There are a few fairly compelling studies on talent out there, although it appears that most of them are related to sports. This one (Erbeli et al, 2017) caught my eye because it’s about writing and worked with about 500 kids — mono- and dizygotic twins (i.e., identical and fraternal, respectively).
The researchers grouped the factors that could exert an influence on various aspects of writing into: genetic, shared-environment, and non-shared-environment factors.
The shared environment is arguably the same for each twin pair, but fraternal twins are genetically different, so they tried (with some success) to distinguish between these categories of factors based on this.
I’m still digging through it but I found the suggestion that there’s ongoing, active shaping of one’s own environment quite interesting.
Children increasingly select, create, and modify their environments and experiences, driven by their own genetic predispositions. As such, the present results are compatible with the idea of Graham’s (in press) model of writing, which argues that cognitive capabilities of the individual who creates writing and the environment he/she seeks to engage in writing are related. In terms of gene-environment correlation, this could mean that, for example, developing writers with a high genetic potential for good writing may actively start to seek environments that provide them with writing opportunities.
This meta-analysis (Macnamara et al, 2014), currently available on ResearchGate, is also intriguing. They looked at performance in music, sports, and games to see if deliberate practice is indeed the be-all and end-all ingredient for performance. From what I can gather, the study found that it’s not. As for other possible contributors, the authors talk about a few: the age at which a person starts “serious involvement in a domain”, general intelligence, working memory capacity.
They even came up with numbers!
We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.
The emphases are mine. Now on to see if the mic dropped by Macnamara et al a decade ago has been picked up…