Just finished reading an interesting article at Scientific American. It turns out that researchers have been studying chess players for some time as a way to gain insights into the way the human mind works. This particular article is concerned with the gaining of expertise, and what it is that separates experts from novices (and all the levels in between).
An excerpt that I find particularly compelling and that has ramifications for both language study and academic communities in general.
The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.
<snip>
Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.
Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.
<snip>
How many of us struggling with other languages have ascribed another's proficiency to some knack, or gift that we ourselves do not possess? That dog, it turns out, won't hunt.
At this point, many skeptics will finally lose patience. Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts themselves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.
Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. László Polgár, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters--the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polgár, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.
The Polgár experiment proved two things: that grandmasters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.
The full article is a bit long, but well worth the read. I'll end this now as I prepare for some (hopefully) effortful study.
Things have been hectic recently as I try to adjust to my new schedule.
I just finished up my second week teaching for DLD. I've had some good classes and bad, but I have a sense for each classes personality now, and think that things should go smoothly from now on. There is still a lot for me to learn about DLD's system and teaching materials, but I'm confident that I'll be able to do well there. I've been putting in extra hours before class to prepare, which seems to have paid off, but now that the new school year has started in earnest, there'll be no more of that I think.
I'm jazzed about our seminar this year. Our advisor, Shinkawa-sensei, is on sabbatical and the seminar is being led by his 後輩, Yamamoto-sensei. Yamamoto take more of an historian's bent in his approach to texts, and he also has done some recent work on house codes. For the seminar, we are going to be working through a text that is a question/answer piece dealing with some of the key issues in buddhism and confucianism. He gave us 4 or 5 different versions of the text (including one brushwritten version) and we are going to do a bit of comparison of differences as we read for comprehension. Also, it seems as if we are going to go slowly and delve deeply into the background of the people, places, and texts mentioned, which should go miles toward making this a text that we will all be able to use in future courses of our own. I don't want to jinx it, but I'm hopeful that I'm gonna get more out of this than I have out of reading some of the esoteric buddhist stuff we've done over the last few years.
I have managed to be semi-regular with my workouts since getting back from the States. I have trained more days than not, and purchasing the weights was key. Muscles, it occurs to me though, are a funny thing. The first workout for legs and the one for traps left me with a crazy amount of soreness. So much so, that I started to doubt that I would be able to continue at anywhere near the schedule that I would like. But, now, two weeks in, I seem to have adjusted to the workload (may have something to do with missed workouts and more rest) and am feeling pretty good overall. I say that with a bit of wariness 'cuz I did stiff-legged deadlifts today for the first time and I'm not sure what my lowback and hamstrings are gonna feel like tomorrow. I'm not too worried, just don't wanna tempt fate. Definitely want to get a good stretch tonight and hit the rack as early as possible.
Since getting back I have caught up with The Shoe, Chris, and Aya. I also ran into Dado in Shibuya about a week ago, and we're trying to find time for Misa and I to head over to he and Mari's place for dinner. Wanted to do it tomorrow, but Misa won't be around. It's weird the way my social circle has contracted. 2+ years ago I would regularly see Mark, Alan, Luay, Yousseff, Danjo, Aya, Shai, Inokuma-san, Ken, Nate and a little less often, Juan Luis, Brian, Bunshi, and Macchan, and now? Not so much. People have moved on, either overseas or at least to new companies, and I'm busier than ever before anyway. A little sad, but there's little to be done. Still, I miss the warm security of an extended group of friends.
But soon Nate will arrive in Japan and Mark and his family will probably be here for part of the summer so I can live it up a little for the next couple 'o' months.
It seems that the famous Ramen Jiro has spawned some offspring, one of which is in Sengawa.
...becoming is a denial of being. -- Bruce Lee
Just about 8 years ago I read this quote in a copy of Bruce Lee's The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, that I borrowed from Todd -- who btw, just got his first Mac, welcome to the dark side. I spent a few weeks contemplating the profundity of this simple statement. I should say for those of you who are either new to this blog, or just don't know me that well, that I have always been a dreamer. Being a dreamer is nice, you can have the loftiest goals, and always the promise of a great future to look forward to. There is very little that is bad about it from the dreamer's perspective. You only run into problems when a little thing called time begins to factor into the equation. Well, more specifically the perspective that comes with time served, and also the physical changes that await us all. But I get a bit ahead of myself....
You see, after a few weeks of ruminating about those two little sentences, and musing abut Todd's fortune cookie which read "Laziness is the holiday of fools.", I felt like I was on the verge of having an epiphany of sorts. It came actually as I was talking (out of my ass) with Todd. We were musing about both of our goals fantasies of teaching martial arts. He, aikido, and me, karate and kyudo. I asked Todd how many hours a day he thought that this future budoka Todd would work out. He replied (something like) 3 hours a day, and I said that in order to be[come] that guy, then he would have to workout 3 hours a day. As I said those words, there was a sudden ring of truth for me. It gnawed at me for days afterward, but I predictably fell back into my old routine and the chaos that was my life as I prepared to go abroad to Japan for the first time.
I was taking a break a few minutes ago and left my desk to stretch my legs outside. Even though I only work 4 hours at a clip. I usually take at least one of these "constitutionals" a day to clear my head and also to give my eyes a little time to focus on something farther than arms reach away. I started to think about how in the book that I am reading there was mention of Dogen and how one of the revolutionary aspects of his interpertation of Buddhist praxis was that he taught that practice, in this case zazen, was not a means to enlightenment, but was enlightenment itself. Just do it. Hmmn.
How does this relate to my conception of myself? I have always been reluctant to accept any title or moniker for which there wasn't some sort of concrete/external confirmation. But I wonder, what kind of confirmation will I get that I am a scholar or a karateka/budoka? My first published article? The first one in a peer-reviewed journal? My Ph.d? A black belt? A certain number of days in the dojo per week? per year? I realize that my perception of who I am is not really about who I am, but, rather, who and what I want to become. I want to become a scholar/professor. I want to become a karateka/budo sensei. I want to become a person that weighs 70 kg. And on and on.
It seems obvious (right now at least) that I have been suffering from a fundamentally skewed outlook. While I don't think that it is necessarily bad or damaging to have goals, it seems that (for me) it might be better to focus on the day-to-day behavior that will lead to them. Means rather than ends. Micro rather than macro.
This is going to take a little more thinking before I can come up with a creed or an ethos -- at least one that doesn't infringe upon any copyrights. I wonder, though, if I will be able to rewire my mindset such that I stop worrying about goals (externally imposed deadlines being a different matter). My gut feeling is that if I own this viewoint and keep in mind who I am (as opposed to who I want to be), I should be able to release some of the anxiety and fear that comes with struggling to get somewhere.
Since I don't think that blog posts like "Went to the dojo, read 150 pages, and turned down some chocolate cookies at work" will be particularly interesting, I am going to continue to post about progress/milestones. This will be my forum for this kind of thinking and expression and I'm going to spend my offline time grinding it out. Smashmouth style.
Starting now.
No, really
