot-blocking as Manute, though many were better shooters. Paris Hilton’s pedigree sets her apart from the crowd, but most children born wealthy don’t achieve celebrity despite trying.

  The concepts of talent and skill are knotted together. Many contemporary books have attempted to prove that talent is an illusion, but that’s absurd. Variations in physical makeup provide different advantages and disadvantages. You can’t practice yourself into Brad Pitt’s cheekbones, Liz Taylor’s eyes, or Frank Sinatra’s voice.

  I suspect that the popularity of denying the value of intrinsic talent stems from a cultural desire for society to reward merit rather than lineage. We want to admire people who strive, sweat, and struggle for success, rather than those who succeed by purely genetic advantages—otherwise, how the hell am I going to get anywhere? Wait, it gets tricky here too, because you could have the right genes, but if you aren’t in the right place doing the right thing at the right time, your genes could sleep through your potential.

  4.2 LIKE RINGIN’ A BELL

  Consider a country boy named Johnny who is interested in playing the guitar. Each day after school, Johnny puts a chord chart and his guitar in a gunny sack and carries it to some trees near a railroad track where he practices. As Johnny struggles to synchronize his strumming right hand with the shifting fingers of his left hand, neurons from his eyes,
ears, and motor cortex fire signals across his brain seeking patterns. He begins with a conscious, top-down awareness of just how badly he plays—which is why he practices by the railroad tracks.

  4.2.1 The wetware

  I’ve been pretty cavalier about throwing around concepts like motor cortices firing signals through neurons to build associations into patterns. It’s time to get our hands dirty.

  You create every aspect of your universe through the interaction of eighty to one hundred billion neurons. Each neuron has an average of ten thousand synapse connections; so, at the receiving end, the dendritic tree consists of an average of ten thousand branches. A hundred billion neurons each with an average of ten thousand connections yields a million billion unique connections and the potential for a stupefying large number of possible combinations of circuits.

  So far, neuroscientists have documented thousands of different types of neurons. The distinctions have to do with their shapes, response times, and whether they excite or inhibit other neurons. About 80 percent of your inner Feynman neurons are the elite, highly connected pyramidal ones that connect far and wide across your brain.

  When Johnny sits in the shade of an evergreen tree between the railroad tracks and a bayou with his guitar on his knee, a chord chart on his lap, and strums, neurons from his senses convert sounds, sights, scents, tastes, and sensations into electrical signals. Engineers call things that convert sensory data into electrical signals, or vice versa, transducers—microphones, speakers, televisions, electric thermometers—the world is rife with transducers, and so are you.

  When Johnny looks at his guitar, light reflected from the strings enters his eyes and knocks around electrons in the rods and cones of his retina. For a fraction of a second, the chemical structure of that rod and/or cone changes. These front-end chemical changes propagate to another layer of neurons, still within the eye, that sends them along the optic nerve to Johnny’s brain. The same sort of thing happens in your nose when a molecule hits your olfactory glands or taste buds on your tongue: Chemical change at the front end of a nerve propagates up an axon to the first layer of processing and then to your brain.

  When Johnny strums his guitar to the rhythm of passing trains, the strings vibrate, whacking air molecules. Those air molecules collide with neighboring air molecules that bounce into more air molecules until this compression-decompression wave enters your ear and hits your eardrum like, well, a drum. The sound waves continue on the other side of the eardrum up a spiral-shaped cochlea. Sounds wiggle little hairs at different points within the cochlea. Those wiggling hairs are the transducer ends of auditory neurons. The wiggling knocks electrons around, which changes the chemical structure of the axons and creates electrical signals that excite another layer of neurons and so on, propagating up the auditory nerve and into the brain for processing.

  Here’s the weird thing: Once the signals enter our brains, they all look the same.

  At the front end, sensory inputs look totally different—fingers, ears, eyes, nose, and tongue—but once the front end nerves transduce the worldly data into bioelectrical signals traveling up axons, they look the same. Seriously, if you were to climb into Johnny’s brain and examine a bunch of axons from his eyes and ears under a microscope, you couldn’t tell which was which. If you plugged those axons into an electrician’s equipment like an oscilloscope or spectrum analyzer, you wouldn’t be able to tell which signals came from the chord he’s strumming or the train he’s watching.

  So how come the experience of looking at something is so distinct from the experience of hearing something? Why don’t we hear tastes and feel smells?

  People with a rare condition called synesthesia experience sights as tastes, sounds as colors, and so on. Synesthesia is crosstalk among the senses. The most common symptoms are more amusing than confusing, like associating numbers with colors.

  4.2.2. The signal

  Our sensory transducers produce electric signals that propagate through circuits that compose the networks that create our thoughts. The signal itself is a spike of electrical energy that propagates down axons to synapse connections. By spike, I mean a brief, localized surge of electrical energy. These action potential spikes are nothing like the currents traveling along wires in your electrical gadgets. Currents in your body are carried by salts dissolved in the gooey fluid contained in neuron cells, not at all like tidy copper wires.

  Figure 11: The spike of energy transmitted by neurons to other neurons, called an action potential.

  Everything that happens in your head consists of patterns of action potential spikes dancing among neurons. Those neurons that participate in a given thought compose a neural circuit.

  At the synapse connection between separate neurons, the spike’s electrical energy releases neurotransmitters—stuff like serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, and what have you—that cross the synapse into the receptors on the dendrite of the other neuron and are converted back into a spike that travels down the dendrite to the cell body of the receiving neuron.

  Consider a single neuron. As thoughts course through your brain, that neuron receives and combines signals from thousands of others. If the total of all the signal spikes it receives surpasses a specific threshold, then that neuron either sends out new signals or stops sending out old signals. If the total is below the threshold, it continues whatever it was already doing. Neurons can be classified as either excitatory or inhibitory. Excitatory neurons, as you might have guessed, try to excite other neurons to act, and inhibitory neurons try to inhibit them.

  The old right-brain-is-creative/left-brain-is-analytical dichotomy came from the observation that the left hemisphere sends more inhibitory signals to the right hemisphere than vice versa, reducing its capacity to act. For Johnny to become a great musical artist, many of those inhibitory neurons need to acquire higher thresholds so that they don’t cramp his creativity.

  We need to slow down here or we risk missing the magic. Somewhere, somehow, within the neuron cell, action thresholds are set so that each neuron knows the best way to respond to the signal it receives.

  The fingers of Johnny’s left hand are controlled by neurons in his motor cortex. Those neuron thresholds must be tuned so that they move his fingers across the frets just right. Otherwise, Johnny’s guitar will sound like Ransom’s, and passersby will never say, “Oh my, that country boy can play.”

  The mechanism for this magic, which is also the reason I call it magic, is not well understood. Computational neuroscientists model how neurons fiddle their thresholds to get the right result. That fiddling, I think, is the magic: how a single cell working in a team of billions alters its response to input.

  And the thresholds aren’t fixed. As Johnny learns to play, those thresholds change—learning at a molecular level.

  4.2.3 The transition from playing notes to playing music

  The first time Johnny plucks a string, neurons from the excited parts of his brain—visual, audio, motor control, as well as the higher-level processors that will become note-reading, symbol-decoding, and song-recognizing centers—fire signals. Since those signals don’t correspond to a recognizable pattern, the lit-up, confused axons start making random connections with other neurons.

  Biological growth doesn’t happen immediately; the axons grow more like a plant. On hot sunny days, morning glory vines grow fast enough that you can see progress over the course of hours, but you can’t see minute-to-minute growth. Signals flowing in Johnny’s axons excite the process and, as he practices, his axons grow and make synapse connections to more neurons. As the neuron thresholds adjust, his skill improves.

  The rule for synapse generation is “those neurons that fire together, wire together,” known as Hebbian learning. Since Johnny’s concentration focuses on the audio-processing wetware, that’s where axons grow and new synapses form. The size of his brain actually increases in the regions he uses to make music. Analyses of musicians’ brains have shown an extra 30 percent more wetware in the audio-
processing centers.

  Within the neighborhood of the active axons, the synapses make random connections. Well, whether or not they’re actually random isn’t completely known, but other systems in nature use this random “Monte Carlo” technique for finding the best configurations. Trying random configurations often turns out to be a more efficient way to optimize certain systems in uncertain territory than following a methodical map.

  As Johnny practices, his conscious top-down process tunes neuron thresholds to recognize the musical patterns that link finger-string positions and sounds. It amounts to teaching the unconscious bottom-up processors to recognize those patterns in an instant. At that point, the process becomes automatic, and Johnny makes the transition from playing notes to playing music. Instead of thinking about where to put his fingers, Johnny thinks of the sounds he wants to make, and the bottom-up processes direct his fingers to the right frets and strings in a way that feels automatic.

  Though Johnny never learned to read or write very well, his experience of the transition from playing notes to playing music is much like the transition you experienced when you went from combining letters into words to reading stories.

  4.3 TALENT OR SKILL?

  Practice creates skill and develops craft.

  Audio patterns in Johnny’s brain translate directly into visual and tactile patterns complete with finger positioning, strumming, and rhythm. Does talent play a role at all?

  In learning to read, we follow a sequence like this: start with the alphabet, associate sounds with letters, sound out combinations of letters, recognize the word, associate meaning with the word, and move on to the next word. The first time you ever read a sentence, you probably forgot the first word by the time you worked through the second. Then you had to go back and do it again. It’s a top-down, serial process.

  I remember going through flash cards with my mom and coming upon “embarrass.” I sounded it out: em, bare, ass. I said, “em-bareass,” my older sister laughed, and my mother smiled and asked me to try again, but I didn’t recognize em-bare-ass as a word. Eventually, she had to say the word for me to get it. The instant she said the word, it all came together and the multiple entendres cracked me up. I never missed that word again.