Producer: And, welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I am here as always with our host Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, Sucheta, yet another great conversation. I can’t wait.

Sucheta Kamath: Good morning to you, Todd, and it is such an exciting time because we have another fantastic expert, and I can’t wait to talk to him, but before we get started, I thought I will kind of share this quick story that came to my mind. Today, we are going to talk about experts, and experts are not born but they are made, and this funny story which is kind of an old story at this point, but came to my attention that Eric the Eel, have you heard of him?

Anders Ericsson: I don’t think so or at least, I don’t recognize it, so maybe if you would give me more information, I might.

Producer: Yeah, I’ve never heard of him either.

Sucheta: So, Eric Moussambani Malonga entered Olympics to represent Equatorial Guinea, so that year, and I think it was 2000 when the Olympics took place in Australia, the officials decided to offer wildcard seats to three competitors from very, very underprivileged countries whose Olympians or whose athletes may not have had any chance to develop the skills and abilities to participate in Olympics. So, Eric shows up to this 100-meter race, freestyle race, and of course, he had never swam in the Olympic-sized swimming pool before to the Olympics in the day of, and he had only practiced swimming for eight months, and he and the two other contestants from two other countries which were also wildcards – all three of them stood about to enter the water when the gun was shot, and two disqualified right there because they didn’t enter the pool right, and so it was just Eric swimming this 100 feet, and it took him one minute, 42 seconds and 72 milliseconds, apparently, which is significantly a slower rate of swimming compared to the rest of them. What was fascinating, so I don’t know, if you get a chance, I’ll put a link in this podcast, but they have underwater cameras and you can see him struggle and you can see his imperfect strokes, and you can see, he looked a very buffed, he looked prepared, he must of been an athlete, he was just not Olympic level champion.

So, the reason I’m talking about this, when this story hit the media, it became kind of a mockery because they were making fun of this athlete and how did you even think to enter the Olympics with such poor preparedness? But I think now that I know the back story that the Olympic committee was trying to give him a chance, I find this very fascinating that yes, there is a distinct characteristics of those who are experts in those were novices, and of course, when novices enter the field of experts, we can distinctly see the demarcation. So, that’s why we are here today, the talk about the making of an expert, an expert who has studied this. So, does this mean to our guest today, K. Anders Ericsson.

He is a Conradi Eminent Scholar and Prof. of psychology at Florida State University, and he is from Sweden, and after his PhD, he collaborated with the Nobel prize winner, winner in economics, Herbert A. Simon on verbal reports of thinking, leading to their classic book, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data. He has edited several books on expertise and the influential Cambridge handbook of experts and expert performance consisted over 40 chapters and 900 pages, and the recent development of professional expertise which appeared in 2009. His most recent book which we will be focusing on today, which he published along with his co-author Robert Poole in 2016 which is titled Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, and his research has been featured in cover stories, including Scientific American, Time, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times, it gives me such great pleasure to talk with him because in my work, when I talk about executive function, I am talking about people becoming experts at self.

So, welcome, Anders, to the show and we are so delighted to have you.

Anders: Well, thank you so much and I’m really looking forward to talking to you.

Sucheta: So, as I begin, this podcast is all about executive function which entails adaptive flexibility, goal assessment, intentional focus, and goal-directed behaviors. In short, executive function is the CEO of the brain that governs and gives order to the rest of the brain to get things done and to achieve what it wants to achieve. So, do you mind if I start with you as a learner and thinkers? What kind of student were you when you were younger and what kind of self-regulation did you notice it yourself? Were you attuned with your strengths and weaknesses as a learner?

Anders: Well, depends a little bit on how far you want to go back. I remember that when I was kind of in like, junior high or the equivalent in Sweden, I made this contract with myself that I did not want to memorize. I found that I was actually quite good at memorizing, but this seemed like a total waste of time, so what I ended up doing, instead of memorizing and preparing for the history test I would go to the results in the library about that same period, so then I could actually ask the question but I didn’t have to kind of engage in that more focused memorization of facts, but it was more like I was trying to understand things, and I think that has probably been one of the things that has gone through pretty much from the beginning, this idea that I really want to understand, so sometimes, it is hard to know why things aren’t the way they are, and then I guess I found that looking at the history of how things happen, and provide some kind of understanding or background to why people are doing things in a certain way or using concepts, and stuff like that.

Sucheta: So, it’s so fascinating, it sounds like you are a very curious learner and passionate about going to the depth of learning, and going deep, you invented these techniques and strategies for yourself, and if you go as back as junior high, I mean, that is very insightful because most kids in junior high are just developing pimples and just fussing around, so that is amazing.

So, my next question is what expertise did you develop as you have begun to go through your own career to come to study expertise and how did that journey go for you?

Anders: So, I think the red thread through pretty much from high school onward this was that interest in my own thinking and how would I be able to improve that, so I guess much of the research that I have been doing this been trying to answer these questions here. People that I really admire and whose thinking and performance I really admire, I would love to understand how they actually are able to do it, and I think that is kind of at the center of basically my research. I think relatively early on in high school, I have made the observation, I was playing chess just for fun and there was one guy in particular that I was playing with, and over that year, he just got better and better, and then I guess I asked him, when he said he was part of a chess club and he was studying chess and stuff like that, and then when I realized how much time would have to be invested if you really wanted to succeed in these domains like chess or other activities, I think I was very clear that I wanted now to focus in on what was my primary interest, developing research methods and being able to study thinking and hopefully learn something that would be of interest to even people.

Sucheta: And, remarkable work that you actually did what influenced so many researchers who came after because you have consented models of thinking which is great.

Let me ask you, what makes an expert and expert and how is an expert different from novice?

Anders: Well, that is actually one of the starting points of kind is my research when I came to the United States, and we kind of wanted to make a distinction here between being an expert or having people think that you are an expert vs. somebody who can actually do something that other people can’t, and if you take sports, it is pretty clear, somebody who is able to run a marathon near in two hours, that is not something that anybody else would even come close to, and most people probably wouldn’t even be able to complete a marathon even if they just walk, so that idea here of actually finding what is it objectively speaking that some individuals can do that other people can’t.

Sucheta: So, that is a good distinction you are saying, so sometimes, being an expert vs. being called an expert, vs. doing something that others cannot do, such a great distinction, so there are people – we have a saying in my mother tongue which is, “Among calves, cow is the strongest.” So, if you are competing with incompetent people or not is competent, then your slight competent can actually stand out, but what does it mean to have that incredible, exceptional skill set? So, do experts always or rather expertise always refer to motor skills or mental abilities that allow you to do or perform things that either exhibit faster speed and better outcomes, or there is something more to that?

Anders: Well, I think that is part of – as we are now starting out studying sort of expertise that was relatively well-defined and where there was organized competition so you could in some way say, here is somebody who has competed against all these other individuals and show that he or she is able now to perform better than they were, but we are also applying this to also access other more professional domains, so in particular, I have been interested in surgery because they are, it can design, and actually when they started out as research on expert surgeons, what they did was just ask people to nominate individuals that they thought were the experts or the surgeons, but what we found is being perceived to be an expert is not necessarily the same thing as somebody with a better objective outcome, so instead of asking people, you would actually be looking now at the outcomes of their patients, and if you find now a surgeon who has better outcomes than most of his colleagues, that would be somebody who is never reproducibly better at treating patients with certain problems that require surgery.

Sucheta: So, what steps does an individual takes to reach a level of expertise?

Anders: Well, I think that’s a very interesting question, and I think if you were to take it descriptively, so if you look at now, across domains where other people have identified now those individuals who are actually able to do things that other people cannot, what we would say as probably the most effective method in those domains where that’s even possible to have a teacher that is actually helping you now, and they are drawing up information that they have of other people have basically been able to obtain that high level of performance, so they can almost sort of guy, so if you wanted to climb a mountain, I guess I just doing it, you probably would talk to a guy who would be able to access whether you actually have the necessary skills here to be able to sort of user groups or whatever techniques that would be necessary, but also, they would know the path that would be the best one to reach the top of the mountain. So, that’s a little bit how we view this process, that you get started, and some, especially technical domains, it’s really key that you get that initial introduction to the domain, so you learn the right fundamentals, especially if you have interest in reaching the highest levels. So, in music, it’s pretty well-accepted that there are certain fundamental techniques that you should be starting out with, even if you are doing simple pieces here and you are a beginner, because ultimately, the way you are doing these fundamentals are going to be critical for you to be able to master the more complex techniques later on, and I have talked to coaches in sports would tell me at its really a sad experience when you have a really excited athlete coming to you and you see here that they have learned how to execute their skills by themselves, so now, we are talking six months for them to really have to relearn the fundamentals to get back on track, so they would be competitive with other individuals.

Sucheta: So, it sounds like you get started, which is a great take away here, that you get started, so there’s some intrinsic motivation to want to learn skill or ability, or acquire it, and then you seek out this expert or consultant with somebody outside you, so you can get the right process or a specific, or somebody who can dissect the elements and help let that back together, and then the third part, I think, is that individual practice or the solo practice too, right?

So, before we get to that, I have a question, so I’m going to use this example, let’s say somebody is at a level 0 expertise or skills and abilities, and so their movement from 0 to 10 vs. somebody who is at five, and then their movement to 15, vs. somebody who is at -10 and their movement to zero, are those all considered similar? I don’t even know if I’m presenting this question right, but is the process identical? Because I work with people with disability or people with challenges, and they don’t have a skill set, for example, to develop good study skills, you need to have great attention. So, if you have attention deficit disorder, you have difficulty with attention, so you are basically building your attention skill vs. I see, I also heard that students want to finesse their learning, and I find that they bring this attention skill, they just don’t have control over their attention, and they are learning how to polish that or remove distractions, and how to kind of get a better handle on the directions or task management skills. Am I making sense?

Anders: Yeah – now, I guess what I would say and what I find, looking at, because that’s a question I get very often, okay, I don’t want to even attempt to be the best in the world, I just like to reach kind of a level year where I can play music with my friends where I can do golf at a level year that is comparable to the people that I am working with. Now, I would argue that if we are talking to parents or I kind of recommend that getting one of your children to kind of find something that they want to go deeper into, because as they are going to try to master whatever they commit to and you as a parent would be supporting them either directly or by finding teachers or other people who would be able to know more about a particular domain, but I think that challenge a very early on, working and actually acquiring now a high-level performance at whatever it is – and I’m not so sure that it makes a difference here it’s martial arts or whether it’s music, or maybe drawing, or whatever because I think all of these kind of developmental histories that allow you to get to a high level in these skills seem to have that requirement of being able to control and focus your attention, and often, the teacher would give you sort of a task, but you can’t yet do, but basically exploring different ways of doing it and repeating, it will eventually be able to master it, and that is not something that can just be done here by you more or less playing around, and I think playing is okay. It is just that you need to be very, very clear that playing with your friends in a sort of a friendly soccer game is very different from you trying to acquire some skills in soccer that require now this focus and repetition and refining at what you are doing.

Sucheta: Got it. What I found remarkable in your book that you talk about, the goal is to build the potential rather than reach it, so it is quite a remarkable patient and it invokes growth mindset, so can we now talk about deliberate practice? What is it and how does that look like in a life of an individual who is trying to gain expertise?

Anders: Right, so we kind of contrast with most people are doing, so when you are getting into a domain, when we see what a typical person is doing is just kind of get to an acceptable level so they can now engage with other people playing tennis or playing chess, or Scrabble, or whatever you are doing, and we will also say that in some professions, it was kind of the similar thing that for the first couple of years, you are actually improving what you can do, but after the first couple of years, unless you do something special, almost seems like you remain able to do whatever you were able to do, but you are basically not improving automatically here by just accumulating more experience. So, what we have found when we look at those domains that can actually produce outstanding individuals, and I guess we started out with music, is we are looking at what isn’t that seems to be driving the ability of a child or adolescent at a given level to be able to do something they can’t do, and that is where the teacher come in, having knowledge about how other individuals engaged in goal-directed practice actually allowed them now to kind of each that higher level, and then once you have reached that, then you can basically address some new challenges and you keep going essentially far sometimes their whole life of explanation and actually pushing yourself to new areas and territories, even if you are exploring same domain.

Sucheta: So, it sounds like it’s kind of you begin to develop skills, then you run into a roadblock, and it’s of the true test of expert mindsets who are not even experts yet, but they have a mindset to not collapse, but they have circumvented and they keep going forward area that seems to be the biggest trick and that requires a great adaptive mindset, and I love all the examples you have quoted, and in your research, you have found that people who took the time to review their mistakes into really, really benefit from that, kind of having new goals. As you said, to address new challenges I’m all you need to know what challenges you are facing in spite of a decent level of competence, correct?

Anders: Right, and also, I think the teacher comes in knowing, because if you have never acquired a certain level of skill, say in golf were playing a musical instrument, you don’t really know what the kind of challenges that other people have already encountered, so the teacher will be able to kind of guide you in the direction here where you are not actually telling yourself to do things that we know from the music curriculum might take three or four years or somebody to basically master if they are kind of working on it, so you basically have defined those adjustments what you are doing that are manageable within the time that is available, and we kind of contrast that a little bit with what a lot of people do. For example, I remember when it comes to playing darts, I would take hours and decide on goals of how I would be able to improve my ability to hit the dartboard. Now, we call that purposeful plan tests, and it may be improving your performance, but it lacks kind of that added validity of having a teacher that has actually helped other people reach the level that you want to reach, and they would have a much better sense of what it is you should focus in on and what are those kind of improvement that are actually manageable and attainable within a couple of weeks or something like that.

Sucheta: So, it sounds like all teachers are not equal. So, a different junction of your learning, you need to also find teachers who can fine-tune your learning difficulties and they themselves need a certain level of expertise to pick out those elements in your performance.

Anders: Yeah, I think in music, it is very often kind of noticed some teachers are really good to introduce children to music, and obviously, as you are starting, you’re not going to ask them to do four hours of practice. It seems that about 10 to 15 minutes is what a child or a beginner in really do and actually have the sense here that they can focus and they can also get the sense here that they are actually changing and level of performance, and over time, so when it comes to music, I guess, there seems to be a gradual increase in the amount of times that individuals can successfully maintain that concentration, so it really benefits them to engage in practice. So, it seems like professional musicians can may be do four maybe five hours a day and. Beyond that, I guess I have yet to see anybody who has been able to sustain that level of practice for longer periods without getting into trouble, like a burn out when you push yourself so much that you cannot really recover on a daily or a weekly basis.

Sucheta: So, you also talk a lot about what you found is about these templates or mental representations. Can I use the word mental schemas? Would that also do the job of describing what this is? Can you walk us through what these mental representations do?

Anders: Yeah. So, I personally think that the way some other psychologists are using schemas is a little bit different, and so that representation is trying to capture what is in the head of the person who is talking about a musician who wants to play a particular piece. One of the things that you find on a given expertise level is that the musician can just look at the notes and more or less generate music in their heads without actually having the instrument, and that allows them to kind of generate very interesting sounding experiences, and then what practice is really about than it is for them now to try to translate what they were able to hear in their heads into something that they can perform, and they also need to be able then to as they are playing, listen to what it sounds like what they are doing, so they can compare that to what they were intending to achieve, and then you create the feedback cycles, but that sort of shows now that just going in mechanically and spend an hour repeating what you are doing is not going to improve your performance. You really need to have that ability of setting goals that are outside of what you are currently able to do, and that is kind of driving in creating this feedback cycle, so you can actually view yourself how you are making progress towards that goal, and then when you do that goal then, you can select other goals.

Sucheta: So, can you talk to us a little bit about the mental representation? How did, in your research work, you identified that individuals for creating these mental presentations and what is the way to gauge at and how to know these representations are being formed that are fulfilling this purpose of allowing the individual to kind of have some template to work with, and how can we bring that out in learners even in classrooms? Is there some process that can promote development of creating mental representations as precursors to developing expert skills?

Anders: Yeah, so when I was doing my dissertation, that was kind of the key acquiescent to me: how would I be able to understand what is going on in the head of somebody else who is [0:25:26] problems, and that is where I sort of read and found that there was this method of thinking out loud your people were now engaged in some activity. It could involve practicing in your practice studio or you could be analyzing a chess game, or for example, a surgeon could be planning surgery on a particular patient, and if you ask them to think out loud, you will actually now get an explication here of what is in their heads, and then you would be able to potentially have them think out loud, the surgeon when they are doing the surgery, and you will now see how they are planned for the surgery a guide them most of the time, but then there is something that’s unexpected, and then they are now in that kind of situation where they notice a mismatch between what they expected and what is really happening, and now, they had to figure out ways here f addressing that mismatch.

Sucheta: So, this is something, the way you approached it and this is how typically, people have kind of, as you said, getting into people’s head to see, but once somebody who routinizes or masters that sequential process, they are not really thinking in words, correct? They are kind of seeing maybe – I don’t know if it is a visual representation, but a big picture map in their head of what needs to be done. Is that fair to say?

Anders: Well, I think, and that’s kind of a very good point you are making there, that you really have to challenge yourself, so if you are just doing things that you could kind of do on semi-automatic pilot, then you really don’t have to generate these representations, but what is interesting is that actually, surgeons get into this almost automatic mode of dealing with patients based on doing what they have always been doing, occasionally, they encounter patients that have a different anatomy, and that may actually not create a very devastating problems, whereas now, the surgeon who is actually planning out and actually thinking through here, so when they are getting to the body, they are keeping track of the relevant blood vessels, they would be much less likely here to do that kind of problem because they are constantly monitoring what they are doing, and I would argue that when individuals are playing competitively at their peak performance, the way they can actually do that is by being very aware of the situation, and people obviously have a problem here of thinking out loud when you are playing a tennis game, but what they have done is to have tape recorders when they are changing sides, and they are, they can actually give a retrospective report about what they were thinking about, so you can then analyze it after the match.

Sucheta: That is so cool, and I’m familiar with the work in the area of self-talk and using to mediate thinking and to help in planning and execution, but one of the things you are talking about, all these skills that you are describing experts possess, I find that people with executive dysfunction have challenge with, that monitoring performance in the midst of performance or executionary sequence as you are delivering the performance is a very difficult thing for people with executive function, and so that brings me – I’m going to circle back a little bit about one of the interesting things that you have talked about in your book, and the research shows that people who engage in deliberate practice don’t actually enjoy it. The work that goes into developing skills, they do it because they care about it, they are motivated, but they don’t enjoy it, and that is the difference between somebody who just pick some something and didn’t get a lot of satisfaction or they are kind of delighted or a little giddy after they finish practice. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I thought that was so fascinating because experts have reasonable expectations or they keep their emotions in check, that I am not going to be over-the-top happy doing this practice, but it is such an essential practice that I will do it.

Anders: I think that’s really interesting and that is something that we have seen, because if you define now that the kind of practice that we are trying to encourage is actually doing things that you cannot do, I mean, most people will find that frustrating, but basically, if you have now this kind of confidence that if you engage in this type of activity, you will eventually master, basically, the goal that you set for yourself. What I would argue is that most especially people who get more advanced levels, when they practice, it’s more like they are going into a room where they are so focused in on paying attention to what they are actually doing, that it’s not like they are asking themselves, am I really enjoying this? They are just sort of focused, and once they get to the point here now where the actually achieve their goal, now, they can relax and that is often when you feel good. I think some people, when you lift weights or other kinds of things, the actual lifting part, especially if you are pushing your limits is not going to be enjoyable, but maybe that feeling when you’re on the shower or relaxing, that’s going to be kind of something that is enjoyable, so I think it’s a matter of learning kind of skill of knowing that you actually have to go through this process, and once you get out of it, you are actually going to feel quite good about yourself, and that skill in itself, I think is really key here to individuals who are successful once they move into other professional careers.

Sucheta: So, with training individuals to manage their emotions were kind of get a hold of their frustrations, anger, irritability as they keep running into things that are not managed well, or doing things they couldn’t do it is the very definition of you learning, so was that have any merit to it or does a good teacher counsel that it’s going to be hard, you stick with it, don’t worry, or it’s something that one has to figure out on their own?

Anders: Well, I think it’s interesting, and let me talk about a couple of intriguing demonstrations. It turns out that during the concentration camps, there was a lot of people who acquired mental multiplication skills, and then some of basically these individuals were interviewed, and the reason why they gave for basically they got so good at multiplying numbers was that they felt that that situation was so difficult to deal with, that they are now focused on multiplying numbers, so they can more or less forget about the really awful situation that they were in, and I have seen that in many other cases where it’s sort of provides kind of its protective space where you have control, and then the question is, and I guess I haven’t worked with children, so I really don’t know, but I could imagine that a skilled teacher would be able to make the steps sufficiently small, but essentially guide a child into this space and hopefully, they would then feel good about themselves because they are now able to have a control which they might not have had in their normal environment.

Sucheta: That is such an incredible observation! My last point about this was, experts seem to have a specialized way concentrating and putting effort, and in fact, it almost is an exercise in staying effortful. So, the topic of flow, the flow state is what they achieve or they are in the middle of deliberate practice or that state of flow comes after you develop a certain level of competence and expertise, and when you go to do that work, you are in the state of flow?

Anders: I think that’s a really interesting point, and I think there’s some controversy. I personally think that deliberate practice is empathetically to flow because you are in summary are creating this gap here between what you want to achieve and what you are currently doing, and inflow, you don’t even supposedly have a sense of yourself. You are just being in sort of a very non-analytic way, where asked if you’re going to be analyzing what you are doing wrong, that obviously, you need to analyze yourself.

So, I agree with what you are proposing here, that I think the flow experience isn’t real. I think it’s more rare than most people would argue when people have actually tried to have people keep diaries and see how often it happens because it is desirable, and especially people like jazz musicians, their kind of idea here of actually being almost in this magical harmony with your fellow musicians, something that they often strive for, but apparently, relatively rarely experienced, and then sort of a little bit, the way I view it is, most of the time, when people perform, there is this kind of sense your that you are monitoring what’s happening, but occasionally, everything goes right, and during those occasions, it is almost like when you’re thinking back, you can’t even remember what was happening because there was no mismatches here between what you desired to happen and what actually did happen.

Now, obviously, that means that you have to have a difficulty level that wouldn’t create these problems or at least the difficult level would be sufficient that once in a while, you would actually now experienced that sense of doing exactly what you wanted to have happen, and that is what I think is flow, but I haven’t personally done any research on flow, so maybe a future researcher will reach a different conclusion.

Sucheta: Yeah, I completely see the way you are explaining.

So, as we close, Anders, your work has been soaked in pack to follow and you see it in forming not just athletes and the coaches, or performance artists and the trainers, but ordinary individuals, and encouraging them to put this kind of effort as they search for meaning and purpose, and expertise, is where the joy is, I guess.

So, how has this experience changed you as an individual and what makes you so hopeful about the future with the work that you have done, and the flipside of it is what keeps you up at night?

Anders: Well, I think I’m now in a phase in my professional career where I am really interested in helping younger researchers and other individuals will have found a domain here and asking the question, how would we be able to help individuals to kind of continues to have that sense of excitement in their work situation, in particular, so it’s not like what we see in many jobs, the people almost go off through automatic pilot, but could we actually redefine their tasks in such a way that they can maintain that challenge and feel like they are doing something that is worthwhile, not just for themselves but in particular for other people, so you have a sense here that you are actually contributing something useful? I would say that personally, I’m really interested in these motivational issues because if we really wanted to allow a larger portion of the population here to have access to this, I think we need to find those paths that would actually allow individuals to kind of find small steps here and hopefully, you would find now is that individuals who are frustrated could actually use their energy and if those more control over their mental experience by now becoming masters, as opposed to being almost victims of the environment.

Sucheta: Well, thank you so much for your insights and your candid conversation, and particularly, giving us something, the audience of teachers and speech and language pathologists, the educators, psychologists who are dealing with children, and expertise is not probably what they are really focused on, but to me, managing self requires expertise in itself, so that your research has incredible impact on our understanding of that, so I think you for your time and it was great fun.

Anders: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you, it was great.

Producer: All right, that’s all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, today’s guest, Prof. Anders Ericsson, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.