Book Review: Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code: Intriguing neurobiology, disastrous and illogical conclusions

One of my students recently recommended that I take a look at Daniel Coyle's book (Bantam Dell, 2009), The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born.  It's grown.  Here's how.   Like my student, I was fascinated by Coyle's description of an emerging scientific model of skill development.  Apparently, recent research has suggested that myelin, a fatty substance that gets deposited around neurons as brain connections develop, not only provides insulation to the neurons, but also both strengthens and speeds up particularly well-practiced neural connections.  It seems that the more frequently a neural pathway is used, the more layers of myelin get deposited, resulting, as Coyle writes, in a "broadband" effect which increases the effectiveness of the nervous system in performing the skill set under development.

The biological facts that emerge from the research Coyle describes help to explain how learning happens — how we develop skill — and why habits are so hard to break.  Firing a neurological circuit causes myelin to wrap the neurons involved, which is how skills get built up as we repeat the associated actions.  Coyle further reports that there is no mechanism which undoes this wrapping (other than aging or disease), which means that, once you develop an enhanced neural pathway, it is there for life, waiting to be triggered whether you desire it or not.  (Unfortunately, Coyle glosses over this inescapable and critical phenomenon in one short paragraph and never returns to flesh out its consequences.)

Once he has laid the (greatly simplified) neurobiological groundwork for his book, Coyle goes on to draw conclusions and make recommendations that 1) do not follow from his premises, 2) are largely irrelevant to both students and teachers/coaches, and 3) perpetuate a prevalent but detrimental attitude towards learning that can be summed up as "you gotta try hard to succeed."  In the following paragraphs, I'll address each of these weaknesses of Coyle's arguments in turn.

Under Construction

When a highway is being resurfaced, you have to find a temporary alternative route.  In a similar way, the new vocal technique you are working on in your lessons may be not available for "real" singing for some time.

This inaccessibility of your best resources can be downright frustrating, as my students D. and C. found out recently.  They both have begun working with me in the past few months, hoping to address some inconsistent results that arose in performance situations.  Both of them have a high degree of musical intuition, so they have been able to achieve a much-improved register balance during their lessons in a relatively short time.  Both of them have experienced the effortlessness and beauty of sound brought about by a well-coordinated vocal mechanism — while singing exercises in my studio.

Both of them have also experienced a demoralizing return to the problems that brought them to me when they have sung songs outside their lessons.  What is going on here?

The View from the Mountaintop

(While I'm on vacation — from teaching and blogging — I hope you enjoy this piece from my website archives.)



Have you ever become so engrossed in a book that you completely lost track of time and eventually looked up from your reading to realize that you’re a little achy from sitting for god knows how long in an uncomfortable position?  Or have you ever zoned out into auto-pilot mode while driving home from work and somehow gotten to your destination without any recollection of the trip?

Lately, under the influence of Missy Vineyard’s excellent new AT book, How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live, I’ve been contemplating this kind of situation, in which my awareness shrinks, leaving me with only a partial picture of my experience.

What constitutes complete awareness?  I distinguish at least three aspects of any moment of experience which my awareness may encompass: my Self, my activity, and my environment.  While recognizing that my awareness exhibits a fluid, delicately shifting balance among these three aspects of experience, my goal is to neglect none of them and favor none of them above the others.

The power of intention

(While I'm on vacation — from teaching and blogging — I hope you enjoy this piece from my website archives.  It's from a few years ago, for those of you who may be wondering why Willy doesn't get a mention.  He hadn't been born yet!)


The skill I've developed through my Alexander work in manifesting intentions paid off in an unexpected way today.

I have been running with my dog, Freddy, for a few months now.  Several times a week, we jog down to the river park along the Hudson and back--perhaps 3-4 miles in all.  Freddy is faster than me and has far more stamina (who knew Chihuahuas were so athletic?), so he always tended to run a bit ahead, barking all the while.  I interpreted this behavior as wanting to go faster and greeting everyone we passed.

Yesterday I began reading a book by the "Dog Whisperer," Cesar Millan, on dog psychology and training, Cesar's Way, and learned enough to realize that Freddy was running ahead of me because he considered himself the alpha dog in our "pack" and he was barking to alert his pack of perceived threats--bikes, buses, other dogs and runners, etc.

This morning, I changed my intentions for our run.  I decided to actively take on the mantle of alpha dog, designating myself the leader in my own mind and taking the responsibility for alertness and judgment that comes with this role.   I noticed that the change in my thinking brought about an immediate if slight change in my carriage and my confidence, which Freddy apparently picked up on.

Thinking vs. feeling: the eternal conundrum

We decided to take a later train and ferry to get to Fire Island this evening, so I find myself with a couple of extra hours to write a blog post.  I am challenging myself to use this windfall time to tackle a tricky and crucial question posed by my reader Jack over a month ago — I've been avoiding it ever since, but now I'm going to face the music.

Jack's question is one inevitably encountered by serious students of the Alexander Technique.  His particular version of this age-old conundrum came in response to my posting about how I'd recently made the mistake — twice! — of trying to feel my way into change:

If I ask myself "is my neck free?" isn't that attempting to get a feeling? How could this properly be converted to "thinking"?


Great questions, Jack!  This topic deserves a book-length treatment, but I'm going to focus today on just two potential paths to understanding.

The Everything Whisperer

I think I'm going to have to add a fourth "main influence" to the Art & Science of Singing: Cesar Millan, "The Dog Whisperer."


Originally, I was drawn to Mr. Millan's TV show and books for their substantial help in creating the kind of behavior I wanted in my "pack" (Freddy and Willy, the Chihuahuas).  But I have found benefits well beyond the realm of dog behavioral training: becoming a pack leader has led me to some pretty significant personal development in other aspects of my life.

Many of Cesar Millan's training principles apply to life in general and to my teaching.  A calm, assertive energy is likely to help me get anything I want in life, not just obedient pack members.  When I teach, my staying in a calm, assertive state elicits a state of mind in my students that is conducive to learning.  And, as Millan demonstrates in nearly every episode of The Dog Whisperer (I have 4 seasons on DVD!), when we want to create positive change, we must strive not to work against Mother Nature.  Treating dogs as if they were humans makes them unbalanced; ignoring the way our bodies and voices are designed to work makes us unbalanced--tense, injury-prone, and frustrated.

The amazing new Ease-o-Matic Indicator!!!

In Alexander lessons, one of the functions I perform for my students is to help them monitor their state of ease as they do various activities.  With a delicate contact of my hands on their head/neck area, I can amplify their own sensations of ease vs. non-ease, making it easier for them to track how successfully they are preventing interference with their natural coordination.

Without a teacher's help, it's easy to get sucked into the intricacies of the activity you're pursuing, totally forgetting about your ease in the process.  This is one of the main ways we all get into trouble in our daily lives.  Ignoring our state of ease makes it very easy (inevitable, really) for a state of relative non-ease to establish itself.  We end up scrunching ourselves and tensing ourselves in myriad ways, often never realizing this until it gets bad enough to cause us pain.

My students have frequently remarked that they would love it if I would follow them around all the time to help them monitor their ease.  (They are usually daunted by my fee schedule for around-the-clock Alexander service.  I have yet to have a taker for this intensive program, which would allow me to fund weekly bodywork courses and frequent biking tours through French wine country.)

But now, for the first time, I present my new invention, the Ease-o-Matic^® Indicator!  (Drum roll, please.)

Ta-da!  Here it is (available in two stylish models as shown to complement any color scheme.):

OK, so I didn't actually invent this.  It's my Chihuahuas, Willy and Freddy.  But let me explain how they help me to monitor my state of ease.

The focus in learning

Lately in my lessons, both as teacher and as student, I've been thinking about the relationship in learning between 1) fostering the particular skills under development and 2) fostering the overall state of coordination in the student.  I've been wondering what the most beneficial ratio in focus on these two factors might be.

In most teaching, #1 gets virtually all of the attention.  I'm recalling my childhood swimming lessons, in which I was taught how to kick my legs, how to move my arms, how to blow out the air under the water, and so on.  Nobody ever suggested that all these functions were part of an overall pattern of whole-body coordination, or that it could be helpful to consider that coordination in learning to swim.  In any case, I learned how to (barely) remain afloat while struggling mightily.

I also recall some unfortunate early voice lessons I took with marvelous singers who had no clue how to teach.  I learned how to move my ribs and how to position my palate, tongue, throat, and even cheekbones, with not even a nod to the idea that somehow all these parts were subject to an overall coordination in my body, which could be well or poorly adjusted while I was singing.  Of course, the more I tried to correctly align all the involved pieces of my anatomy, the more I interfered with my overall coordination.  Since nobody was paying any attention in the learning process to this coordination, it escaped all of us—me and my teachers—that something radically detrimental was happening.  Yes, I learned to sing, but only through a huge amount of straining.

Eventually, I was fortunate enough to come into contact with the Alexander Technique, a method for learning that does take the overall coordinative state of the body into account.  In fact, it makes attention to this state the PRIMARY focus of all learning.

Coming home. . . .

Well, I'm on the Bolt Bus ($10) back from Boston, feeling exhausted but eager to try out my new skills  in the coming week on whoever of you is interested!  It's pouring down rain, as it has been for the past 48 hours.  (Even my hotel room was not impervious to the weather; I jumped out of bed this morning onto a soggy carpet.  Ewwww.)

By the final day of this course, as is typical for these 3- to 4-day classes, I was feeling a bit over-sated with new knowledge, as well as tired of sitting in a chair for so long (not in my normal mode of living, thank goodness!) and breathing recycled hotel air.  Luckily, I had enough time before my bus departed to swim a few laps in the hotel pool—a welcome bit of energetic movement before being restricted once again for 4 1/2 hours to a seat.

Now I'm sitting in that very seat, where, thanks to the miracle of in-bus wifi, I am writing this blog entry.  (It was a little creepy when I walked back from the bathroom in the back (creepy also) to see a laptop or smartphone glowing at almost every seat.  Have we become so addicted to our connectivity?  (He asks while typing on his prized Apple while hurtling at 80 mph down the highway.))

Having a clear mental conception

Let's perform a thought experiment.  Imagine carrying out the following pair of instructions:

1) Emit a stream of air through your larynx while opening and closing your vocal cords 440 times per second, resonating the tone most strongly in the range of 800 to 1200 Hz.

2) Play middle C on a piano or pitchpipe.  Now sing that note on the vowel [ah].

Obviously, nobody sings according to the procedure outlined in #1 above, although, if you could, it would produce the same result as #2.  In reality, we sing by mentally conceiving the sound we want to produce, our bodies responding to the intention of our conscious minds by activating the right muscles at the right time.