Ted Williams wasn’t born swinging a bat. Through practice, practice, and more practice, he re-wired his brain to perform expertly in the moment. This is not unlike a doctor who studies for years to make a complex diagnosis in the blink of an eye.
David Shenk, in his new book, thinks that anyone can be talented if they practice something hard enough. Shenk certainly establishes his PC cred, but in the process he attacks freedom of choice and defends the entrenched meritocracy.
The real question should be: Why did Ted Williams succeed when other kids in his neighborhood didn’t? The answer is, he had greater resilience, drive, motivation, and determination to stick with his practice routine. He used charm to enlist other kids to help him practice, and he boldly approached other baseball greats for advice.
So where do charm, resilience, drive and motivation come from? Following Descartes' example, I'll examine my own mind first. I don't want to play baseball. I'm not interested, and certainly not obsessed with it. Yet if you don't want something (desire it, crave it, obsess about it) then you won't practice it, and you won't develop that talent. You can't separate the middle brain's desires from the higher brain's ability to learn through practice. They are one system.
Surely swinging a club was a valuable skill in the State of Nature, but not everyone is interested in developing that skill – then or now – because "interest" itself is what's innate. To paraphrase Schopenhauer, you can do what you want, but you can't choose your wants themselves.
I agree that the higher brain (the neo-cortex) is a general purpose learning engine that can absorb the results of practice by fine-tuning its neural connections. Most of us have the capacity to learn what we practice. But talent is not just about neo-cortical learning through practice. It’s about our choices, desires, passions that emanate from what I call the inner eye, which includes the more primitive regions of our brain like the amygdala, thalamus, and basal ganglia. Different desires and drives and motivations and passions lead to different practice routines, which lead to different skills.
Genes construct the inner eye. (Yes, it's complex development over time, but nobody would argue that other time-delayed development, such as female breast development, is not innate.) From the inner eye comes desire, motivation, interest, and passion, which lead us toward some situations and stimuli over others. We practice what interests us, and practice leads to talent. Resilience and risk-taking are also innate. Since we all differ genetically, it follows that we each possess different inner eyes, and thus different talents.
It’s easiest to understand if you explore the outliers and "make the natural seem strange," as William James suggests, to reduce your intuitive bias. Consider the case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was fascinated by killing and mutilation. (To be fascinated by something, you first need the innate circuitry to recognize it and then react to it, at least abstractly, the same way my son is innately attracted to trains for their orderliness and mechanical nature.) I can’t imagine having the same interests, desires and passions as Jeffrey Dahmer – he repulses me. But I also can’t imagine being excited by playing baseball or the violin, so I will never practice them.
Genes are special physical objects in that they manifest millions of years of past experience into the present. So genes embody the environment in which they evolved. They develop brain structures that can recognize aspects of the environment and respond to them. Our neo-cortex is subservient to the inner eye, to allow our instincts more subtlety in their action. Passions, desires, interests... these are all akin to instincts.
Are genes deterministic? Yes and no. Identical twins have the same genes but don’t necessarily end up identical, for the same reason that two elevators with identical designs are not summonded to the same floor. Human brains and elevators have an internal state, or memory, and genes themselves have semi-persistent epigenetic on/off switches. Yet elevators are designed to be triggered by the environment (i.e. human fingers pressing on the call button), and these stimuli are fully anticipated in the design itself. The human brain is less strictly specified, but nonetheless, a vague impulse every day adds up to a very specific motivation over time.
In any case, David Shenk describes an imaginary world of actualized potential and one has to ask why it doesn’t yet exist. The answer is: If I don’t want to become, say, President – if I don’t find it interesting or exciting – then I literally can’t become President. Since our interests come from our genes (i.e. gene variants that differentially develop the inner eye), it’s the same thing as saying that I can’t become President because of my genes. Genes are not something you have; genes are something you are.