Some of you will doubtless remember the late 1960s exploits of the eponymous schoolboy-cum-super-spy, Joe McClaine, in the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson Supermarionation TV series, Joe 90. Each week Joe sat in a machine invented by his adopted dad and had other people’s skills and experiences downloaded directly into his young brain. This enabled him to perform brain surgery, pilot various aircraft, acquire several foreign languages, and in short carry out his full range of duties as the Most Special Agent of the World Intelligence Network. It was a pretty useful trick, even if he did have to wear a pair of rather unflattering spectacles to pull it off.

Joe 90 was (and I stress) a children’s science-fiction fantasy series. But even if you don’t happen to have an adopted father with a Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record and Transfer machine to hand, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) would assure you that it is perfectly possible for you to replicate young Joe’s impressive accomplishments. As one NLP website enthuses: ‘If one human can do something then, potentially, anyone can ...’ NLP has been propounding this view for some years now, but while most of us would freely acknowledge that a ‘can do’ attitude is likely to get you further in life than self-defeating passivity, a moment’s reflection may reveal that this cherished tenet of NLP doesn’t really stand up to serious examination. As blogger Diana Hartman points out: ‘If that were true there would be a lot fewer janitors and a lot more astronauts.’

NLP claims that by replicating the mental habits and representations of successful people you can duplicate their success-inducing behaviours. This was the rationale behind Bandler and Grinder’s original analysis of the communication style of three eminent therapists – Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and later Milton Erickson. Bandler and Grinder believed in doing so that they had uncovered the ‘deep structure’ of effective communication, a psychological grammar that could be learned and copied by just about anyone. Now it is one thing to identify and imitate behavioural techniques employed by the great and the good. It’s quite another to suggest that by doing so you will replicate their results. Knowing the rules of chess may enable me to move the pieces around the board in a legal fashion, but it won’t necessarily turn me into a Grand Master overnight.

Perls, Satir and Erickson were all masters of their craft. Quite apart from having put in the requisite hours, one strongly suspects they were used to making subtle and complex judgments at the instinctive, unconscious level deployed by the true expert. Ironically, as educational researchers and brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus explain, as people develop real expertise they move beyond any structure of knowledge that can be readily formalised or communicated to someone else. As they put it:

‘If one asks an expert for the rules he or she is using, one will, in effect, force the expert to regress to the level of a beginner and state the rules learned in school. Thus, instead of using rules he or she no longer remembers, as the knowledge engineers suppose, the expert is forced to remember rules he or she no longer uses ... No amount of rules and facts can capture the knowledge an expert has when he or she has stored experience of the actual outcomes of tens of thousands of situations.’

The more expert we become, the more the relevant processes fade from the view of consciousness. Expertise therefore cannot be taught or even adequately described by anyone, not even the expert themselves. It has to be developed through experience and immersion, and is encoded within the evolving structure and function of our brains. To borrow one of Bandler and Grinder’s computational metaphors, the software and the hardware become merged into one. Since I can’t have your brain, I can never really have your expertise either. The best I can hope for is my own approximation of it.

Way before we run into the difficulties of replicating expertise, we face the more fundamental problem of how even basic skills are to be installed in our heads. Bandler and Grinder are a bit vague on this point, but since we lack a convenient disk drive to allow the instantaneous upload of new ‘programs’, we are instead forced to rely on the more laborious, hit-and-miss process called education. Skilled teachers know that when it comes to learning anything, one size does not fit all. They have to adapt their approach to the strengths and thinking styles of the particular pupils they are dealing with. Perhaps the student is a visual learner, or an auditory learner, a converger or a diverger. Good teachers have to use different strategies to communicate knowledge effectively to different students. This would suggest that learning takes place within the parameters set by individual brains, and that knowledge is not necessarily constructed in an identical way by each of us. If the way I process information is different to you, why should I be able to do everything you can do?

Then there is the thorny issue of innate talent or aptitude. Are all brains really created equal? It is undeniable that some people arrive on the planet predisposed to pick up certain skills with particular ease, while for others they will always remain a significant challenge. The electrochemical messages that travel between neurones go faster in the brains of clever people. Mice who have their RGS14 gene disabled remember objects better and navigate mazes better than regular mice, perhaps giving us a glimpse of the role that genetics might play in constricting or enabling individual learning abilities.

A team from the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group in Barcelona has some convincing experimental evidence that people naturally better at differentiating between subtle auditory distinctions in vowel sounds are naturally much better equipped to acquire other languages. Furthermore it will come as little surprise to anyone who has spent time in a classroom that scientists are also discovering innate differences in very young children that suggest some of us are just born better at maths than others. Have you ever been at a fête where you have tried to guess the number of marbles in a jar or ping-pong balls in a car? Dr Melissa Libertus found that pre-schoolers whose superior ‘number sense’ allowed them to judge more accurately whether they could see more blue or yellow dots on a flashing computer image later also performed better on more formal measures of mathematical ability.

Although there has been a lot of emphasis recently on the role that sheer practice plays in developing superior performance capabilities, other factors are clearly involved. As Paul McCartney pointed out when asked about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, the Beatles were by no means the only band to have put in over 10,000 hours on the road. However, they certainly made more of an impact on popular culture than their peers.

No two brains are exactly alike.

The 1,400 or so grammes of spongy grey matter in people’s skulls may look very similar but brains are different, and thank goodness they are or the world would be a very dull place indeed. It is highly unlikely my brain physically resembles Einstein’s in terms of shape or detailed structure. It probably doesn’t lack a parietal operculum, or have an enlarged Sylvian fissure like his did. It’s unlikely to have his above-average concentration of glial cells. We know all this, incidentally, because the physicist thoughtfully left his brain to science. The pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey helpfully removed it, dissected it, photographed it from every conceivable angle, and preserved it in formalin. Somewhat less helpfully he then diced it up into 240 pieces. Gruesomely, he also gave the dead man’s eyes to Henry Abrams, his optometrist. Einstein’s eyeballs are currently rumoured to be sitting in a safe-deposit box somewhere in New York.

It may be that certain features of his neurobiology gave Einstein a head start, although it should be noted that he was considered very average at school. But even if these gross structural differences count for very little, the brain he started with was undoubtedly physically and functionally altered as a result of his experiences and the many hours he spent in that Swiss patent office pondering the mysteries and mathematics of space-time. We now know that neural pathways that are strengthened through repeated activation tend to become permanent, while redundant circuits atrophy and die away. Literally. In fact, during adolescence our brains undergo a massive paring down of their less frequently used connections. Nature and usage sculpts your brain into a one-off masterpiece.

However, brains are wonderful things and, within limits, continue to adapt structurally to the purposes to which they are put. Thus Dr Sara Lazar and colleagues found that the brains of regular meditators demonstrated thickening in the cortex in those areas associated with attention and emotional integration, while only half an hour of mindfulness meditation over eight weeks produced greater density of grey matter in brain centres associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.

Similarly, the brains of London taxi drivers generally have larger than average hippocampi, the centre that helps mammals navigate. The hippocampus also plays a significant role in memory and the coordination of neural relays between the two hemispheres. When you think about what they do, and the fact that they spend on average three years learning the maze of roads within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, it is perhaps unsurprising that their brains respond by generating a greater density of connections in the relevant areas. Or maybe in some kind of urban version of natural selection only the taxi drivers with a larger hippocampus were able to assimilate The Knowledge in the first place? But before we get too carried away we should remember that three-quarters of all those who embark upon acquiring The Knowledge never complete their training. Again, this would suggest that rehearsal and practice can only take you so far. Nature imposes limits that have to be respected.

But, you might object, the high failure rates don’t mean that these drivers couldn’t acquire the relevant skills, merely that they didn’t acquire them. Perhaps they weren’t that keen in the first place? Maybe they got bored or distracted, or needed a change? You could well be right. However, the point is that exactly these kinds of factors also impose real restrictions when it comes to picking up new skills. We now know that learning isn’t just a matter of raw intelligence. It is strongly influenced by factors like attentional resources, motivation levels, memory, mental flexibility, and even personality factors – all of which can vary significantly between individuals and many of which may have strong biological roots. Physiology alone would stop me from ever running a mile as fast as Usain Bolt, but I suspect I might not even have the will-power to stick to his training regime. The truth is that aspects of my personality and temperament may also present equally significant obstacles to any prospect of my developing his unique skill set.

It may also be that I can’t learn to do what you can do because my brain has already become specialised to do the things that I can do. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson reminisces: ‘... every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?’ While this is a parody and your brain actually retains sufficient capacity to learn new skills late into life, there may be a grain of truth in Homer’s lament. Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly interested in the interference effects that take place when new knowledge and old knowledge compete for processing and storage space.

Proactive interference takes place when previous knowledge disrupts the ability to assimilate new knowledge. Have you ever changed your bank account and tried to learn the new account number? It proves to be much harder because the old account number has become so firmly ingrained. Or have you ever found yourself standing in a garage able to call to mind the number plate of your old car but completely at a loss to recall the new one? These are relatively trivial examples, but can you imagine the issues that arise once brain circuits have been dedicated to certain tasks and you suddenly expect them to accommodate totally new skills? The human brain is plastic, but not infinitely so. While most of us can have a stab at most things, it is unrealistic to assume we are necessarily going to be able to achieve the same level of performance as someone whose neural wiring reflects their devotion to rehearsing and honing particular talents and habits.

Are we really so vain or insecure that we need to believe that we can do and be anything? Has political correctness reached a point whereby we can no longer admit to ourselves that some people are just better at certain things than others? Why do we allow ourselves to be cast into the wretched state described so well by Shakespeare in his 29th sonnet:

‘Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least ...’

Why can’t we focus instead on being good at the things we are built to be good at, and celebrate the talents and skills of others without feeling the need to grab them for ourselves? I remember meeting a twin once who told me that when his brother learned how to do something he would step back, not because he didn’t want to compete, but merely because as a pair they now had that particular skill in their repertoire. Perhaps we could start thinking more along these lines? I am happy to let Usain Bolt run 100m on my behalf and cheer when he blasts across the line. I am content to be transported by Murray Perahia’s virtuosity on the keyboard without feeling I have to try and duplicate it. I strongly suspect that my own time would be better spent discovering what I most enjoy doing, even if I never become that competent at it. I’m not denying it would be great fun to be Joe 90, but it’s not realistic. NLP’s promise is an empty one. In any case, perhaps the real question is not ‘If someone out there is doing something really well, can I do it too?’ but rather, ‘Why would I need to?’