The biology of resolutions

You may or may not have told yourself that you mean – really, really mean – to reinvent yourself in 2011. Out with that bad diet! Out with forgetting one’s friends. Out with not taking time to practising the piano. Out, damn spot – out, out!

Ah, but how to stop the resolutions themselves from going out – out and down some black hole in the brain’s gray matter?

The key may lie not in the gray matter – those parts of the brain concerned with specific competences – but in the brain’s “white matter”, or, to use its proper name, myelin, a kind of insulating coat of our nervous system.

Most cognitive psychologists today reckon myelin is important not just for the proper functioning of our nervous system; since it serves to facilitate communication (very roughly, by insulating connections from interference) within the brain, and between it and the rest of the body, it may be responsible for the speed of thought, ingenuity of perception and agility associated with genius and super athleticism.

Although there is still a lot of focus on whether the brain of a genius, like Einstein, is bigger than average, the right question may be to ask if he had more white matter coating it. And, yes, it appears he did. Was he born with all of it? Almost certainly not, is the good news for the rest of us. White matter is not the biological equivalent of talent; it is produced by practice, lots of it. Long hours of deliberate practice – an ability to handle routines, to apply oneself to the study of boring detail – is what distinguishes Mozart, Einstein, Picasso, Bill Gates, Bobby Fischer, the Polgar sisters and even seemingly irrepressible anarchists like Captain Beefheart and Devendra Banhart from most of us.

Long hours of practice, together with a role model, and a teacher capable of pointing out the seemingly insignificant errors: All these reinforce the white matter, making thought and action seem automatic, a matter of second nature, rather than the imposition of the will on a natural impulse.

Such knowledge – without the brain science – has been known for decades in many areas of sport. My American former fencing instructor was taught by a Hungarian master, back in the days when Hungary dominated the game. The country produced such talent partly for the same reasons some Russian tennis academies produce bunches of superstars; young learners focused on the minute routines of body movements before being permitted to handle the foil (or tennis racket); a process that could take up to two years. The important thing is to delay the onset of automatic action till the drill can be carried out correctly.

The implications are important for all of us, not merely those parents who want to raise a genius. Learning how to do something well – including being a better version of ourselves – is a matter of focusing on those things we do automatically.

The publicity given these days to the brain’s white matter reflects the growing influence of cognitive psychology on popular culture (which rivals that of psychoanalysis in the mid-20th century) and driven middle-class parents’ desire to produce a child genius. With popular culture and fond parents there likely comes, like cheese with biscuits, a thick slab of mythology. The number of novels featuring a protagonist with a brain pathology has risen conspicuously over the last 10 years or so.

So it is worth remembering that our appreciation of cognitive psychology’s discoveries, let alone our incorporation of them into our days, does not mean we have to accept that personhood is reducible to the brain.

For example, Aristotle and his mediaeval followers, like Thomas Aquinas, thought of being a good person as a skill or, rather, a set of skills, which they called virtues. One could train at being just, kind, generous and commonsensical. One trained by making them a habit that came easily. It paid to have a role-model, like St Francis, who was good at, say, generosity. And one examined one’s actions minutely, identifying unthinking errors – the vices – and resolving to eradicate them.

But far from seeing all this as reducing oneself to one’s habits – or, as we might put it, rightly firing neurons – Aquinas saw it as the path to participating fully in the creativity of the universe or, as he might put it, the path to sainthood. Aquinas saw morality as part of nature and evolutionary self-development, without thinking that, somehow, this zapped the meaningfulness out of goodness.

Whether you take the strictly secular cognitive view, or that of Aquinas, however, some things remain the same. When you tell your mirror you mean to reinvent yourself this year – really, really, really – remember this cannot mean cutting yourself off from whatever you have been up to this point. On the contrary, it means a really, really, really close examination of where you are and long practice of walking away from there.

ranierfsadni@europe.com