When to ease the cognitive load

See ball – hit ball

In certain sports where the players are endeavouring to hit a ball or a target, there is a very general coaching instruction to watch the ball or watch the target. The coach may specify this further by changing the word watch to focus, however there can be no doubt as to what the player is being expected to do. It is an instruction I myself have repeated countless times to countless players.

And yet here, in the minds of all players from beginners to experts, there runs a heuristic to ease the cognitive load. It is part of what “gets in the way” of performance for all players.

They start out by watching the ball or the target, and they may be expert enough at giving it their full attention.
However, the primary burning question is “For how long?”

The answer I got once from a very perceptive player aged just eleven was,
“For as long as I could tell what the ball was doing.”
It made total sense to her to do it that way every time. Digging a little deeper revealed that she gathered enough information to enable her to decide which way (direction) to play the ball and how to hit it. 

However, the crux of her answer was this:  

She watched it only for as long as she thought she needed to.

And when she missed the ball, or mis-hit it, it was her thinking that was at fault, not her watching. To put it another way - it was her decision when to ease the cognitive load on watching and switch it elsewhere (probably to initiating and executing the shot) that was at fault. She, like so many of us, was running a heuristic, a little macro routine, which turned watching the ball into an educated guess. Her decision to go into guess-mode was what, for her, lowered the drawbridge from the Castle of Cognition to the wide open intuitive spaces beyond the moat.

My job, as her coach, then became one of highlighting what was happening so she could change her map and navigate the entire routine to achieve a more productive outcome – a cleaner hit.

One time, I was explaining this to a fellow coach, who was well schooled in the more ‘conventional’ approach.
“So, Pete - isn’t this nothing more than getting her to change her thinking?” he asked.

“To a certain degree you could say that, but your language shows that your own thinking is taking you in the wrong direction,” was my reply. He appeared momentarily confused, but continued:

“So what about those coaches who point towards positive thinking as a means to help instil confidence, for instance? Isn’t that, too, all about changing our thinking?”
(He’s a great believer in the argument that for as long as we just focus on the positive then all will be well.)

“What I would say is this,” I said. “Every player watches the ball. Whether it is the eleven year old student player or the very best player in the world, they are both only ever going to watch the ball for as long as they think they need to. They will do that every time they hit the ball, or play a shot.
So I’m definitely not going to be changing their thinking in that area.”

“Yes, but ...”

“Look, it is all about the type of Language conveying the data, the information, the meaning. Positive thinking is all about filtering the Verbal Language content of the thoughts, conveyed via slow and ponderous cognitive processing. Watching the ball is a thought process about gathering data in Sensory Language – running much faster at an intuitive level. These are both types of “thinking” – but there is no comparison after that.”

“Ah, I see.”

“So in terms of ball watching, I don’t need to get my eleven year old student to change her intuitive thinking. We can certainly improve the quality of her sensory acuity, of course. However, that has nothing to do with changing her thinking! She needs to maintain that particular thought process and Understand that in order hit the ball better, she needs to watch for longer. No more – no less! This will inhibit the firing of this particular Heuristic for much longer AND mitigate the downside effects this heuristic causes – i.e. Forcing her into guessing what the ball is doing.

Likewise, I don’t need to coach the best player in the world about watching the ball because he Understands that when he misses the ball or mis-hits the ball it is because he hasn’t watched it for long enough. That’s part of the territory that comes with being the best in the world.”

“So what if the ball takes a dodgy bounce, or is blown by the wind? I’ve seen players go and look at the pitch or ground, or complain about the weather conditions. What about that?”

“They may look at the pitch to satisfy their curiosity as to what made them miss, or grumble about the wind - however, the pitch and the conditions are the same for all players.

So what kind of processing is going on in each of their Minds to make the difference? Looking at the pitch is visual sensory data gathering, whereas a whole load of slow and ponderous cognitive verbalising goes into the activity known as grumbling.”

Aside from the secondary major process of perfecting the physical form of playing the shots, hitting the ball – how they deal with the primary major process is what marks out the novices from the experts; and it is not the watching per se, but the thinking behind it.

•  Novices and experts always run the default heuristic of educated guesswork once they think they can tell what the ball is doing.
•  The experts have navigated enough hitting of balls to realise that they need to watch for longer, and that delays the running of the heuristic.

In terms of “brain-power”, the experts allocate more band-width to their watching process. They don’t ease the cognitive load on the primary major process, they ease, or even shut down on the other processes. They manage their mental resources better, in comparison to a novice. Even the experts though, can still fall into that mental trap of thinking they know and in those moments they become novices once more - because they are relying upon a Thought and not an Understanding.

Remember R D Laing’s quote:
“If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know.
If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.”

Task Manager

If you look in the background at what is going on with your computer you’ll locate the Task Manager. It is like a report of what processes are running, and how much processing power is allocated to each task. 

There are often quite a lot of tasks - ranging from how the information is put on the screen so you can see it, to where that information is drawn from, and so on. 

Our computer has a set amount of RAM resources available to run tasks at a particular optimal processor speed. If we are running a lot of screens and some ‘meaty’ tasks then the Task Manager has a lot more on his plate in terms of how he is allocating resources through time. Some of the computer’s performance will degrade if it approaches the limit of its resources. It will run much more slowly.

Eventually we’ll get fed up with this downturn in performance and we’ll go and upgrade our computer to one with more resources. When we upgrade with more RAM and a higher processor speed, then the Task Manager can cope with a lot more – ergo there is now no degradation of performance. Things run much better – and we are happy!

Our upgraded computer can handle its cognitive load with ease. Then, of course, we’ll start getting it to do more for us by running more sophisticated processes that increase the cognitive load ... and so the whole cycle goes on.

However, that’s how it works in computer terms – so what about US and our amazing human brain, for we are a million miles away from being a computer! For this I need to go back to my eleven year old player.

When she Understands that she needs to watch for longer, her Task Manager will change the resource allocation and she’ll get better at her watching – and her playing.
We call this watching for longer a part of “paying better attention”, or “better focus”, or “better concentration.”

We can “road-test” her being better at watching by adding to her Tasks and seeing what happens. The best way to do this is to throw in some distraction.
If she is “put off” by the distraction then her Task Manager has allocated some resources to paying attention to the distraction and gathering information about it. This has moved some of the resources originally allocated to watching the ball over to the distraction – and the result is degradation of outcome quality.

In terms of see ball – hit ball she won’t be able to see ball as well so she won’t be able to hit ball as well, if at all.

Moving on, when she gets good at dealing with distractions, then her depth and longevity of concentration will go up dramatically. And when she gets really good at dealing with the biggest distraction of all – herself – then she’ll achieve a good level of self-mastery. She will be more expert than novice!

Mind you, she will still be vulnerable even then, because - for all of us - our attention ebbs and flows, our level of awareness fluctuates over time and through every moment.