In 2000, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the results of a by-now famous research study examining the brains of London taxi drivers who had navigated the city’s streets for years. The researchers found that the part of the taxi drivers’ brains that deal with spatial relationships—the hippocampus—had grown in size and contained a higher number of neural networks. Essentially, the taxi drivers had changed their brains by navigating London so much.

It’s not just cabbies whose brains change and adapt through training. Our brains are anything but static. When we have new experiences and encounter unfamiliar ideas, clusters of neurons are formed and existing clusters connected with previously learned behaviors are strengthened. Through the right kind of training, our brains can adapt to perform at higher levels than many of us tend to think—pushing us past what we believe our “natural abilities” to be.

For nearly 30 years, behavioral scientist K. Anders Ericsson has researched how training can produce exceptional levels of performance. One of his focused on memory. Ericsson and two colleagues recruited a college student, whom they referred to by his initials, S.F., with a normal IQ and memory. After listening to a sequence of numbers, he could recall around seven digits. Sounds pretty normal, right?

Through the right kind of training, our brains can adapt to perform at higher levels than many of us tend to think.

The researchers then put S.F. through the ringer in the form of several hundred hours of memory-enhancement training. By the end of it, S.F. had drastically exceeded the goal of the exercise, which was to double his “natural” benchmark and memorize 14 random digits, and actually proved capable of memorizing up to 82. Just to give you a sense of that, here are 82 random numbers. Go ahead—try to memorize them all:

2 4 7 9 3 6 2 5 3 2 6 8 9 1 1 0 3 6 3 2 6 1 7 3 4 6 2 7

9 0 1 4 9 7 8 2 5 2 3 5 1 7 9 2 8 4 5 2 7 9 2 1 4 0 5 9

6 3 7 0 5 2 7 9 5 6 6 8 2 1 7 2 0 8 6 4 8 6 9 5 2 1

You probably can’t, right? Of course not—you haven’t spent hundreds of hours practicing. The researchers attributed S.F.’s vast improvement of his memory to his use of mnemonic associations—such as converting random numbers into running times, for instance, so 247 became two minutes and 47 seconds—and to relentless training.

The effects of training on memory performance have been replicated many times by numerous researchers. When behavioral scientists from Florida State University analyzed the decades of research in this area, they concluded that there is no “evidence that would limit the ability of motivated and healthy adults to achieve exceptional levels of memory performance given access to instruction and supportive training environments.”

Ericsson and others have found that continual training has similarly remarkable effects across a wide array of professions, including business, music, mathematics, and sports—turning otherwise ordinary people into experts capable of superior performance.