You have to say it in a rhyme.
Long ago and far away, I was a corrections worker at a juvenile corrections center. It’s hell to remember names of any of my cohorts there because we all wen by our initials. That made me MGK. We used initials because the kids in the lockup – and that is what it was, the calaboose – were dangerous. Since most of us there lived in the city or close by, we often shared neighborhoods with our wards. Read that prisoners. They were kids even though some of them were in there for heinous enough crimes. Some for murder, some for sexual assaults, the majority for felonies. It was preferable they didn’t know where we lived.
I want to tell you a little about one of those initial sets – TJS. He was a supervisor and the self-defense (and everything else, I think) training officer.
Zen Moves
TJS trained the staff in self defense and other protective tactics, like storming cells when someone barricaded him or herself in. His training was my first experience with Aikido. Except for his clean clothing, TJS looked like he either just drove in from Woodstock or the bible. He wore his hair long, had a neat enough beard, and round John Lennon glasses. As David Brombeck used to sing, though, don’t let the glasses fool ya. He handled himself well; his look and his demeanor could be decieving.
When it was time for him to go into action, he was a different person. In training, he demonstrated moves that most of us there never mastered. When he did, his moves looked effortless. It seemed like any child could master them. And maybe a child could. The adults he trained were a different story. TJS never broke a sweat in training. He was no different when a raging kid rushed toward him with venom in his eyes, and with Zen-like ease, he would bring him to the ground like laying down a baby. I was always happy with that because one of those kids could have easily hurt someone, possibly me.
When this instructor trained us he talked about practice, practice, practice, and developing muscle memory. What I am getting to here is that this is my chance to say, “No TJ, you were wrong.”
I’ll tell you why in a moment.
You’ve probably read Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers. If you haven’t you can get it at the bottom of this page in the carousel. His premise there is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a Yo Yo Ma or a Joe Montana. That 10,000 hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks and if you see it from my next author here’s perspective, it’s practice of about 3 hours a day, so you are really looking at somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to 15 years. And that’s not the only condition in the quest for greatness.
Athlete, musician or the Gates and Jobs among us – They often began this “practice” at a tender age. And many of them just lucked into the circumstance that made this practice possible. Twists of fate as simple as being in the right place at the right time in the right frame of mind drew them forward. For some, particularly athletes, according to Gladwell, it could even have been something as simple as having a birthday early in the year. Y0u’ll have to read the book to figure that one out.
That’s all well and good. Tell me, pray tell, what’s the science behind these miracles. Let me give you a hint. It’s not genius (although that could help) and it’s not muscle memory.
What’s the old joke question?
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Sort of. Not quite.
As I sit here tapping away at my keyboard and you there watching these electrons dance across the screen, there are a whole lot of workers in workclothes machine gunning tiny chemicals electrically charged into go juice or slow juice. They get to work with every little move (or not move) we make.
You have to be the judge of this, but I have noticed that somehow as I sit here every day finger dancing on this computer that things have been changing. Even at my age, it gets easier as I do it and stick to it. I am able to write faster, and dare I say it, even better. How could this be?
It goes like this. The tiny workers and their productions reach out to the tips of my fingers, while at the same time shuffling chemicals around in my brain. They do this using the same pathways every day. These neurons and neurotransmitters do get to know their way around and their job gets easier. But they are not the real heroes in this story.
Myelin enters the picture. Most of us think of our brains as gray matter; at least that’s what we’ve always been told. It is beginning to look like the real hero is myelin, the “white matter.” It acts more like “light” matter. Myelin is an insulator of those pathways where the neurotransmitters travel toward the synapse between the cells.
It’s already starting to become the star that it may very well seem to be. What is it? Myelin is the fatty substance that encases your nerve fibers. It’s essentially a very important type of insulation. Every time your nerve is stimulated, the myelin gets a little thicker, your insulation gets stronger resulting in a faster signal. The faster the signal the better your skill and speed of delivery. TRAIN OUT PAIN: The Myelin Sheath (4 September 2009)
But what it does is so much more than that. Scientists are barely at the beginning of the thousand mile journey toward understanding myelin, so I gues we can wait until Monday to get to what almost seems like the miraculous actions of this simple cell structure. The violin – the virtuoso on the violin has, over the years, lit up the neuron-neurotransmitter-synapse freeway. And we all benefit from the artist’s success.
Mike
The books mentioned in this post are available below.
About Mike
[...] first post on myelin gave you the basics on what this ‘brain function’ is and I hinted at what it does. [...]