Losing its all in the brain (the psychology of choking)

dimanche 5 février 2017

No matter what manager no matter how good you are as a player - under pressure real or imagined - even top professionals choke

This is what is happening to certain players in the team - mainly those in the defensive and midfield positions

Its set out here by Matthew Syed - and in his brilliant book Bounce

To view the link you have to Register or Login The psychology of choking
By Matthew Syed - Journalist, broadcaster and former Commonwealth table tennis champion

Why are so many of us inclined to mess up at precisely the moment when messing up is most calamitous? Why are we so prone to fail when we most want to succeed?

In effect, experts and novices use two completely different brain systems. Long practice enables experienced performers to encode a skill in implicit memory, and they perform almost without thinking about it.

This is called expert-induced amnesia. Novices, on the other hand, wield the explicit system, consciously monitoring what they are doing as they build the neural framework supporting the task.

But now suppose an expert were to suddenly find himself using the "wrong" system. It wouldn't matter how good he was because he would now be at the mercy of the explicit system.

The highly sophisticated skills encoded in the subconscious part of his brain would count for nothing. He would find himself striving for victory using neural pathways he last used as a novice.

This is the neurophysiology of choking. It is triggered when we get so anxious that we seize conscious control over a task that should be executed automatically.


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