Genius doesn’t exist

Genius doesn’t exist.

I, like many people, just believed my brain wasn’t wired to do certain things or think certain ways. I thought I was just naturally bad at coding, thermodynamics, and learning languages among other things. I thought other people were more gifted than me in certain areas. A book I read changed that belief in me forever.

When human babies are born, we’re kind of idiots compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. A baby horse can walk, drink, and eat all by itself an hour after its born. Meanwhile, human babies can’t even stop themselves from drooling. This is actually really cool because we’re born to adapt to literally anything! If humans were born with the ability to dog sled, that’d be really useful in Alaska but pretty worthless in Thailand. If we were born with the ability to program computers, that’d be a super useful skill today but worthless 100 years ago. A horse is born with almost everything it’ll ever need to know in its lifetime where we’re hardwired to learn everything. We are the only species designed to adapt to any environment and any time period.

The way we learn skills is through something in our brain called myelin. Myelin acts as a sort of insulation. When we do something correctly, like swing a golf club well for the first time, neurons in our brain fire and signals myelin begins to wrap around those neural pathways. This myelin can wrap up to 50 times and it increases our processing power by 3,000 times. This is why when you begin to golf, you have to think of every step (raise the club over your head, keep your eye on the ball, keep your arms straight, etc) to swing correctly and your movements are awkward and slow. But two years down the road, after you’ve practiced a long time, you step up to the ball and swing without thinking, it’s natural. In fact you are thinking, you’re just thinking at 3,000 times the speed you used to because myelin insulated that circuit. You’re thinking so fast you don’t even know you’re doing it. This is how skills are made.

The implication of this is incredible. We’re all born as blank slates, therefore we’re all born at the same level, therefore we’re all capable of anything. Genius is a myth. Mozart, often called a musical genius, was estimated to have been exposed to 3,500 hours of musical training by his composer father by the time he was 6 years old. This puts his first composition at the realm of impressive but not unobtainable skill. Michelangelo trained under a master artist for ten years before he himself was allowed to create masterpieces. Savants, known for their ability to perform astronomical calculations in their heads, are able to practice calculations ceaselessly in their heads while appearing to be in a conversation or doing nothing. None of these people had or have superior brains, they just all had astronomical amounts of practice.

Well what about that person who just seemed to naturally learn calculus better than you? Myelin transfers. Neural circuits useful in one skill transfer to others. So though you both may have never studied calculus before, that person has learned a related subject that helped him pick this one up easier. That naturally athletic person has played a sport their whole lives that developed hand eye coordination which transferred to many sports. Nobody was naturally born better than you mentally, they just practiced in some way you haven’t.

I can learn anything and I know that now. I wasted too much time not trying things because I believed I couldn’t do them. This knowledge changed the way I approach everything. The question is no longer “Can I do it?” but rather “Am I willing to put in the time to learn it?”

-Charissa Enget