Thursday, October 05, 2006

Playing Tennis: Turning Your Attention Outward

Have you ever played tennis to music? I mean background music without words, loud enough that you must raise your voice a bit to talk to your opponent. If you have, then you know the remarkable effect it has on your performance.

The background music affects your mood and makes it easy to get into the zone, doesn’t it? Why?

Here’s my theory, the product of an odd combination of background knowledge I have in areas you normally wouldn’t view as connected. I’m interested to hear what others think.

The key to understanding this is, I think, in understanding that we can direct our attention in either of two general directions, inward or outward. In this, we are quite different from animals, who rarely direct their attention inward. They have little need to, because they don’t talk and therefore don’t need to interpret written and spoken language. They don’t study. They don’t plan. You get the idea.

Therefore, they are always alert and well aware of their surroundings.

On the other hand, we spend a huge portion of our time REFLECTING, that is, turning our attention inward to think. We do this while reading, while working on a computer, while trying to figure out some puzzle, while consciously thinking what would be the best way to respond to something, while trying to remember some fact or instruction (recall something from the brain’s vast system of freeform relational databases).

The next important thing to note is that, whenever we reflect, we become more or less ABSORBED in our thoughts.

For example, while you are working on a computer, you become absorbed in the screen, a reflection of what’s in your mind, and you are oblivious to the rest of the room, the weather outside, the sounds of traffic on the street, and so forth.

That’s good. Otherwise you’d constantly be getting distracted and never would figure out to make that goshdarned JavaScript work. The same thing happens while you are solving a math problem. It’s called “focus.”

Again, for example, have you ever been reading a novel and not heard your wife say, “Honey, get me a beer”?

She said it, but you didn’t hear it. Actually, you did hear it: it just didn’t register. That is, it was filtered from your consciousness. In fact, it made such a light impression on your brain cells that no memory persists of hearing it.

Right now, while you are reading this, you are unaware of the pressure of your butt on the seat you’re sitting in. Well, not any more, eh? By mentioning it, I snagged the attention of your brain cells and made that incoming sensory information leap to consciousness on you.

The same thing would happen if, while you were reading that novel, your wife yelled, “Fire!” That you would hear.

The brain is a marvelous organ. It is programmed to filter certain types of information from consciousness and under certain conditions. If, for example, you live near a railroad or an airport, your brain learns to filter out the loud noises. You don’t even hear them anymore. Correction: you aren’t aware of hearing them anymore.

But let those flights start coming in from a different direction because of unusual winds and you suddenly become aware of them.

We almost never have our attention turned wholly outward or inward. Normally, our state of consciousness is somewhere on the continuum between extremes. So, we are always more or less absorbed in our thoughts. While asleep, we are extremely absorbed.

Nonetheless, we have two definite mental modes of operation: one for when our attention is focussed primarily inward and one for when our attention is focused primarily outward. We filter much more of what's going on outside the mind when we are in the first mode.

Our ability to filter unnecessary incoming information is crucial. For example, when you are talking to somebody, you "tune out" the picture on the wall behind him and the sound of the footsteps in the hall. If you couldn't do that, you'd miss most of what he says and wouldn't remember his name or face. He'd be nothing more than another object in your field of vision to you. (People suffering from NPD have trained their brains to filter all but the information they seek and consequently have a problem in this regard, one that superficially resembles mild autism.) Again, for example, if you want to find a health-care product on a store shelf and can't focus on one item at a time -- if you "see" everything in your field of vision -- you're going to go nuts.

But while playing tennis, the danger is filtering too much, filtering things we should be aware of.

Playing tennis is a PRECISION physical activity that requires our maximum powers of judgment. That means it requires maximum input of sensory information about the court situation, the speed of the approaching ball, its trajectory, its spin, where the various parts of the body are and how they are moving, and so forth.

If we are busy thinking, turning some of our attention inward, we are going to miss a lot. The brain will take fewer snapshots of the approaching ball, for example (as with slow-speed filming). Result? We judge its speed less accurately. We won’t see the ball as clearly. Result? We won’t notice as much information that tells us about the spin on it, like the fuzz, the seams, and the trajectory. We collect less body information as well, information about our balance, the position of each part of the body, the speed and direction in which various parts are moving, and so forth. In other words, our kinesthetic perceptions take a performance hit, too.

How much can a person miss? An incredible amount. For example, have you ever wondered how your doubles partner could fail to see an opening as big a barn door in the opposition’s court and hit somewhere else instead? Then you know what I mean. He or she never NOTICED that big opening. It was right there, big as life, in their face, but they never noticed it.


Why? Because they were THINKING. Not SEEING. Too much of their attention was turned INWARD.

If this sounds like it supports what Tim Gallwey teaches in The Inner Game of Tennis, that’s because it does. The IGOT Method aims at focusing your attention OUTWARDS, raising AWARENESS of what’s going on out there, on the court.

Ignoring what’s going on in your head.

That little voice in your head will shut up if you pay no attention to it. (Since it’s your ego, it’s narcissistic and so that’s all it wants = attention.)

It might as well be me, standing at the net post and barking orders at you while you're trying to play: “Watch the ball. Bend your knees. Step into the shot. Get the racket back early. Hit deep to deep. Keep the ball far away from that opposing net player. And yadda yadda yadda. Hey, you DIDN’T WATCH THE BALL. What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you do a simple thing like watch the ball? You are pathetic. You always do this.”

Could you play if I did that to you? Then don’t try to play with that voice in your head doing that you.

I think these facts show why playing and practicing with background music makes it so easy to get in the zone. It draws your attention outward. So, you don’t just hear the music, you hear the ball. You see it better.

In other words, the music gets your attention. It gets your attention turned outward. Hence, it gets your brain into the outwardly focused mental mode, “tuning out” the jabberbox in your mind and thereby minimizing your awareness of thought and your level of absorption in it.

The additional attention you are paying outward improves your timing, ball judgment, speed, and coordination dramatically. You are “in the zone” and playing “out of your mind.”

It is quite simply that – getting out of your mind. And into the real world.

This is why I say that even strategy and tactics must be taught with a view to minimizing the need for memory of verbal instructions, which must be THOUGHT of and recalled during play. For one thing, there’s simply no time to search your brain’s database for the right rote rule of what to do with the approaching ball. For another thing, the moment you start THINKING (remembering) what to do, you turn a good deal of your attention inward, becoming less aware of the approaching ball and the court situation.

This is why boiling strategy and tactics down to no-brainer rules like "Hit deep to deep and short to short" doesn't work. In other words, rote doesn't work. Instead, as much as possible, strategy and tactics must be taught visually. It must also provide a solid foundation of UNDERSTANDING. Only then can the player apply this knowledge during play without thinking.

Indeed, you must play by just seeing what to do and doing it spontaneously, without thinking. Like you drive an automobile. For more on this see this article at the main website.

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1 Comments:

At 6:05 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just came across your site today - our last day of fall matches wouldn't you know. The comment 'you are thinking too much' after a particularly easy shot is missed come up often over a season. I will share this with my team mates.
My 10 yr old daughter had a singles match last weekend for which she practiced hard (she plays 'up' on an older girls team). She often writes notes to herself on her bathroom mirror - wear the pink earrings, take your flute etc. On the day of the match she had written one thing 'see the ball'.

 

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