Genius, motivation and taxi drivers
Being good-looking, fresh-faced and petite, with blue eyes and natural blonde cheerleader looks, it was never going to take long for identical twins Bryony and Kathryn Frost from the Isle of Wight to get noticed. Aged 18, their mirror-image good looks were set to make them millions in sponsorship deals and the tabloids loved them.
However, the Frost twins – or ‘Frosties’ as they are known – were also tipped as possible Olympic medallists in the gruelling steeplechase event. Their agent believed he had the equivalent of double Anna Kournikovas and the sponsorship offers started flooding in. Kathryn and Bryony were ranked first and second respectively in the UK Under 20s team and fifth and sixth in the world, and held the British junior 3,000m steeplechase record. ‘We are just two young girls who love running and our dream is to go to the Olympics and win gold.’ They started running and winning at the age of three in the school sports day and joined an athletics club at the age of ten. By 15 they had won three gold medals between them at the Island games in Sweden. They were dedicated and trained for hours every day, eating only fresh fruit and vegetables with the occasional small bit of steak to keep their weight down and improve their performance.
Sadly the twins never made it to Beijing. They had dropped their weight so much that they fell ill and found it impossible to regain their strength. They were soon diagnosed with anorexia nervosa – a common problem in female long-distance runners that also leads to hormonal problems, brittle bones and risk of fracture. They have now given up competitive running and their chances of Olympic golds. Using their unspent Adidas sponsorship money, they have started a property company together and hope to get rich instead.
The story of such similar talent in identical twins usually points us towards a major genetic influence. They had the same competitiveness, determination, small frame, physique and endurance that made them perfect middle-distance runners. But is most sporting talent genetic? A casual search on the Internet would suggest this is indeed the case, with a number of websites offering commercial genetic testing to assess your own or your gifted offspring’s potential sporting prowess.1 Companies include Atlas Sports Genetics,2 who say that their $169 first sport gene test is ‘geared specifically to show athletes, trainers and interested individuals where their genetic advantage lies’. So where does this evidence come from?
In 1998 a short article in the prestigious journal Nature3 led to the media announcing that ‘the gene for sports endurance’ had been found. The team suggested that a gene called ACE, which alters dilation of blood vessels and blood pressure, can also affect endurance. Most genes have strange long names and scientists shorten them to make them more memorable and exciting. ACE is short for the Acetyl CholinEsterase gene, which produces a protein of the same name. They found that the gene variant ACE II was twice as common in 25 elite British mountaineers who regularly climb above 7,000 metres without oxygen as in nearly 2,000 normal men. They also found similar results in British army recruits who could do the most reps with dumbbells during the ten-week training course, and in another group with the best improvements in heart muscle.4
Soon after, another group claimed to have found ‘the running gene’. Called ACTN3 (short for Alpha Actinin-3), this gene could alter endurance of muscle fibres by producing an enzyme of the same name.5 We have two main kinds of muscle fibres: fast twitch fibres that don’t require much oxygen and are useful for sprinting or power, and slow twitch muscle fibres for endurance running and sports for which oxygen is essential. Endurance runners have twice the frequency of this genetic variant as sprinters. They also found that mutant mice that lacked the ‘endurance gene’ caused their fast fibres to act like slow fibres and increased their treadmill endurance by 33 per cent. Human populations had walked (and sometimes run) out of East Africa 100,000 years ago following long droughts. In the exodus we diversified as we spread out in different environments. Because the gene frequency varied five- to tenfold across the world, the scientists behind the study hypothesised that evolution could explain these differences in sporty genes.6
The so-called running and endurance genes caught the prevailing mood – it suddenly seemed obvious why athletes of African origin had won every track gold medal in long distance and sprinting since the 1970s. All the best sprinters originally came from West Africa, and long-distance runners from East Africa. If we could identify the genes of the large numbers of Kenyan medallists, who all lived in a tiny area in the Rift Valley, we thought we would have the key to sporting success. Around the world sports academies started looking at genetic testing of their most promising youngsters, while others started touring East Africa with syringes and test-tubes.
But while millions of dollars were invested in biotech companies and sports genetics grants, a slight problem emerged. The data of follow-up studies was not quite so solid. After the initial positive research papers featured by the media, more studies were performed, with better designs and much bigger numbers, which produced negative results. By 2008 over 50 studies had been carried out with athletes and these two genes, and it became clear that (like many other hyped candidate-gene studies) there are no consistent strong effects.7 With international consortia we have recently also failed to find any effect of these genes on muscle bulk or muscle strength using tens of thousands of subjects. So, although we cannot rule out tiny effects, for prediction of athletic ability they are pretty much useless – and certainly can’t beat a stopwatch.
Vanessa Mae, the child-prodigy violinist turned pop star, began playing piano at the age of three and violin at the age of five. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, at 13 she was the youngest soloist to record both the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky violin concertos. At ten, she made her international professional debut at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany and with the Philharmonic Orchestra in London. On entering adolescence Vanessa Mae broke away from her traditional classical influences and became known for her sexy music videos, playing electric violin and promoting her best-selling albums. She performed in the interval of the Eurovision song contest watched by billions. In 2006 she was ranked as the wealthiest young entertainer under 30 in the UK, with an estimated fortune of about £32 million stemming from concerts and record sales of over 10 million copies worldwide. Where did this amazing talent and success predominantly come from? Her genes or her training?8
A few years ago I was interviewed with Vanessa Mae, then aged 31, for a TV programme about her life and the role of nature and nurture in her success. She did not like my opinion at the time that good genes were the prevailing reason she was so talented. She was adamant that her success was due to years of dedication and hard work from an early age.
She was brought up by a strict Chinese mum, who, in the style popularised by Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, early on enforced a strict regimen of social isolation and practice on Vanessa. The practice paid off – but at a cost. Vanessa was an only child with an absent father, and was not allowed to go to a normal school and have regular friends. Her mother, herself an accomplished concert pianist, was such an obsessional disciplined trainer that it caused major scars in their relationship and they no longer speak. Her experiences, isolated childhood and adolescence have clearly left a mark on her.
A recent wave of excellent best-selling books – Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Matthew Syed’s Bounce, Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated, David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code – have all provided the same clear message: that there is actually no such thing as innate talent.9 They all quote the work of Anders Ericcson, a Swedish psychologist working in Florida, who did much of the key research.10 He is known as an expertise-ologist. The essence of his work is that our society vastly overestimates and applauds talent and ignores hard work and graft. He used both experiments and historical examples to make his point.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is to most people the clear example of a child genius. By age six he had started to compose piano and violin pieces and was performing regularly. But what is often forgotten is that his father, Leopold, was one of the best music teachers of his time and had started training young Wolfgang intensively from age three. It probably wasn’t until age 21, after 18 years of gruelling practice, 12 hours a day, that he produced his finest work – his violin concerto No. 9. When looked at objectively by experts his early child works, written between 11 and 15, show no particular originality or genius; they are merely good rearrangements of other composers.
Ericsson’s view is that only hours of gruelling practice make someone good into someone exceptional.11 Mozart is estimated to have put in around 3,500 hours of practice before he was six and over 10,000 hours by age ten. He himself said: ‘Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I.’12 Using more modern musical examples (as highlighted by Gladwell), The Beatles were far from overnight sensations: they spent several years playing together for 12 hours a day in a cellar in Hamburg to hone their skills and reach the magic threshold of over 10,000 hours of practice.
What about sport? Surely that is where natural talent is most obvious. Tiger Woods is hailed as the most fluid ‘natural’ golfer of his generation. Yet, like Mozart, he had a great coach, a dad who was also an ex-sportsman. Tiger started playing golf at the age of 18 months and entered his first tournament (a pitch and putt competition) at two. He was clocking up incredible hours of practice – over 10,000 – before he reached 16, and six years before he became the youngest winner of the US Masters aged only 22. The years of isolation and practice may have made him a great golfer, and the richest sportsman in the world, reputedly earning $90 million each year. Money however may not have made him happy or a rounded individual, as seen by his strange obsession with infidelity, hookers and Las Vegas.
If talents like Tiger Woods are so rare, these genetic miracles should only come along once every few generations. But an unassuming 21-year-old Northern Irishman, Rory McIlroy, recently beat even his amazing record. McIlroy easily won the US Open tournament in 2011 after the traumatic experience of having ‘choked’ as his nerves got to him while leading on the final round of the US Masters at Augusta a few weeks earlier. He attributed his ultimate success to a new mental attitude: putting golf into perspective. He spent three days in Haiti before the tournament, where on that hurricane-devastated island 50,000 people were now living in tents on a nine-hole golf course. He was the youngest winner for nearly a century and had a record-breaking final score. Just four years after turning professional he was ranked number one in the world. Surely his gift and rapid overnight success was God- or gene-given talent?
But Rory was not a one-off. He came from a golfing family and his father was an excellent scratch golfer. Like Tiger he was an only child and lived his early life at the local golf club near Holywood outside Belfast, where he was the youngest full member aged seven, but still wasn’t allowed in the bar. His father started practising with him from 18 months, and by two years old he could drive the ball over 40 yards. He won his first international tournament at age ten. He slept with his favourite toy – his driver. By the age of 18, when he turned professional, Rory too had clocked up way over 10,000 hours of gruelling practice – probably more important than small variations in his 25,000 genes.
The myth of the power of genes for elite runners has also been challenged.13 Ninety per cent of elite Kenyan runners come from the same tiny area of the Rift Valley near a small town called Eldoret and belong to the same tribe, the Kalenjin. However, unexpectedly, they were actually not generally related to each other, but did have a few unusual environmental factors in common. They lived at altitude all their lives, which increased the number of red blood cells circulating oxygen naturally. They also ran to school every day in their school uniforms – an average of eight to ten miles a day. So again by the age of 18 they had accumulated vast hours of running, which felt natural for them. At the time a US car bumper sticker read ‘Give our athletes a chance – donate school buses to Kenya’.
Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder in the marathon and perhaps the greatest distance runner ever, was not Kenyan – he was Ethiopian. Although he too ran to school from the age of five, despite his skin colour his genes, like most of his countrymen’s, are much more similar to Europeans’ than to Kenyans’. While we are readily biased by the colour of someone’s skin when predicting their physical or intellectual abilities, surprisingly skin colour is controlled by just a handful of genes, and is a poor guide to the other 25,000 underneath. Indeed there is more genetic diversity in one small area of Africa than there is in the whole of Europe.
The idea that humans have really diversified genetically in our running skills has also now been questioned. One current theory of our evolution and separation from other primates 6 million years ago is that all humans needed to run for long distances on two legs. This was both to escape predators and to catch prey on wide hot plains. Although compared with most animals we are pretty useless sprinters, over 20 miles or so in the heat we are nearly unbeatable. In some regular long-distance contests, men can – and do – beat horses. This suggests that it is a hard-wired human trait, not a rare gift of a few.14
The expertise camp give many other examples of hard work trumping talent in other areas: in art the late-stage improvements to the work of Picasso and Cézanne; in literature the case of Mark Twain, who took ten years to finish Huckleberry Finn – here the great ‘talent’ shone through only after they had been practising for a very long time. In contrast there are very few examples of success due to innate gifts and little practice – other than perhaps underwear modelling, or being on The X-Factor.
Black cab taxi drivers in London are unique in a number of ways, one of which is that as adults they have to pass an intensive memory test. They have to spend an average of two to four years travelling around on scooters visually memorising in their heads 25,000 routes and alternatives from one place to another across large distances without GPS. This intensive test is called ‘The Knowledge’, and many fail the exam even after ten years of trying. So were the successful cabbies more talented? Researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London scanned their brains and found that the area underneath the cerebral lobes called the posterior hippocampus actually had 50 per cent more grey matter than in bus drivers or normal controls. In contrast the part in front, called the anterior hippocampus, was smaller.15
So did they have a naturally large hippocampus – the brain area responsible for spatial imaging and memory?
When they retested retired cabbies a few years later they found that the hippocampus had actually reduced in size, showing that it was the hours of daily practice, not genes or IQ, that had made bits of their brain reversibly larger.16 This extra growth of the brain was akin to a body-builder increasing their biceps, and allowed them to memorise thousands of alternate routes, while generously giving their strong opinions to passengers on any subject. The same is unlikely to be true of most untrained New York drivers, who often get lost. Expertise in other domains such as music, mathematics and linguistics has also accompanied relative increases in grey matter in some parts of the brain. However, as with most things in life, there may be a price to pay. Studies also showed that as some areas improve, some other bits of the brain suffer: cab drivers, for example, were less good at some other memory tasks, perhaps explaining how they can forget to give change.
What about other cerebral professions? Doctors, who have to learn lots of facts over many years and have above-average IQs, did not (despite their big heads) have any obvious brain-size differences compared with controls. What about in more real-life scenarios? Is the talented youngster sometimes going to outperform the older experienced doctor? Anders Ericsson and his fellow psychologist Paul Ward run courses in Florida where they try out experts and novices in pressure situations – for instance in a hospital nursing scenario, trying to save a dummy patient from dying. ‘That’s when we uncover the expert superiority: their ability to perceive more information, and also, after the fact, remember more of the thought processes than the novices,’ says Ericsson. ‘Some key differences would be the way in which they pick up information from the environment,’ Ward says, ‘and the way in which they comprehend that information such that they could then use it to good effect.’
Ericsson and Ward have used techniques like this to compare thousands of experts with novices in fields from music and sports to medicine and law enforcement. So far they’ve found no evidence that experts are born with any more natural ‘talent’ than other people. ‘We have yet to find any compelling evidence that any talent matters,’ says Ericsson. ‘Anyone with the right kind of practice will be able to dramatically improve their performance and it looks like they would be able to become experts with sufficient practice.’ The key they say is focusing on the activity you are weak at. Ericsson’s team famously trained a randomly selected ‘average’ student called SF to become a memory expert. They did this in just 250 hours of training in the lab for an average of one hour a day over two years.17 Most people are hard-pushed to remember phone numbers of over eight digits. By the end he could memorise over 80 digits correctly. If Ericsson and Ward are right, any dedicated parent would, if they started early enough, be able to produce a prodigy – even if only in reading the phone book.
In 1967, a young and newly married Hungarian educational psychologist called Laszlo declared that he was going to produce children who would be chess champions.18 He chose this he said because it was a sport or skill that was easy to grade. Two years later his first daughter Susan was born. He started playing chess with her when she was three, using fun techniques to get her hooked. It worked, and she had accumulated hundreds of hours of practice before the age of five. Two more daughters followed and the same regimen was applied. All had reached the magic 10,000 hours by the age of 14, and all became chess champions. One was the youngest grandmaster ever; another won eight games in a row against male grandmasters; and the third became the only female winner of the under-twelve world championships. Some tough critics argued that as he was a reasonable chess player himself, this could be partly genetic. So in response he enthusiastically offered to adopt three new children and repeat the process. Sadly for him and for us, his wife felt a bit tired of chess and children and overruled him.
But can this really be true? Can any child be trained to be the best chess player, violinist, tennis player, golfer or mathematician? Are we returning to the blank slate idea and the Jesuit mantra? (St Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuit order, with its famous maxim: ‘Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.’) Since the Second World War, apart from a few blips, the nurture ‘blank slate’ concept has been dominant. The idea is usually traced to the seventeenth-century philosopher (and parental expert) John Locke, who said: ‘Let’s suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? … To this I answer in one word, from EXPERIENCE.’
The idea fitted the prevailing mood of the Enlightenment, challenging the supposedly innate authority of monarchy and class and allowing expression of personal freedom. An influential Victorian with the opposite view about nature and nurture was Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis.
The ultimate Victorian gentleman scientist and explorer, Francis Galton is credited with being the father of twin studies and heredity (as well as discovering African countries, fingerprints, regression statistics, and anticyclones on the way). He took a particular interest in geniuses, and in 1869 he published a best-selling book, Hereditary Genius, based on his research on the 400 most eminent men of Britain in the 1860s.19 When he studied the top ‘eminences’, using his personal and debatable choice of graduates of Cambridge and Oxford as well as judges, he found that they were related more than you would expect by just chance alone. He concluded that his results showed: ‘It would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages over consecutive generations. Each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow and maintain that it is a duty we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power and exercise it in a way that without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be the most advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth.’
The subsequent enthusiasts of the eugenics movement of the 1930s suggested theoretically that selectively breeding champions would produce a super-race. However, human experiments to actually produce ‘master-races’, such as the Nazi Lebensborn project or the early Aryan Kultur settlements in Nueva Germania, Paraguay, in 1887, ended as dismal failures. Even if we ignore the practicalities, is there a basis for Galton’s view of hereditary genius? As we have discussed before, the results of the twin and adoption studies of IQ are very consistent, showing an average heritability of around 60 per cent in over 30,000 individuals. So clearly genes must have some role, in IQ at least.
What do genetic studies in the population tell us about sporting abilities? A massive study of 37,000 pairs of European twins set up by the sadly deceased Finnish geneticist Leena Peltonen showed clear results. In all of our seven twin registers tested, participation in sports was influenced 70 per cent by your genes after the age of 21.20 Before then, school and parents controlled your actions to a large extent, but as they left home people returned to their genetic tendencies of either natural laziness or sportiness.
So if willingness to play sports or exercise regularly is quite strongly genetic,21 what about sporting ability? With Dutch colleagues we looked at our twin registries a few years ago. In over 4,500 twins we identified sporting skill in over three hundred who had competed for their county or nationally at any of 20 sports. We found a 66 per cent genetic influence on competitive ability at any sport.22 However, they often didn’t share the same sporting prowess and, for example, only 50 per cent of identical twins were both competitive at tennis. The heritable results for ability were similar to our estimates for the structural elements: lung capacity, muscle strength and muscle bulk.23 More recently with Cambridge scientists in the Actiheart study we have found that cardiac fitness is also heritable.
The work of Eriksson and others focusing on expert training and long-term practice ignores the fact that not all people given the same training regimen will respond in the same positive way or as fast. Some are more likely to then give up disheartened, while others will see quick results and keep going. This is often the problem of taking anecdotal sporting examples. You only see the successes. Who knows how many dads gave their kids a golf club driver for their second birthday who never became a Tiger Woods or a Rory McIlroy? Ninety non-sporty overweight couch-potato Louisiana families in the Heritage study were put through a 20-week training programme using indoor cycling machines. As you can imagine there was a wide variety in fitness response. There was a clear heritable component (50 per cent) in the rate at which their oxygen uptake improved. This was regardless of how fat or fit they were when they started.
Being a talented musician is a more complex skill than cycling or running, involving a number of different skills in addition to manual dexterity and coordination. In trying to separate the key components of what makes a talented musician we performed some twin studies with the help of a gifted NIH researcher, Dennis Drayna, who had designed a cunning test of relative pitch perception. It is called the distorted tunes test and comprises 24 well-known tunes like ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, ‘Fleur de Lys’ and ‘London’s Burning’.24 Roughly half have deliberate subtle and obvious errors introduced into them, and the test subjects have to guess which are correct or not. We tested our twins and found that around 10 per cent had perfect scores, most scored about 85–90 per cent correct and 8 per cent hadn’t a clue, scoring no better than chance.
This tone-deaf group are responsible for much global pain and suffering in karaoke bars. Clearly if you were tone-deaf it would be nigh impossible to be a concert pianist, and very difficult if you were not perfect.25 But can this skill be acquired in all kids by intensive early training, as in the chess family? This seems unlikely in tone-deaf kids, as the trait was very similar in identical twins with a high heritable factor of over 80 per cent. We also found several pairs of twins who both had top scores but had never played an instrument in their lives, as their parents were either poor or uninterested in music. One recent and as yet unreplicated study of Finish families has suggested that a propensity to listen to music as well as creativity was heritable, and much more speculatively that genes for sociability (vasopressin) might be involved.26
Absolute pitch (AP), also known also as perfect pitch,27 is the much rarer ability (found in around 1 in 1,000 to 10,000 people) to name the pitch class of any given tone from any instrument or sound without a reference).28 This ability is thought to be a ‘musical gift’ partly because of its possession by musical talents such as Mozart or Stevie Wonder.29 Increased frequencies of AP of up to 10 per cent have been documented among classes of gifted young musicians, showing that it is possibly helpful, but certainly not essential. Mild autistics also have higher rates of AP, and brain scans have shown that those with AP have increased brain cortical connectivity.
There have been many arguments over the role and timing of early musical training in acquiring AP. A recent small twin study of absolute pitch found a 79 per cent agreement in the 14 monozygotic pairs and a rough heritability estimate of 66 per cent, suggesting some genetic influence is present. But this clearly doesn’t rule out the environment. AP is also more common in countries with tonal languages (China and Vietnam) and decreases when these populations emigrate to the US or Europe – again suggesting a key influence of early sound exposure. There are even training schools like that of David Burge and www.perfectpitch.com, which will train you to attain AP at home for a mere $169 fee. Sadly, while there may be improvements in naming notes and tones, there are few if any examples of students that have mastered AP to a high level this way. However if you have the cash it might still be a useful trick at parties.
Despite a great deal of conflicting information presented by proponents of both the training and the genetic camps, both groups tend to ignore the existence of the other. Until now we have talked mostly about skills and expertise in muscles, coordination and brain-power and the ability to practise from an early age. While there is undoubtedly some genetic component to talent, exactly what the key set of genes do is far from clear. Genes controlling muscles, neurones, eyesight, hearing or coordination on their own are not enough. There are clearly other factors that differentiate the great from the good. The most famous ice hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky, famously said: ‘Maybe it wasn’t talent the Lord gave me, maybe it was the passion.’ What form could this passion take?
The ability to have a strong faith can be beneficial for survival. Many sportsmen have this same conviction and faith in their own abilities that helped them with success, even when the facts pointed elsewhere. Jonathan Edwards, the gold medal-winning triple jumper and religious TV show presenter, suddenly and publicly gave up being a devout Christian on his retirement from athletics. Perhaps he no longer needed the same conviction or divine help to drive him. Others like Matthew Syed, the champion table-tennis player, have pointed out that successful people seek winning the way a drug addict seeks heroin. The effect of the win, like that of some drugs, is so short-lived that as soon as they have left the winner’s podium they feel depressed and unfocused and need to start over again immediately. Other differences may be more subtle.
Born 20 minutes apart in Lewisham, a poor part of southeast London, on 3 May 1934 were two identical twin boys. Their father was a keen boxing fan, and aged 14 they joined the local Bellingham amateur boxing club together. They were strikingly similar, with strong foreheads and deep-set eyes. They were tall (both 6′ 2″) and powerful but nimble heavyweights. They were inseparable and George would always fight second so that his twin wouldn’t get upset watching him. Though gifted, they found their way slowly, both losing their first four amateur fights, until Henry started winning and got selected for the Olympic team. Both were given professional contracts in a blaze of publicity in 1954, when they sparred together in front of TV cameras.
Henry kept winning British, European and Commonwealth titles, and his career reached a historical moment at Wembley Stadium in 1963 when in round 4, with a vicious left uppercut, he knocked out Cassius Clay (later to become Mohammed Ali). Sadly for him, Ali was saved by the bell, and dodgy delaying tactics used by his trainer Angelo Dundee. Ali recovered and came back at Henry with a flurry of blows, opening up nasty cuts to his head which stopped the fight. Ali said later: ‘He hit me so hard – even my ancestors in Africa felt it.’
So while Henry is remembered as one of the best boxers Britain has ever produced, what happened to twin brother George? Although no slouch, he never found the same level of success. As a pro he won 16 fights and lost 14 and then retired. One theory for his relative lack of success was his (genetic) susceptibility to facial cuts, but probably he was getting hit more than his brother. As in many other cases, it’s hard to find much difference between the twins to help explain this subtle but vital ingredient of being just good and being at the top of the game. However, there are always random events that we can implicate. For instance an attack of rheumatic fever at age 16 stopped George training, perhaps at a critical point. Or again we might point to the skill (or lack of it) in a junior doctor making some extra cash, who helped stitch up cuts on both the twins at the ringside. I say this because my father claimed to have done this, and he, like me, through too little practice – or talent – was a terrible surgeon.
However a more likely explanation to me is a very slight difference in motivation between the Coopers. Ultimately Henry probably just had the extra determination and wanted to win a tiny bit more. Considering that there are millions of identical twin pairs in the world, there are relatively few of whom both have reached or had the motivation to reach the top in similar high-profile areas. Examples include the non-famous or more secretive twin siblings of Mario Andretti, Jerry Hall, Keith Chegwin, Joseph Fiennes, Isabella Rossellini or Curtis Strange. We will return to the question of why determination may differ later.
Standardised IQ tests for intelligence have been around for nearly a century since Alfred Binet in France and Lewis Terman in the US started using them as predictors of talent. Although twin and adoption studies have consistently shown a clear but politically controversial genetic component, a number of odd findings have emerged which question IQ’s value. One is the fact that every decade in every country tested, the average test results improve and continue to do so. Another is the disappointing result that Terman had when he followed his most gifted children in California. Very few of them ended up the successes he would have predicted from their high IQ. More puzzling is a study that showed that the strong genetic IQ effect disappeared towards zero in very poor and deprived children.30
The important ingredient could be motivation. IQ tests were recently looked at in 2,000 kids and researchers found that scoring well in the test was strongly related to levels of personal motivation.31 Those who scored worst also had relatively lower motivation levels, so failure became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who do well may just be the ones trying to impress the most. IQ tests (and according to some, life itself) can be seen as a test of both IQ and personality, and possibly also circumstance and environment.
Motivation is thus a key underestimated factor in success. It is likely to be crucial in being talented, making the difference between the child who can sustain the hours of tedious training and the one who gets distracted and loses heart. Could this, rather than strength, reflexes, eyesight or manual dexterity or perfect pitch be the missing factor?32 Over 35 years ago a near-forgotten study looked at 61 pairs of twin schoolgirls and found a clear genetic influence on motivation – so the genes for this trait could be the most important genes of all.33
The pro-training camp often forget that by only looking retrospectively at the successes you don’t see how they have been slowly selected for this trait. Nor can you see all the others who gave up years before, demotivated. More often than not one of the parents had the same steely determination, even if they never practised the same skill. So the key motivation factor is again likely to be a mix of genes and environment.
What happened to the offspring of the cohort of medal-winning Kenyan athletes of the 70s and 80s? Well, the trophy cupboards were bare in the 1990s. The genes on their own were not enough, and the next generation didn’t produce any prodigies or win any medals at all. Perhaps because the medal-winning family had prospered, the drive and hunger to succeed was now gone. Or perhaps the fame and riches meant they no longer had to run to school every day?
Where there is a clear interplay of genes and environment (in this case training and practice) there is an obvious role for epigenetics. Is there any evidence that extended practice can modify your genes? A recent (as yet unreplicated) Italian study showed that athletes were more likely to possess certain key gene variants that made their genomes less likely to methylate. This suggests it made their genes generally harder to switch off.34 This lower level of methylation had the effect of stimulating muscle cells and muscle growth more than average in response to exercise. The relative importance of genes and training in this epigenetic process is still unclear, but early signs are emerging of potentially important different levels of gene methylation between physically active subjects and couch potatoes.35
Studies in rats have attempted to imitate the effect of giving out free gym memberships.36 Into some lucky rats’ cages they put a circular treadmill. Rats love to run. In fact they found they ran on average 10 miles every night just for fun. Previous studies had shown that rats and mice vary naturally in their normal running levels, depending on their genetic background and gender.37 When after four weeks the now seasoned runners were compared against the non-gym rats they found they performed much better in tests of physique and response to stress.
That wasn’t a particular shock, but what happened in the brain was. The genes in a key part of their brain, the dentate gyrus, had been modified epigenetically. This is a part of the brain in the cerebellum that controls muscle movement. There was a clear methylation difference between the rat groups. Studies are still ongoing, but it is likely that other genes are altered, and although there are practical problems in performing brain biopsies in humans using gyms, it is likely that similar changes occur. Some proportion of the changes to genes caused by exercising the muscles or the brain in adults could be retained as genetic marks, and passed on to our children to either use or waste.
It is hard to test muscle or activity differences across generations, but testing memories might be more feasible. As proteins only survive intact in our bodies for up to 24 hours and neurons can’t divide and replicate, exactly how memories have been retained for years has been a mystery. Recent exciting research from a group in Alabama has found that when rats are given powerful memories – usually conditioned responses to a shock – these short-term memories are stored briefly in our old friend the hippocampus. They are then passed to the cerebral cortex, where they stay for years. This memory is regulated by long-lasting epigenetic mechanisms. Experiments show that these painful memories in rats can actually be erased by chemicals that block methylation (such as DNMT inhibitors). There is increasing evidence that musical training may have its long term effect on the brain and musical memories and skills via epigenetics.38 Epigenetics is thus a great explanatory mechanism for both reversibly modifying our genes and producing (and allowing us to forget) our memories.39
What of designing future talent and elite status? One ingredient for success is the ability to pick star kids early, and gene testing was the early hope. We have seen how gene testing has been oversold and is still decades away – if achievable at all. But the following factors will certainly increase your chances. First, having a determined, highly motivated parent with whom you share the same character and similar genes. Second, start training early in life or live a long time. Third, acquire a strong faith in your own ability. Fourth, work on improving your willpower.40 And finally get lucky, as most of the world’s most talented people go unnoticed.
If you have all that burning ambition and all else fails, you could always try drugs. Doping is common in many sports and many believe that reversibly changing genes by the use of epigenetic drugs is likely to be very hard to detect, safer than steroids and possibly the sad future of many sports.41 Cheating in exams or training with epigenetic smart drugs to improve memory is another option for the truly ambitious. The more serious upside is that epigenetic drugs also have great potential in treating dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, 42 which one in five of us will suffer from.43
The fact is that despite all the best efforts, training, encouragement, similar genes and environment, offspring are more often than not a disappointment to their gifted genius parents, whether they are racehorses, scientists, musicians, writers or athletes. Nature just seems to have a way of balancing the books and keeping us guessing on what it produces. Einstein said in 1952: ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.’ In the next chapter we explore one of the great human passions: religion.