Focused Training Produces Extreme Mental Feats Even in Older Adults

The Next Brain Blog is dedicated to exploring the techniques, materials and lifestyle choices that lead to improved brain function and peak cognitive performance.   Much of what you will find on this blog produces incremental effects. The idea is to combine many of them into a program and reap the rewards over the longer term.  That is the way it works with physical exercise and indeed with most things in life. But this need not be as boring as it sounds.

A longterm tightly-focused cognitive training program can produce extreme and even profound results in ordinary people.

Take for example, the  case recently reported in the Research Blog about a 58 year old man, JB,  that was able to memorize and recite (under controlled conditions) the entirety of Milton’s Paradise Lost. That is a 10,565 line 60,000 word epic poem.  It took him nine years.

“Just how did JB manage to pull off this incredible feat? He studied for about one hour per day, reciting verses in seven-line chunks, consistent with Miller’s magic number seven – the capacity of short-term, working memory. Added together, JB estimates that he devoted between 3000 to 4000 hours to learning the poem. Seamon’s team interpret this commitment in terms of Ericsson’s ‘deliberate practice theory’, in which thousands of hours of perfectionist, self-critical practice are required to achieve true expertise.”

And his performance was far find mindless memorization. It involved “deep cognitive involvement” with the material.

One hour a day for nine years. A lot of training but doable.  You may not be interested in memorizing a book but that’s not the point. JB’s work demonstrates that we can achieve extreme mental performance if we are willing to put in the work.  A general claim is that with the right training you can achieve world-class performance in 10 years or 10,000 hours in any domain.   It is not talent that wins but dedication, proper training and time. Looks like this might hold for cognitive performances as well.

Very interested to hear from readers that are considering or engaged in a longterm tightly-focused cognitive training program.