Is there a genius in all of us?

An interesting short article on the BBC website challenges the notion that our personality is innate and touches on much of the recent work about neuroplasticity and how the brain can be shaped. These articles often introduce the idea of neuroplasticity and then go on to talk about how children have the potential to be geniuses but there is less discussion about how much an adult brain can change and how much effort is required to make this happen. Examples where people's brains have been damaged and adapt are often cited but of course these happen through necessity. The example cited in the BBC article is the usual one of the changes in London cab drivers' brains as they learn The Knowledge. What we know about this is that they put a lot of time and effort into this learning, and the interesting question for me is how prepared are people at work or in life to put in the amount of effort that is needed to change the brain this way. Dr Anders Ericsson's work suggests that people need to put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in something.

I had an interesting conversation with Paul Brewerton at the Strengths Partnership yesterday about how the ideas of neuroplasticity fit with strengths focused development and one thing that they have noticed is that people with a self-improvement strength are much more prepared to try and fix weaknesses because they are energised by the process of developing something new and hence happy to put in the effort, whereas those who don't have this strength find the idea of building on their existing strengths much more appealing.