#reaction-time

[sophiasnorm]

[curtiscsmith]

Why Practice Matters

This article was written about athletes - what makes certain athletes so superior to others, but it applies to almost anything including art, design or photography. Practice matters. And lots of it (roughly 10,000 hours or 10 yrs. to become expert). There are no short cuts except in rare instances.

These few paragraphs are excerpts from the article but the entire read is worthwhile and entertaining (see link below). 

Enjoy. cs 

'In their now-famous paper, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," the authors extended their conclusions to sports, citing the Starkes occlusion tests showing that learned perceptual expertise is more important than raw reaction skills. Accumulated hours of practice, they suggested, were masquerading as innate talent in both sports and music.

The lead author of the paper, K. Anders Ericsson, now professor of psychology at Florida State, came to be viewed as the father of the "10,000-hour rule" to achieve expertise (though he himself never called it a rule) or the "deliberate practice framework," as it is often known among those who study skill acquisition. Ericsson and other proponents of the framework went on to suggest that accumulated practice is the real wizard behind the curtain of innate talent in fields as diverse as sprinting and surgery.

In a 2009 paper, "Toward a Science of Exceptional Achievement," Ericsson and his co-authors wrote that the genes necessary to produce a pro athlete (or a pro anything, really) "are contained within all healthy individuals' DNA." In that view, experts are differentiated by their practice histories, not their genes. The media interpretation of Ericsson's work has often been to say that 10,000 hours are both necessary and sufficient to make anyone an expert in anything. No one, the idea goes, achieves expertise with fewer hours, and everyone achieves expertise with that amount.

On the backs of several best-selling books and reams of articles, the 10,000-hour rule (alternately known as the 10-year rule) has become embedded in the world of athlete development and an impetus for starting children early in hard training. In some cases, popular writers describing Ericsson's work have allowed for individual genetic differences in addition to differences born of practice, while others have taken a rigid view of the 10,000-hour rule as absolute, with no room for genetic gifts. The 10,000-hour rule has, for scientists and coaches alike, become shorthand for the idea that practice matters, and should be started as early as possible; that it is not only nature but also many years of nurture at work behind athletic stardom.

But it is not enough for scientists to say that practice matters. That point is entirely uncontroversial. "There isn't a single geneticist or physiologist who says hard work isn't important," says Joe Baker, a sports psychologist at York University in Toronto. "Nobody thinks Olympians are just jumping off the couch."'

Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/news/20130724/the-sports-gene-excerpt/#ixzz2a1zxEfMD