4 ms·

Similar here. For a very long time, I thought that being good at something was knowing the system and rules, and applying them consciously every time. It's funn

Similar here. For a very long time, I thought that being good at something was knowing the system and rules, and applying them consciously every time. It's funny because I legit thought that that's what I was doing while playing video games or doing martial arts (the only things I was reasonably good at for quite awhile). It turns out the learning and doing processes are both deeply subconscious; very little goes on in the conscious mind during both.

smogcutter 2y ago
Developing that automaticity with a physical skill also unlocks the brain to do other parts that are conscious. After a game, Lebron James can explain what happened in a play moment by moment for every player on the floor, and everything he was thinking and planning as the play developed. He’s done it in post game press conferences off the top of his head. Granted he’s maybe the all time greatest, but it’s illustrative. He’s not thinking at all about how his body is going to do what it does. That’s completely automatic. He’s thinking a lot about the higher level strategy of the game.
- djtango 2y ago
  Fully agree that mastery allows you to broaden out / think at a higher level. I guess that's the "meta" I recently read a post about how Nadal gets an unfair stereotype of being brutish due to play style but from a young age in his post match interviews (in Spanish) we would refer to specific points in the match and give critical analysis for how he made adjustments etc.
- cromulent 2y ago
  Consistent with many technical sports such as Formula One motor racing. Ask a driver to talk about the race, during which they are driving a vehicle at levels normal humans could not approach, and they describe not the driving but the tactics and strategy within the physics window.
divan 2y ago
There is a new shift in the understanding of coaching in sports called the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA). It's both super nerdy and practical (i.e., based on practitioners' empiric experience). Basically, it sees the body as a complex system of organs/tissues/cells that tries to solve movement problem under the pressure of different constraints. In a simple words, coaching then is the art of creating/manipulating constraints in order to optimize that search for the solution to the movement problem. In a way, it's way deeper than "subconscious". A large portion of the science behind CLA is based on Nikolai Bernstein's works from the 1930-s (the guy who coined the term "biomechanics"). He wrote about the hierarchical model of motor control, where 5 different systems (that evolutionary are completely different) must work in synergy to solve the movement problem. There is a great book that explains the science behind CLA called "How we learn to move" by Rob Gray.
- djtango 2y ago
  Yes constraints are great. My piano teacher would basically just repeat to me like mantra: - was it legato? - were you playing free from tension? - was your tone even? - were you in time? Very rarely would he actually ever tell me anything. And whenever I'd ask for more or feedback he'd just loop back to the questions and ask if I was actually listening to myself play. It was a very frustrating start but eventually it all clicked what he was doing was teaching me to understand my own constraints and then also understand what are the outcomes I am aiming to achieve - if I can't hear how even my own touch is how will I ever play evenly. Was the most valuable coaching I ever got and was probably life changing for me in terms of levelling up my ability to learn new things. Prior to meeting him I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano and would occasionally peruse books and videos on the subject. Of course, as my teacher was keen to point out, no body is the same so how can two anatomically different pianists play with the same technique? If you have small hands so much of the repertoire will be different vs if you have rach hands
  - divan 2y ago
    Great points! I've seen a couple of papers on CLA for music learning, but CLA is a subset of so-called "non-linear pedagogy", so maybe music education has its own "branch" of it, so to speak. > I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano Yes, CLA is actively debunking the myth of a "perfect technique" which is very popular in sports. Like a coach/teacher is one who knows the "perfect" way, and their job is to make students repeat an exercise over and over again, fixing deviations from "perfect" technique. This couldn't be more wrong according to CLA. Already mentioned Bernstein introduced the concept of "repetition without repetition", which claims that repetition is important in learning but for a different reason. Each attempt of a movement will have slightly different "inputs" - constraints – and thus can't have a single "perfect" technique that will work for all variations of inputs. Each repetition will be slightly different (hence "without repetition"), and the goal of the proper learning process is to give the body enough "input data" to _discover_ the proper movement solution. It's important to note that "constraints" is a wide term here, and there are few classes of constraints. Task and goal given to the student are constraints, so the size of the hand or level of fatigue. Even environment temperature, mental state, and light conditions are constraints. Another important concept in CLA is action-perception coupling rooted in James Gibson's theory of perception. This one was mindblowing to me when I first read it. In essence, the brain perceives the world not as a set of geometric objects but as "actionable" items. What you can do directly influences how you see the world. That has direct implications for learning as well – mastering any skill (including playing a musical instrument) is coupled with perception, as your body has to react to how it sees/hears the result of its own movements. But the core of CLA as an educational philosophy lays in acknowledging that the actual learning still has to happen inside your nervous system. You can't really "teach" a skill, only facilitate a discovery inside the student's body. It's really fascinating how it all works in practice. One related concept in motor skill acquisition science is the Method of Error Amplification (MAE). Let's say, golf players make a fundamental error of not shifting weight onto the back foot after swinging. Instead of giving them verbal instruction "Shift weight to the back foot", coach might do the opposite – ask them to move weight to the *front foot*. This will increase the error, which will amplify the signal in the nervous system and the body will react to it as it now feels "more wrong" by itself. It's not super clear to which types of errors MAE is applicable, but the research on MAE is fascinating.
djtango 2y ago
On rules and applying them I am always reminded of this quote from Bruce Lee: "Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." As applicable to fighting as it is programming. You will see it in high level sports - athletes will do all kinds of unorthodox things from weird positions to eke out a result, because the result is all that matters.

smogcutter 2y ago

Developing that automaticity with a physical skill also unlocks the brain to do other parts that are conscious. After a game, Lebron James can explain what happened in a play moment by moment for every player on the floor, and everything he was thinking and planning as the play developed. He’s done it in post game press conferences off the top of his head. Granted he’s maybe the all time greatest, but it’s illustrative. He’s not thinking at all about how his body is going to do what it does. That’s completely automatic. He’s thinking a lot about the higher level strategy of the game.

djtango 2y ago
Fully agree that mastery allows you to broaden out / think at a higher level. I guess that's the "meta" I recently read a post about how Nadal gets an unfair stereotype of being brutish due to play style but from a young age in his post match interviews (in Spanish) we would refer to specific points in the match and give critical analysis for how he made adjustments etc.
cromulent 2y ago
Consistent with many technical sports such as Formula One motor racing. Ask a driver to talk about the race, during which they are driving a vehicle at levels normal humans could not approach, and they describe not the driving but the tactics and strategy within the physics window.

divan 2y ago

There is a new shift in the understanding of coaching in sports called the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA). It's both super nerdy and practical (i.e., based on practitioners' empiric experience). Basically, it sees the body as a complex system of organs/tissues/cells that tries to solve movement problem under the pressure of different constraints. In a simple words, coaching then is the art of creating/manipulating constraints in order to optimize that search for the solution to the movement problem. In a way, it's way deeper than "subconscious". A large portion of the science behind CLA is based on Nikolai Bernstein's works from the 1930-s (the guy who coined the term "biomechanics"). He wrote about the hierarchical model of motor control, where 5 different systems (that evolutionary are completely different) must work in synergy to solve the movement problem. There is a great book that explains the science behind CLA called "How we learn to move" by Rob Gray.

djtango 2y ago
Yes constraints are great. My piano teacher would basically just repeat to me like mantra: - was it legato? - were you playing free from tension? - was your tone even? - were you in time? Very rarely would he actually ever tell me anything. And whenever I'd ask for more or feedback he'd just loop back to the questions and ask if I was actually listening to myself play. It was a very frustrating start but eventually it all clicked what he was doing was teaching me to understand my own constraints and then also understand what are the outcomes I am aiming to achieve - if I can't hear how even my own touch is how will I ever play evenly. Was the most valuable coaching I ever got and was probably life changing for me in terms of levelling up my ability to learn new things. Prior to meeting him I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano and would occasionally peruse books and videos on the subject. Of course, as my teacher was keen to point out, no body is the same so how can two anatomically different pianists play with the same technique? If you have small hands so much of the repertoire will be different vs if you have rach hands
- divan 2y ago
  Great points! I've seen a couple of papers on CLA for music learning, but CLA is a subset of so-called "non-linear pedagogy", so maybe music education has its own "branch" of it, so to speak. > I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano Yes, CLA is actively debunking the myth of a "perfect technique" which is very popular in sports. Like a coach/teacher is one who knows the "perfect" way, and their job is to make students repeat an exercise over and over again, fixing deviations from "perfect" technique. This couldn't be more wrong according to CLA. Already mentioned Bernstein introduced the concept of "repetition without repetition", which claims that repetition is important in learning but for a different reason. Each attempt of a movement will have slightly different "inputs" - constraints – and thus can't have a single "perfect" technique that will work for all variations of inputs. Each repetition will be slightly different (hence "without repetition"), and the goal of the proper learning process is to give the body enough "input data" to _discover_ the proper movement solution. It's important to note that "constraints" is a wide term here, and there are few classes of constraints. Task and goal given to the student are constraints, so the size of the hand or level of fatigue. Even environment temperature, mental state, and light conditions are constraints. Another important concept in CLA is action-perception coupling rooted in James Gibson's theory of perception. This one was mindblowing to me when I first read it. In essence, the brain perceives the world not as a set of geometric objects but as "actionable" items. What you can do directly influences how you see the world. That has direct implications for learning as well – mastering any skill (including playing a musical instrument) is coupled with perception, as your body has to react to how it sees/hears the result of its own movements. But the core of CLA as an educational philosophy lays in acknowledging that the actual learning still has to happen inside your nervous system. You can't really "teach" a skill, only facilitate a discovery inside the student's body. It's really fascinating how it all works in practice. One related concept in motor skill acquisition science is the Method of Error Amplification (MAE). Let's say, golf players make a fundamental error of not shifting weight onto the back foot after swinging. Instead of giving them verbal instruction "Shift weight to the back foot", coach might do the opposite – ask them to move weight to the *front foot*. This will increase the error, which will amplify the signal in the nervous system and the body will react to it as it now feels "more wrong" by itself. It's not super clear to which types of errors MAE is applicable, but the research on MAE is fascinating.

djtango 2y ago

On rules and applying them I am always reminded of this quote from Bruce Lee: "Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." As applicable to fighting as it is programming. You will see it in high level sports - athletes will do all kinds of unorthodox things from weird positions to eke out a result, because the result is all that matters.