Aidan Moran
The Big Idea
When it comes to research in cognitive psychology, until fairly recently there had been little interest in studying sport-related mentality. In its early history, the typical cognitive psychology researcher was quite comfortable interpreting human mental activity as information processing, as something computer-like. By implication, motor behaviour (the body) was considered to be independent of thinking. The consequence was to reduce motor skills such as sports to a rather uninteresting research status. And which in turn helped to trivialise sport actions and accomplishments.
But truth has a way of frustrating our theories about it. It turns out that in the last 20 or so years, the idea of persons as embodied selves largely erased the contrived dualism in cognitive psychology. It turns out that sensory experience and mental imagery, for example, share similar pathways and neural representations. Consequently, cognitive psychologists are coming around to rediscovering William James’ 1890 original observation that “my thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.” And so the primary thesis of this research review paper is that human action is the hub as opposed to the consequence of cognition.
Takeaways
- The relationship of action and thinking in sport is richer than otherwise believed.
- Cognitive psychology today recognises that skilled action is thinking in such regions as elite sports performance.
- Research on peak performance (flow) and impaired performance (choking) represent popular interests in cognitive psychology research.
- Flow states appear to be the absence of normal or linear thinking, and yet experientially are meaning-giving as we follow rather than steer an idea.
- When conscious and what we call unconscious thinking gets in a tangle, choking can happen.
- Mindfulness training may help improve the positive, and block the negative.
- This research discussion implies that when it comes to expression, it is through expression that our ideas arise and not the other way around.
- In other words, a self doesn’t exist and then get somehow expressed; it is precisely through expressive acts such as sport that the self comes to be a self at all.
The Research
So how did indifference to studying sport action change to enthusiasms for it? Early on, the psychologists preferred to study what they couldn’t see but inferred to be the primary centre of visible human action, the mind. But in the field of neuroscience it became clear that human action as sport could in fact be a natural laboratory for their studies. For example, it turns out that contrary to coaching wisdom over the years, cricket batsmen and tennis players do not watch the 100 mph balls they swing at. Visual signals of their opponents’ body position or limb movements are used to anticipate the location of the non-seen ball. These and other study results were suggesting that sporting actions are in fact knowledge-based, even if we don’t altogether know what we mean by that knowledge.
Now what other examples are there of this increased enthusiasm for learning more about the relationship between skilled action and thinking? Most interesting is the flurry of studies on elite performers either in peak performances (flow) or in impaired performances (choking). What kind of thinking is associated with these two contrasting states of mind? For athletes in peak performances, usually referred to as “flow states,” performers from many sports all report the absence of thinking in the traditional way. In fact, thinking things up is blocked; normal modes of thought are set aside; even sensory perception is reduced to essential concentrations on the action itself; and such actions are effortless, automatic, even transcending ordinary time and space. These descriptions by the athletes themselves suggested to the researchers that what appears in these experiences is some kind of incipient ideation and that maybe such flow states could be taught. Mindfulness techniques apparently reduce stress, improve attention, and affect learning and memory. Such mindfulness training may help athletes focus on the hear-and-now, and how to cultivate living in the present moment where there is no difference between the thought and the action. The trick is to find ways to control the flip-flopping between conscious and unconscious thinking, and how to hold out instead for the so-called unconscious action by itself.
“We all choke,” said golfer Tom Watson. “You just try to choke last.” Less is known about this phenomenon of choking than flow. About all we know for sure is there are a couple of familiar features: 1) choking seems to occur when an athlete deliberately focuses on trying too hard to excel; and 2) when an athlete begins to think self-consciously on their own techniques and mechanics. Interruption and sometimes action paralysis occurs. The habitual is no longer habit.
So what? How do elite performers and coaches move from theory to practice in thought control? One way is to get professional help from cognitive therapists. What makes this form of psychotherapy interesting are these principles: 1) our cognition affects both our emotions and behaviours; 2) people are capable of learning to modify and monitor their cognitive activity; and 3) that by changing our beliefs about our control abilities, we can change our behaviours and experiences. For example, learning to suppress negative self-talk might be a helpful technique to employ—so long as the suppressed idea it doesn’t rebound into even more negative self-talk.
Overall, it appears that cognitive psychologists are in the hunt for the kinds of ideas that are sometimes called fleshy ideas in sport, and which are more closely connected to achieving a self than expressing it. We become who we are becoming when particular aspects of reality, like sport performance experiences, are disclosed to us through our expressive acts.
