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Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool · 4 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
From the world’s reigning expert on expertise comes a powerful new approach to mastering almost any skill. Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill. Ericsson’s findings have been lauded and debated, but never properly explained. So the idea of expertise still intimidates us — we believe we need innate talent to excel, or think excelling seems prohibitively difficult. Peak belies both of these notions, proving that almost all of us have the seeds of excellence within us — it’s just a question of nurturing them by reducing expertise to a discrete series of attainable practices. Peak offers invaluable, often counterintuitive, advice on setting goals, getting feedback, identifying patterns, and motivating yourself.  Whether you want to stand out at work, or help your kid achieve academic goals, Ericsson’s revolutionary methods will show you how to master nearly anything.
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Not exactly using the same terminology as the blog post, but the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Ericsson and Pool has a lot of details about the importance of deliberate practice and getting into "tight" learning loops.

See https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544456238/Peak and book summary here https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/psychology...

The science underpinning the idea of learning, memory, recall and is based/described in neuroscience at at cellular level. So you can read papers. The coursework is really at a more abstracted level describing the processes as a model based on cited research. This is a high level course to improve learning, not STEM as such. Still very useful.

Chunking is described in more detail at Week2 https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/home/we... and books:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1101982853/ref=as_li_qf_sp...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544456238/ref=as_li_qf_sp...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743277465/ref=as_li_qf_sp...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674729013/ref=as_li_qf_sp...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579220541/ref=as_li_qf_sp...

Thanks for your openness.

I assume you've already done so based on a few of your word choices, but if you haven't already, I recommend checking out Peak [0], the latest (2015) work by Anders Ericsson. He's the researcher who came up with the "10,000 Hours Rule" as popularized by Gladwell. I thought the book had useful suggestions such as how to make sure you're achieving deliberate practice, how to get better when you don't have a coach, or what do for yourself (or as a parent for a child) when considering quitting an endeavor. Ericsson also shares reflections on what folks mistake about his research (i.e. 10K hours was merely the mean for one of his studies.), while clarifying the approach you SHOULD take as supported by his research.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp...

JauntTrooper
That's really interesting, thank you. Did you find his techniques to be effective in practice?
caminante
Yes. In particular, I feel like I gained an improved set of questions to ask myself when learning and others when coaching that have led to better results.
Can anyone up to date on this field tell me if there has there been any scientific studies on trying to rewire the brain using mnemonic techniques for Alzheimer's patients? I have seen some stories on some attempts to do that, but I never could find anything which looked very scientific.

For some context, I read in the book "Peak" by Anders Ericsson (who is credited with the 10000 hour rule) [1] that cab drivers in London who passed the cab exam literally rewired their brains during the process of studying and it could be observed in the brain scans. (But also notes that they unfortunately lost some spatial awareness ability which the average person had)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp...

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