Sometimes you have to be able to act and react quickly. Very quickly. Maybe even faster than that if you’re, say, whizzing around at over 200 miles per hour in one of those cool Formula One race cars. You certainly can’t be driving slow in the fast lane in one of those. Formula One sports psych consultant Kerry Spackman puts it this way:
“We didn’t evolve to drive racing cars,” he is saying. “Our brains have developed over millions of years and in some ways they’re incredibly sophisticated, but in others they’re very ill suited to some of the tasks we want them to do. In most sports now, the modern athlete is pushing his brain to the limit. Today’s formula one car does things almost instantaneously, and the brain can’t keep up.
It’s ironic then, that the way Spackman advises us to be able to go so quickly is to go very slowly - at first.
If you physically slow the body down, the brain gets the message that it doesn’t need to be in this highly anxious state. If you take some slow, deep breaths, the process of turning the body down for a moment does actually help to calm the brain down.”
Seems it’s all a matter of learning to make finer and finer distinctions; presumably faster and faster ones. And the way Spackman advises on doing that is to start very slowly. In a sport with lots of assets like Formula One, drivers can use very expensive training simulators to prepare them for almost any situation.
That process can be carried out in the simulator, or it can be reproduced with no equipment at all, creating a virtual reality through a process of verbal reconstruction. Either way, Spackman starts by giving the athlete two versions of the same experience that are initially far apart, so that he can easily recognize the difference.
The important thing here, I think, is this idea of learning to make distinctions. Start with some easily recognized differing situations, and building from there.
“That gives the brain a structure to work from. Then you bring them closer together. If you do it straight away, he can’t learn anything. But if you bring them together slowly and provide him with feedback in a learning environment, gradually his brain will start to build circuits that can take these nuances and store them, building up a mental library of solutions.
What’s important here, in any learning situation (and what isn’t), is to not skip over early stages of learning, and not to make them so difficult that they are not useful. This is learning to learn, in my view. Just don’t start out at 200 miles per hour.