Dear sk410,
"Thinking" as usually understood means CONSCIOUS use of the inside voice in our heads. But it really also means emotional stuff like "worrying" and "anxiety" and "fear of embarrassment" and the like. The emotional "tides" in the human brain "serve up" the flotsam and jetsam of the verbal brain. That is, the emotions "make" the brain utter words with this inner voice, and the brain just sort of comes up with something to say that reflects the emotions. So, in addition to the usual idea of "paralysis by analysis," it's really a worse situation than that, because thinking is not really analysis for most people and is more random chatter.
In my teaching about how the brain actually works in putting and how to get a lot more out of it (if not exactly get "the most" out of it -- we can always hope!), neuroscience teaches that the brain is designed for movement first and foremost, and "consciousness" in our sense is sort of a late-comer to life forms. The exact purpose of "consciousness" (i.e., why humans have subjective self-awareness and an inner voice) is recognized as one of the most challenging puzzle in science. That's all very interesting, but I remain stuck working on how the human animal PERCEIVES and MOVES on the putting green when making a putt. The whole reason why animals have a brain and plants do not is because animals are required (allowed?) to MOVE to get their food and to reproduce. Plants can stay right where they are and the food and pollination will either come to them or not. So animals get a big advantage from being able to CHANGE environments, and thus spread around and share the resources.
What I have been learning about the inner processes of the brain relates to this fundamental MOVEMENT rationale for the brain. The human brain uses perception to PREDICT the outcome of a proposed movement, so that the movement will succeed in reality (gravity and physics forces). Otherwise, the animal will die. So movement is a problem of timing space -- here I stand now next to the banana tree and I want my hand to reach across this particular span and take hold of that banana and close my fingers around it WHEN they arrive and then pluck the banana from the tree with the right force pull and then hand the banana (sans skin) to my mouth without accidentally cramming it against my chin, without dropping it, and without getting there before my mouth opens for it! The brain takes this INTENTION plus PERCEPTIONS of where the body / arm / hand is now located and where the banana is located and then plans and "flight-simulates" a motion to test it in advance, and if all signals are go, the brain executes the motion and the human EATS and LIVES another day. If the human misses the banana or the mouth, he dies. Simple as that.
Consciousness is a bit of an odd duck in this MAIN PURPOSE of brains on earth. Consciousness is really an "after-the-fact" process that is out of step in TIME with the real processes of animal movement. These processes predate the human brain, and the human consciousness is not really "adding" to movement, but is something else altogether. That's why the centipede doesn't want to "think" how to walk.
A centipede was happy quite,
Until a frog in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?"
This raised her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering how to run.
Animals move. No thinking about it. Humans COULD do the same when playing golf, since they usually move without thinking in all other parts of life, just like the animals they are.
The problem is that humans are not just another sort of animal on earth -- humans are chickens.
A
leopard looks up to a strong branch in a Baobab tree is South Africa and then just leaps up there and lands on the branch with good balance, and settles down for a nap. That is what I refer to as an "instinctive" use of the leopard brain for successful movement on earth.
The "parts" of the brain getting used by the animal to "see and do" the movement successfully are not connected to our conscious mind. For example, the cerebellum or "little brain" is the oldest and least evolutionarily altered part of the human brain and the part remaining most similar in form and function to the corresponding cerebellum in other mammals and reptiles and birds. That's because evolution for life forms has been cracking the same nut since the beginning of time: how does the animal (any animal) successfully move on earth to eat and reproduce? So, even though humans haven't been around all that long in the scheme of life on earth, the preceding life forms got these problems worked out pretty successfully with the evolution of the cerebellum and other movement brain parts. When the humans came along, they got a "good enough for all the other animals" cerebellum too. The other brain parts involved in movement similarly come pre-loaded for the human species with successful form and structure. This means that "humans are great movers among animals, able to jump from rock to rock across a swollen whitewater river much better than a horse, for example, and able to insert a stick into an anthill and get a protein snack of "ants on a stick" just as well as a chimpanzee."
This being the case, how can the human use these NON-CONSCIOUS brain processes to putt better?
First, knowing that this is how the brain is set up for movement clears a lot of junk off the deck!
But humans are chicken, and unless their "conscious self" is IN CONTROL somehow, they are "afeared of the sea monsters at the edge of the map."
THIS BRINGS US TO THE NUB OF THE ISSUE: HUMAN FEAR.
"Thinking" in golf is not so much astute problem solving and careful planning and execution of movement as it is instead emotional fear of lack or loss of control by the "chicken" conscious self.
When you are a kid in a swing (about age 7-8), some people LOVE the feel of the downswing (a tickling in the pit of the stomach) and some people get afraid from the feeling and grab at the chains of the swing and try to do something to gain control. Golfers are almost ALL the latter sort on the golf course.
Getting golfers to leave thinking in the parking lot of the golf course certainly won't happen, and golfers actually need to think about their shots and the course as they play. But once the thinking is done and the shot or putt is planned, the golfer needs to revert to the moving animal who "controls" successful movements NON-CONSCIOUSLY.
So, how exactly do you get golfers to stop being chicken in golf? You have to SHOW the conscious mind that it's not the one in control and let the conscious mind get okay with that.
The "parable" I tell to illustrate this point is of the Wall Street broker at the New Year's Eve party in lower Manhattan who gets snockered and calls a cab. The Lebanese cab driver arrives, the broker mumbles his address, gets in the back seat, and the cab pulls back into traffic. The driver is driving perfectly, but to the drunkard in the back seat the driver seems to be weaving all over the road. "Hey sbuddy, watchit willya." No response from the driver. So suddenly the broker leaps forward over the back of the front seat and grabs the steering wheel and jerks them both into a huge display window at Macy's! In this story, the driver is the "non-verbal, non-conscious moving animal" and the drunken broker is the "conscious mind" who thinks he knows what's going on and how to "control" the situation. The drunk needs to learn to chill out and let the poor cab driver do his thing.
On the putting green, this becomes tempo and "don't do the downstroke" and just watch what the non-conscious brain will do, so long as you supply it accurate and pertinent perceptions of the green surface speed and distance. Then, the NON-CONSCIOUS processes of the brain rely on the timing of the well-learned tempo to generate the right size backstroke that free-falls into impact with one and only one impact velocity, that just happens to be the correct impact velocity, as usual, since the golfer has not died yet. This has to be shown to golfers over and over until the conscious brain loses its fear or being short or long or of miss-hitting the putt.
Martial arts movement and Tai Chi movement proceeds out of stillness, as does dance. And so does putting. Just not with the problems created by the drunken conscious mind.
The first part of the fix for over-thinking in putting / golf is to understand that the thinking brain is not part of the moving brain, at least once it's time to move. The second part is dealing with the relentless death-grip the conscious mind exerts in order to "stay in control" because humans are mostly chicken. This is helped along by show-and-tell about the NON-CONSCIOUS brain and how it really does a good job because it must or you will die, but also with relaxing the golfer, and with defusing the golfer's psychological fear of being judged as if on a stage performing. And finally it is helped along by insisting that the golfer grow up and be a fully mature person who knows what he or she is doing and how to do it, without FEAR of being watched and judged by others.
Then the third part is teaching the golfer the relationship between perception and movement, without the intervention of conscious processes like emotions, worry, analysis, or "trying." Here, the main point is that "there are perceptions and then again there are perceptions." The brain basically makes a "guess" about what is real based only on the best information available at the time (including some doses of memory on the same perceptual issue). If the info is bad, the guess is not likely to be too good either. Garbage in, garbage out. Perception does not just arrive at the door dressed in a Tux ready for the dinner party: Perception is "built" by the way the human generates them. In human perception, there are better ways to generate accurate perceptions than usual, and the usual way perceptions get generated is seldom good enough for skilled movement. That's another bad trait of the brain: almost all the time, just a little half-a..d effort to generate perceptions is all that is really needed to get the job done in a "quick and dirty" way -- like "glancing" at a glass of water on a table, and then reaching out and taking it up even though the eyes have moved on to other things. The brain is tasked to do hundreds of thousands of tiny little inconsequential tasks like this every day, so it gets use to "good enough for government work" and the golfer has to know this and overcome it. That takes not simply focus and concentration, but also "know-how" about what processes / ways of looking or feeling etc. generate accurate and pertinent perceptions and also WHETHER that is what the golfer is using and WHETHER he can believe his perceptions really are accurate and pertinent.
In the brain, the quality of the perceptions in the pre-movement targeting and planning process determines the accuracy and success of the intended movement. The brain takes the perceptions you supply and makes a battle plan for the movement and ships the plan to the war room for testing and implementation. The plan doesn't always match waht reality requires, and the platoon of muscles that executes the plan doesn't always carry out the orders to the letter, so there is plenty of slippage in the system. But the golfer needs to help as much as he can as a matter of habit, and that means LEARN HOW TO GENERATE ACCURATE AND USEFUL PERCEPTIONS for golf shots, or suffer the consequences.
This all ends up being "know what works, use what works as best you can, and know consciously whether that is what you are using, and be happy and brave when you move."
In the final anaylsis, using instincts is about appreciating how they work and what they need and how good they are and then NOT bothering them when it comes time to pull the trigger. Shut up and putt!
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
PuttingZone.com
Golf's most advanced and comprehensive putting instruction.
