While in normal circumstances only one in every ten thousand people develops perfect pitch, every single one of Sakakibara’s students did. The clear implication is that perfect pitch, far from being a gift bestowed upon only a lucky few, is an ability that pretty much anyone can develop with the right exposure and training. The study has completely rewritten our understanding of perfect pitch.
In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child passes about six years old, so that if the rewiring necessary for perfect pitch has not occurred by then, it will never happen. (Although, as we will see in chapter 8, there are exceptions of a sort, and these exceptions can teach us a great deal about exactly how people take advantage of the brain’s adaptability.) This loss is part of a broader phenomenon—that is, that both the brain and the body are more adaptable in young children than in adults, so there are certain abilities that can only be developed, or that are more easily developed, before the age of six or twelve or eighteen. Still, both the brain and the body retain a great deal of adaptability throughout adulthood, and this adaptability makes it possible for adults, even older adults, to develop a wide variety of new capabilities with the right training.
This is a book about the gift that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sakakibara’s schoolchildren, and Ray Allen all shared—the ability to create, through the right sort of training and practice, abilities that they would not otherwise possess by taking advantage of the incredible adaptability of the human brain and body. Furthermore, it is a book about how anyone can put this gift to work in order to improve in an area they choose. And finally, in the broadest sense this is a book about a fundamentally new way of thinking about human potential, one that suggests we have far more power than we ever realized to take control of our own lives.
But we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones. In this new world it no longer makes sense to think of people as born with fixed reserves of potential; instead, potential is an expandable vessel, shaped by the various things we do throughout our lives. Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential.
In 1908 Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon in what a spectator at the time described as “the greatest race of the century.” Hayes’s winning time, which set a world record for the marathon, was 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds. Today, barely more than a century later, the world record for a marathon is 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds—nearly 30 percent faster than Hayes’s record time—and if you’re an eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male, you aren’t even allowed to enter the Boston Marathon unless you’ve run another marathon in less than 3 hours, 5 minutes.