Kindle Notes & Highlights
In this study, seventy athletes, who compete at the national or international level, were asked to describe the thoughts that went through their minds in high-pressure situations, and in line with distraction theories of choking, high pressure, rather than leading to reinvestment, tended to lead to thoughts about such things as how poorly they are doing or on how they could have made a certain mistake. The study also asked the athletes to explain what they do to get back on track and, in line with Nicholls et al., they found that one common way in which these athletes would attempt to maintain
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Toner and Moran (2011) also found that when holing balls while engaging in a think-out-loud protocol the golfers not only reported numerous skill-focused thoughts but also that they performed as well as when they simply holed balls without thinking aloud. The researchers conclude, not that experts should putt without thought, but “that golfers may need to choose their swing thoughts very carefully because focusing on certain elements of movement, such as the impact spot, could lead to an impairment in performance proficiency” (p. 680).
Moreover, his account provides a reason why such thinking is important: if one’s actions become so automatized that the conscious mind no longer knows how to do them, any glitch which brings consciousness to the fore could result in blanking out, which in a guitar performance means suddenly forgetting how to proceed and thus needing to improvise until one gets back on track.
Varner is a former competitive swimmer himself, and he said that when he was swimming competitively, he would focus primarily on his hips and how they were driving his stroke. Of course, a myriad of other aspects of movement needed to occur more or less automatically for him to be able to maintain this focus.
I can get all this in because I said this one phrase, and the rest follows. So in point of fact, I’m thinking, but I’m thinking efficiently
I would like to suggest that experts in these fields (as well as fields that do divide into practice and performance) at times also aim to improve while performing (in the sense of “doing”) the activities that compose part of their daily work. For example, one aims to improve while reviewing
a draft of a paper, trying not only to make the draft better, but also to fine-tune one’s writing in general and deepen one’s understanding of a topic.
although from an audience’s point of view things rarely go wrong, from the expert’s point of view, things are going wrong all the time.
And although being aware of one’s own foibles while on stage may not be as viscerally unpleasant as watching oneself on film, during each and every performance dancers are aware of many aspects of their performance that have gone wrong.
Another reason why conscious awareness is important in the performing arts may be that it is often the case that relying on the same approach can, as I suggested earlier, drain the life out of a performance. Habits ensure that we get done what we need to get done, like brushing our teeth; they also free up cognitive resources to attend to more important matters.
Consider the difference between listening to someone lecture on her feet and listening to someone read a paper. The lecture is typically animated and fresh while the reading is typically, in Beckett’s words, a great deadener.7 The performance bereft of the mind would be, in certain respects, like watching a machine; although the output could be amazing, that most interesting of spectacles—the human mind—is lacking.
A further factor that counts in favor of engaging the conscious mind during performance is that automatic responses tend toward stereotypes more than well-thought-out ones.
If experts are striving to improve, they are trying. However, let me make use of this chapter to delve explicitly into the relation between trying and doing, to present my reasons for thinking that expert performance is generally compatible with and typically benefits from trying, and conclude with an explanation of the sense in which you can’t try too hard.
Just as one cannot go to sleep by trying harder, so too one cannot act at one’s best—in war, love, marriage, or adventure—by taking direct and complete responsibility for oneself.
As they see it, “effortless trying” is present in all of our actions, and “manifests itself as the subjective experience of flowing forward right into intentional body movement, as in Yeats’s dancer becoming her dance” (p. 179).3 So on their view, a special kind of trying, an effortless trying, pervades all of our actions.
if you have a sore arm, raising it would require effort, however, “as you effortfully try to raise your sore arm, you also effortlessly try to balance and orient the rest of your body” (p. 179). But is this an instance of trying to do something both effortfully and effortlessly? Or is it an example of an action composed of two (or more) sub-actions: one effortful, the other effortless? And if the latter, what is one to say about these sub-actions taken individually. In particular, would the arm raising, itself be both effortful and effortless?
Thinking in action can help one avoid the dreaded choke; it allows for a consistency between practice and performance; it is important for improvement during performance and for avoiding stereotypical responses; and it makes performing interesting for the performer (and perhaps for the audience, by revealing thought in action, which, I speculated, might be an essential element of artistry).
When I raise my arm at the entrance to my favorite café to push open the door, I do not usually try to do this; however, when I raise my arm in the Black Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake, in order to push away (yet tantalize) Prince Siegfried, I give it my all and try my hardest. Of course, this might not be a case of trying to raise my arm; and it certainly doesn’t involve trying to exert as much muscular force as possible. However, in my case, at least, it involves trying my hardest to impart an idea, to create an aesthetically rich movement, and to repel yet tantalize at the same time.
This resonates with my view about expertise: experts are able to perform without much effort or thought when the goal is an adequate performance. For Susan, a ballet dancer who has a highly anticipated date after her evening performance, the morning’s 9 a.m. show for schoolchildren might be one of those times when an adequate job is good enough. An adequate performance is much easier than a stunning one, and on autopilot she can attain adequacy. But when the stakes are high, she will exert herself, both mentally and physically, to do the best job possible.
However, it seems that, as with the varied thought experiments examined in Chapter 4, tests of neural efficiency are open to the criticism they fail to be ecologically valid since, arguably, neither the tasks nor the motivation mirrors what one finds in the wild. And studies of neural efficiency face the further challenge of coming up with an ecologically valid task capable of being performed inside of a brain scanner.
For example, both Tracy et al. (2003), who observed differences in brain activation before and after two weeks of practice tying a complicated knot, and Puttemans et al. (2005), who looked at differences before and after eight days of practice performing a bimanual coordinated wrist movement, conclude that one possible interpretation of the data is that practice leads to reduced cognitive demands. Here too, one might interpret this to mean that the practiced individuals did not need to try as hard. However, again, since there is no need to think much about your movements when you are doing
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there is little reason to accept the view that when they are performing they do not commandeer all of their resources. And when they commandeer all of their resources, they are typically trying harder than the novice in the sense of exerting, in both the subjective and objective sense, more mental effort.
John Toner, Aidan Moran and I speculate that focusing on a single thought or a cue word can help one to monitor and control movement
That said, it may be that there are some experts for whom the process becomes easy. Maybe Nelson was one of those. But another possible explanation is that around 1937 he lost the motivation to improve. When one is already great, one still can perform amazingly well even without this burning desire.
Despite Billie Jean King’s testament to “letting it happen,” it seems that tension and anxiety rather than trying, is the culprit. The want of flow in such situations is not a failure to achieve an empty state of mind, which is how Dreyfus and others sometimes understand the term “flow,” but rather it is a lack of fluidity in movement.
However, when we understand “trying to pirouette”, as trying to do the movements that lead to successful pirouetting, experts ought to and do try their hardest; in other words, they can’t try too hard to do that. If there is a certain dance step that ought to be performed with utmost delicacy, more physical effort would ruin the effect. But when you exert more physical effort, you are not trying harder to make the move delicate.
Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.
However, the types of doubts that lead to revising one’s work are often quite conducive to optimal performance. Flaubert purportedly said he once spent the entire morning inserting a comma and the entire afternoon removing it.5 If this is true (and not merely exaggerated for comic effect), perhaps such extreme doubts can be unproductive.
Again, as with bodily movement, I would say that intense thought can be an escape, not because one loses the self in it, but because it prevents one from thinking unpleasant thoughts.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (2007a). “The return of the myth of the mental,” Inquiry 50(4): 352–65.
Scarry, Elaine (2011). Thinking in an Emergency (New York: Norton).
Shusterman, Richard (2008). Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Shusterman, Richard (2012). Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Stanley, Jason (2011). Know How (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
