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The flow state of great athletes is not the type of autopilot you describe exactly, it’s not a totally automatic function. If you look at their comments it’s ac
by brm 7y ago
The flow state of great athletes is not the type of autopilot you describe exactly, it’s not a totally automatic function. If you look at their comments it’s actually a state of hyperfocus. They may get there in a similar way to what you describe but the space they go to looks different than what you’re describing. “The rim gets bigger” if you will. The game slows down and becomes easier. They’re so in the moment that everything narrows, yes, but it’s that that makes decisions easier, the information they need is simply hyper available. Ask someone like Tiger Woods where the pin was or what the wind was doing on the 12th hole on a specific course during a win 15 years ago and he can tell you that. He can also tell you where contact was on the club face. Same goes for LeBron and others. It’s not that decisions are made by your body or muscle memory etc it’s that the decisions you need to make become easier to make.
- DisruptiveDave 7y agoI don't know if I fully agree with that, particularly the memory part of it. Certain people just have those types of memories that are not necessarily tied to flow states/moments. (see Lebron[1], see Sean McVay[2]). I don't think you're wrong in the way you describe how the game slows down, targets get larger, and decisions get easier to make. I think where we differ is your use of "the information they need is simply hyper available" vs. my take that this information resides in the subconscious and our natural feeling to analyze our actions/strategy in-game actually gets in the way of letting our subconscious take over. Perhaps we're arguing semantics here? [1] https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/lebron-james-photographic-memory https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/lebron-james-photographic-m... [2] https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/09/12/rams-sean-mcvay-remembers-plays-detail https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/09/12/rams-sean-mcvay-remembers-...
- ksdale 7y agoI played running back on my high school football team and based on my personal experience, I would say that on really good nights, when I achieved something that I would consider "flow state," it was closer to the information I needed being hyper available. I agree with you completely that my ability to move the right way existed in my subconcious all the time, but when I got into a flow state, it felt like the thing that changed was my interpretation of the world. It would seem like the defense was moving more slowly, and like I was way more easily able to predict how fast they would get to a certain place and whether I could get there first, and when I got touched, I knew how to shift my body to minimize my chance of being tackled. And those nights, I always rushed for a lot more yards than the nights that I didn't feel that way. As I'm describing it, it sounds like it might just be about semantics, haha! Maybe on those nights, I just let myself not think about it, somehow. As a high schooler, I was certainly not intrspective enough about it to turn it on and off, though. But at least from my own subjective experience of those moments, it felt more like my perception of the world actually changed (almost like being on drugs), rather than that I was just calmly doing something I'd practiced a bunch of times, if that makes sense.
- DisruptiveDave 7y agoI wonder if we are actually describing the same experience in different ways. Maybe your "perception of the world changing" is my "letting your subconscious take over" (which would have the effect of the world looking/feeling different than normal).
- ksdale 7y agoI think that's very likely!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]