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In Practice Learning to Get to Carnegie Hall, and in other places, I’ve touted the idea that learning and refinement are especially important in developing and applying complex sets of skills. Talent may be important, but it’s not enough by itself. The sheer number of practice hours put in by guys like Mozart and Tiger Woods are/were what it takes to make the most of their talents.  Must have paid off for Woods, since he won another British Open since the article was posted. (And, well, Mozart’s still a best seller two centuries after he wrote his last big hit.)

The mention of golf practice reminded me of a conversation I once had with my friend Natalie, a championship amateur golfer. Natalie championed the idea that information is the all important thing to have to take your golf to the next level. However he got it, Woods has lots more information about his golf swing and play technique than almost anyone else. 

I was a bit skeptical about this at the time, but since learning means, among other things, developing information and options, I left it to incubate. What I hadn’t really put into the framework at the time was  intelligence as it relates to the fundamental, very basic motor skills that underly complex activities. For example, jumping and basketball. Larry Bird aside, basketball players need to be able to jump to compete, and the higher or quicker, the better it serves their games.

But is something so seemingly innate as jumping a thing that takes intelligence? David Kohn asks that question on an NPR commentary this morning, and gives the jumping intelligence idea some quality air time. 

Though he mentions some of the many theories that go into developing jumping ability, the idea of intelligence , the idea that jumping is learned and developed through practice stands out. 

some experts think that muscles and nerves may somehow have their own neurological intelligence, some way to adjust on the fly with minimal input from the brain.

Kohn talks with high jumper Gwen Wentland, last year’s U.S Indoor high jumping champion. Wentland says she always been fascinated with “doing her best to overcome gravity.” As a kid, she practiced many hours on a pogo stick, and then on a trampoline, refining her ability to “overcome gravity.” Probably paid off for her:

maybe all those hours of pogosticking and trampolining taught her something the rest of us just don’t grasp

 So maybe Natalie was on to something there after all.