I have been wondering about whether I should keep writing the blog. I have been doing a lot of reflecting and reviewing and have appraised that at least 90% of my posts are awful. But would I be generating the few good posts if I were not generating all the crap?
And then this guy Seb has emailed me and has encouraged me to continue with my blogging, and I got another jolt of inspiration. So onward ho, another year of the blog is comin. It’s comin baby…

That being said, I do want to hear your criticisms. I want to hear what you like about the blog and I want to hear what you hate about the blog. PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO EMAIL ME. Or write it as a comment. But perhaps you feel criticism is an efficient way to make another person dislike you. So what I propose is sending it to me anonymously. Here is a feedback form you can use.

http://zacharyburtblog.wufoo.com/forms/zacharyburtcom-blog-feedback/

Optionally, leave positive encouragement in the comments, too.

By providing feedback you will get more value in the long run. Help yourself by helping me.

By the way, this next post right here just sucks. It lacks cohesion, it’s more abstract than concrete, and what good is theory if it can’t be distilled into practice? Yet I post anyway because I hope:

- some of you will find it edifying
- writing this is preparation for writing something better; I treat my writing like I treat my software: release early, release often.

OK, Emotions Revealed. Here goes..

Paul Ekman defines emotion so well: “Emotion is a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of physiological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation”. All humans have the same 5 basic emotional states: happy, sad, angry, disgusted and afraid. Also, emotions all automatically activate facial expressions in people – even blind people, suggesting that emotional expression is encoded into our DNA.

Table of Contents:
1. Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Disgust & Fear: Evolutionary Themes, Body Language & Facial Expressions
2. Autoappraisers: Automated Triggers
3. Empathy / mimicing
4. Refractory Period and Scripts
5. The Difference Between Emotions and Moods
6. Practical Tips for Integrating This Knowledge To Enhance Your Life
7. Questions I have about emotions
8. Conclusions

Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Disgust & Fear: Themes, Body Language & Facial Expression of each emotions

Sadness indicates that we are going to be faced with some sort of physical or psychological loss. The posture will slump in withdrawal.

• drop mouth open, pull corners of lips down, raise cheeks (pulls agaisnt lip corners)
• let eyes look downward and upper eyelids droop
• corners of eyebrows up
• vertical wrinkle between the brows
• lips stretched horizontally, lower lip pushed up, trembling
• wide open mouth = intensity
• chin boss (skin between tip of chin, and lower lip — that produces a pout) is wrinkled and pushed upward

Happiness as a theme might best be described social/object pleasure. In relief, we will experience a relaxation of body posture. We may also orient ourselves toward a source of pleasure.

• very strongly signaled in voice
• smile via the zygomaticus major muscle (smile) AND contraction of the orbicularis oculi (muscle around eye). When people tell you “smile, it’ll make you happy!” they’re neglecting to mention that you must also smile with your eye to achieve the same effect.

Anger indicates that something is interfering with us or our goals. If we think the interference is deliberate, not incidental or required, if the interfering person chose to interfere with us, our anger may be stronger. Anger causes blood to flow to our hands. This may lead to people clenching their fists. Not surprisingly, people who in experiments are told for unrelated reasons to clench their firsts – report feeling more powerful. In anger we may also move closer to the object. Hence the popular urban phrase “Step Up.” (Resentment is an emotional attitude; hatred is an emotional attachment.) It is best to be angry towards people’s behaviors rather than people themselves, but even the Dalai Lama admits that it can be productive to be angry against a person when they derive pleasure from their abusive actions (e.g., it’s ok to be angry at a bully.)

• glare: brows lowered and upper eyelids are raised
• pull eyebrows down and togehter, inner corners go down towards nose
• while holding brows down, open eyes wide s.t. upper eyelids push against lowered eyebrows, staring hard
• once you are confident that you are making the eyebrow and eyelid movements, relax the upper part of your face and concentrate on the lower part of your face
• press lips together tightly and tense
• jaw tightly clenched, thrust forward
• teeth exposed sometimes
• lowered brow (wrinkles)
• narrowing the lips

Disgust is a feeling of aversion, either physical or moral. (Disgust towards a partner is one of the best predictors of whether a romantic relationship will end.) In disgust, you will likely move away from the offensive object – and in this case, a person may be an object. disgust keeps the sex drive in check as well, because the disgust emotion can override our natural urge to procreate. This may explain a lot of the rationalization (healthy [for social stability, though not necessarily for personal well-being] defense mechanism!) implicit to the attraction process: commonalities and cultural values (=> morals), triggering/preventing attraction.

• nose wrinkling
• upper eyelids not raised, brows not drawn together
• cheeks raised, upper eyelids pushed up. eyelids relaxed rather than tensed.
• raised upper lip. unbalanced raise = contempt
• lip corner tightened and slightly raised on only one side of face = clear contempt expression.
• upper lip raised high. lower lip raised, protruding slightly
• lowering of brow creating wrinkles.
• wrinkles extending from above nostrils dowward to beyond lip corners –> forming inverted U

Fear, worry, anxiety indicate a threat of harm, either physical or psychological. In fear, blood flows to our legs. That makes it easier to run away from the fear-provoking stimulus. You also fixate your attention on the object, opening your eyes to collect more light (and see better).

• raise upper eyelids as high as you can, and if you are able, also slightly tense your lower eyelids
• let your jaw drop open
• stretch lips horizontally back towards your ears
• eyebrows are raised and drawn together
• chin pulled
• surprise rather than fear? indicator = lower eyelids are not tensed, eyebrows are not drawn together

We are remarkably obvious in revealing our emotional state via our voice. Happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust all offer clear vocal patterns with respect to (absolute or relative?) tonality, inflection, volume, etc. Emotions as expressed in the voice are also remarkably accurate, most people don’t modulate their voice when lying. (The researcher Klaus Scherer is perhaps the leading researcher in the field of emotion and voice.) We have great voluntary control over many of our bodily muscles (due to our capacity for and regular practice of skilled coordinated movement, e.g. walking). Therefore you can see why it’s it’s easier to prevent/monitor/micromanage an emotion-related action (as described earlier: moving towards, moving away, etc.) than to remove any sign of emotion in face or voice.

Autoappraisers: Automated Triggers

We are constantly scanning the environment (sensory input goes to the thalamus, then to the amygdala & prefrontal cortex). When we detect that something important to our welfare is happening, an emotion goes off: this is called an autoappraiser. The further removed the variation is from the theme, the longer it may take for the autoappraiser to function, until we get to the point where *reflective appraising* occurs. Our “emotion alert database” is open and easy to add to; when we encounter new events that may be similar to a previously learned database item, an emotion gets triggered. When the learned trigger is more distantly related to the theme, our conscious knowledge may be better able to interrupt the emotional experience. In other words, if our concerns are only distantly related to a theme, we may be able to override them by choice.

There are seven paths to accessing emotion, in addition to autoappraisers and reflective appraisal: memory of past, imagination, talking about a past emotional event, empathy, others instructing us about what to be emotional about, violation of social norms, and voluntarily assuming the appearance (moving our facial muscles, altering our vocal tone).

Intensity of emotion is determined by six factors:
Closeness to the evolved theme (loss; threat; interference; aversion; pleasure/social enjoyment) – how closely current instances of the triggering event resemble the original situation in which the trigger was first learned – how early in a person’s life the trigger was learned – the initial emotional charge when the trigger was created – the density of experience (repeated episodes, highly charged emotionally, during a short period of time) – natural capacity of the person for emotional regulation

Empathy / Mimicry

Emotions often transmit socially, with the stronger emotional expresser transmitting to the less-expressive. But transmission won’t occur if we don’t care about, or in some way identify with, the person. (Emotional patterns often relate to psychological consequences, not just physical consequences; hence, the importance of the link in identity.) And sometimes we witness someone’s emotions and feel an entirely different emotion. We might be contemptuous of someone for getting so angry or afraid, or afraid of the anger they show. If we’re enemies with the person, we will feel positive emotions when they feel negative emotions; see @50cent ‘s joyous tweets about Ja Rule going to prison. I suspect that (culturally) dominant people, naturally prone to stronger emotional expressions regardless, also have more control over people’s emotional lives because so many people identify with them.

On love and empathy: Love privileges another to see us in ways that would shame us and disgust others without the intervention of love. The suspension of disgust establishes intimacy and is a mark of personal commitment. There are three types of empathy: in cognitive empathy, we recognize what another person is feeling; in emotional empathy, we actually feel what that person is feeling. And in compassionate empathy, we want to help the other person deal with his situation and his emotions. We must have cognitive empathy in order to achieve either of the other forms of empathy, but we need not have emotional empathy in order to have compassionate empathy.

Refractory Period and Scripts

We can’t control our emotions; they’re automatic. And after an emotion is triggered, we enter what’s called a “refractory period”. While we are in a refractory state, our thinking cannot incorporate information that does not fit, maintain, or justify the emotion we are feeling. Other information becomes inaccessible for a time! (Consider the phenomenon of refractory periods in relation to the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy **link**). Different factors affect the length of the refractory period. A lack of sleep and excess stress correlate to a longer refractory period– for me, this prompts questions about the relationship between working memory and the refractory period.

Sometimes, when faced with a situation we will import a “script” based on our past experiences. We “fill in the emotional blanks” with predictions about others behavior, based on past experience. Scripts are typically imported when people have unresolved feelings, feelings that were never fully or satisfactorily expressed, or if expressed did not lead to a desired outcome. Scripts distort current reality, causing inappropriate emotional reactions and lengthening the refractory period. It is clear that resolution of past emotions will lead to improved cognitive ability and emotional wellness; I’m not sure whether it’s possible to artificially resolve emotions (by tricking yourself, e.g. through visualization or writing in a diary–self-help writers would certainly have you believe so) or whether the resolution must truly be experienced.

A good way of realizing we’re importing a script into a situation is if a word related to a past emotional situation pops into our head. For example, if I was always bullied by a kid named Joe, and then I see some guy on the street who in some way resembles him, I might think “Joe” – and then I could realize that I’m importing a script. Perhaps the guy on the street has behavioral cues that cause me to compare him to Joe. Either way, it suggests that I need to (1) Be Aware that I am importing a script, (2) Be Aware that the guy probably, but may not, have behavioral resemblance to Joe, and (3) Work towards attaining emotional resolution of my feelings towards Joe.

The Difference Between Emotions and Moods

Emotions and moods are not the same thing — mood is a period of time where our physiology is saturated by a specific emotion, whereas the emotion itself is much shorter. A mood primes you to experience specific emotions; we seek the opportunity to feel an emotion the same color as our mood. Moods make us less responsive to changing nuances in our environment — they bias our interpretation and our response. (What are the most productive moods for accomplishing specific goals?) Mood-relevant emotions are stronger and they last longer. Once an emotion has begun and we’ve become aware of it, we can usually point to the event that caused it (though some people may have difficulty with this skill, it can definitely be built — I know from personal experience). Moods can be brought about by highly dense emotional experiences, but also, possibly, unknown neurochemical and autonomous changes. Emotional triggers that have become cool through effort (e.g. anger management), become hot again in moods. You can probably trigger a mood in someone the same way you can trigger an emotion in someone — just keep triggering that emotion.

Practical Tips for Integrating This Knowledge To Enhance Your Life

Keep a log of intense emotional events. Entered into the log should be as much information as possible about what transpired in the moments and, if possible, time period before you felt {emotion x}. A friend or psychotherapist might be able to help you learn more about your triggers. I myself have started keeping a diary of the circumstances around my salient emotions, so I can do actively trigger things that make me happy, rather than chasing arbitrary triggers I may or may not be conscious of. This is probably something that I should have started doing after I read Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling upon Happiness, but it took this, that, and an article by Steve Pavlina {link} to make the concept hit home.

Hm.. repetition surfaces yet again. Learning things from different angles, in different environment.. worming their way into my consciousness. The other day, I was talking to a friend about support groups, and he talked about how the more people that are there, the more effective it is. It’s because of social proof, we build our realities off of people in our environment, therefore, the more people in our environment who offer a belief to us the more likely we are to accept it and integrate it. (Perhaps the leadership strength of an individual affects his influence?) I’m just going to let these thoughts keep building…

Train yourself to understand people’s emotional expressions. PaulEkman.com offers digital, interactive courses on subtle expressions and micro expressions: there’s SETT (the “subtle expression training tool”) and METT (the “micro expression training tool”). Microexpressions are fleeting automatic expressions that people cannot control. They are instant and rely on the processing from the thalamus to the amygdala, not the prefrontal cortex; therefore they are not subject to conscious control and intervention and are true revealers! Learning to read microexpressions(which last between 1/25 and 1/5 of a second) can help you spot a liar but also helps you read normal people in everyday situations. If I were running a sales organization I would make it a mandate for every salesperson to take both the METT and SETT. In fact, I specifically emailed the Ekman Group to request they create an affiliate program for this service but they don’t have any plans to offer it.

By changing our physiology we can change our emotional experience. You know how they say “smiling will make you happy”? That’s bad advice because most people think just to smile with your mouth, and that always makes me feel like a fool. Make sure that you smile with your eyes as well (orbicularis oculi)!

Take posture classes to make sure you slouch less, helping you maintain the physiology of a happy and confident disposition more continuously. Again, I have a bone to pick with the common advice. Most people tell you to just “stand up straight” and “don’t slouch!” But in my case, I have weak upper back muscles, which makes (continuously) maintaining effective posture an impractical if not impossible challenge. So, I actually hired a personal trainer at my gym to help me specifically with my posture – and he designed a workout that focused specifically on the the areas of my shoulders and back that are weak. Incidentally, as someone who is 6’3″, it can be frustrating to have people under-guess my height. It just makes me feel bad about myself.

Ekman also says:

a) become more consciously aware of when you are becoming emotional, even before you speak or act
b) choose how you behave when you are emotional, so you achieve your goals without damaging other people
c) carefully use the information you acquire about how others are feeling

But since I can’t translate these abstract notions into actionable habits, I don’t know how to deal with them.

Questions I have about emotions

When in a social situation, are we automatically more likely to express/broadcast emotions? (e.g. mirth leads to laughter when in the presence of others) does BROADCASTING emotions cause us to feel them stronger?
Do people ever have “Emotional anxiety”, wondering what is acceptable to feel? This is because emotions are often based on values — cultural cues conflicting with internal ones?
What causes posture to erect then crumple?
What causes side side back and forth head tilts?
What motivates facial stroking of the mustache-area?
Can you gather data on what MEs make people more likely to be pitched? sell training to sales organizations.
Document emotions of a group; timing (order, direction); measure liking, influence, etc.
Learning data: repetition of abstract vs. concrete principles.
Learning: body language – recall – emotion based recall – body language and emotion
what are my insecurity triggers? Is insecurity necessarily rooted in the emotion of fear? Then I have to figure out when I feel fear and then document these episodes in my emotion diary. And then perhaps I have to confront and habituate myself to these fears via exposure. First I need to better understand the physiology of fear.
What about partial facial expressions? could they only be directed towards ONE person / object? for example, anger in half of face oriented towards offending object, but in a social situation we choose to neutralize?

Conclusions

Emotions so important and fundamental in the governance and shaping of our behavior. They are paramount in understanding culture, decision making, influence, advertising, behavior — getting what you want emotionally! Although some of us are blessed with innate emotional intelligence (or have been [un]consciously cultivating it for years), I feel that having a cognitive framework in which to work can only enhance our performance. Emotions Revealed (Paul Ekman) and Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) are my favorite books on emotion so far; I have found them the most edifying. I want to learn more.

P.S. One more solicitation for feedback ~ http://zacharyburtblog.wufoo.com/forms/zacharyburtcom-blog-feedback/

Let Me Tell You About This Hilarious Onion Article

There’s this hilarious Onion article called “Friend Somehow Bad At Hanging Out“.

“It’s weird,” said Reagor, who met Scovell five years ago through Holdrege Pool Supply coworker Brian Neikirk and bonded with him over their mutual interest in baseball, the Kinks, and Chuck Palahniuk novels. “Geoff’s a good guy. We’re friends. We get along. You would think that hanging out with him would be very fun. But whenever we hang out…it’s like…it’s not easy to hang out. Which makes no sense, because hanging out is like the easiest thing.”

And of course, there’s the hilarious, awkward picture. (“Reagor” is on the left.)

It’s Funny Because It’s True

I just finished reading a paper called “The rhythm of rapport: Interpersonal synchrony and social perception”. The researchers discuss that when you’re in “sync” with another person – engaging in the same movements at the same time –  you feel like you have strong rapport, and others perceive that you two have strong rapport as well. You feel happier, too. Being in sync is analogous to (but different from) mimicry and “body language mirroring“. But the researchers also discovered that 180° anti-phase orientation, whereby “whereby each individual’s actions are at opposite points of the movement cycle” – confers with all the same benefits as simultaneous synchrony. Not only that, but~ 90° and ~270° coordination were linked to the lowest levels of rapport. Like the guy in the picture, I always feel really uncomfortable and disconnected in such body language configurations (The picture above seems very 270°). Aha, that explains my discomfort! – thanks, science.

Rewarding Loyal Readers With Further Edification

The authors of the “rhythm of rapport” paper mentioned another scientist who believes that “coordinating one’s actions with another may facilitate information flow, the dynamics of knowledge transmission during a social exchange”. (Remember that most of human communication is implicit.) “Through savings in working memory, coordinated behavior may enable attentional resources to be directed toward [other people you're interacting with].” If you read my last article on choking under pressure, then you’ll remember the incredible importance of working memory on skill execution. Yes! This explains why when I get into a coordinated social rhythm with someone on the basketball court, I score nearly 100% of the time.

But What Triggers Synchrony?

There’s research suggesting that body language mirroring only enhances rapport and liking when the mimickee isn’t conscious of the mirrroring. Yet in contrived experiments, researchers can trigger synchrony by simply having people engage in the same movements at the same time, such as rocking their chairs in coordination to the same metronome.

But taking the ball up on the basketball court, sometimes I’ll just look at the point guard and know that we’re going to go up and score. It seems that synchrony can be contrived through synchronistic motion  - but what sort of eye contact and other subtle signals (pupil dilation? pheromones?) lead to the shared-wavelength, ESP type of synchrony I described earlier as “coordinated social rhythm”? It’s easy to identify “points on a movement cycle” for artificial, laboratory interactions – but how do you identify them for complex skills?

Selling Smiles, Everybody Wins

As he revealed via the rave scene in his book, Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh applied the principles of synchrony in running the business at Zappos.com. Employees all must truly embrace the (harmony-driven) culture – and arrive at the same wavelength. And, because they are on the same wavelength, I suggest that synchrony naturally occurs more often. More synchrony = more happiness & less stress = more working memory = more accomplished at work. The science confirms it.

TODO: understand the relationship between culture and values; learn the cause of being on the same wavelength as someone; discover a comprehensive list of triggers for synchrony. your thoughts are anticipated!

Have you ever “choked” before? Choking isn’t just performing badly – choking occurs when the pressure is on, and then we perform significantly worse than we did in practice. I think all of us can relate to choking. I remember the time I choked at one of my piano recitals in 4th grade. I practiced a piece called “Allegro” so much and I knew it cold. Yet, when it came time to play, I just fell apart. My parents told me I should have practiced more but I just felt defensive, because in practice I played it so well, and from memory. I think everyone can relate to this feeling. The book Choke by Sian Beilock talks about what causes us to choke under pressure, and the answers may surprise you. It also provides us with a great tool kit – what can we do to prevent choking?

I really, really want to cheat and give you the tools to prevent choking at the beginning of the article. But research shows that understanding the rationale for something will help you remember it. So I’m going to spend two minutes writing up an egghead explanation of why choking happens, and I’m going to make it as simple as possible. If you want to get a really detailed explanation, you should buy the book. I have this tendency to elaborate with extraneous nerdy details, but I’m going to rein it in as much as I can. Also, if you really want to cut to the choke-prevention tips, I listed them out at the end of the article (scroll to the bottom).

Most of us know about short term memory and long term memory. Short term memory is things that you learn and then forget within a day or two; long term memory is stuff that you remember forever. For example, I might have remembered the address for the Social Security Administration building for a couple days after I made my appointment, but then I forgot it. That’s short term memory. Long term memory is stuff I’ve heard so many times that I’m probably not going to forget it. My parents’ home phone number would be a great example of this. But there’s another concept of memory that psychologists use, and you should know about it too. It’s called Working Memory.

WHAT IS WORKING MEMORY?

You know how our computers have RAM or “cache”? Our brains have a kind of RAM too. It’s working memory. Working memory lets us hold things in mind while we do other things. For example, if I need to remember the address of the grocery store, and then someone tells me what I need to GET at the grocery store, I’ll be better able to remember the address of the grocery store if I have a lot of working memory. Working memory is really closely related to attention. If you have a lot of working memory, you can keep the idea “don’t get distracted” in mind while you get bored. So patience and working memory are related. People are genetically different in the amount of working memory capacity they have. People with ADHD tend to have lower working memory — they can’t remember to sit still. It’s also worth pointing out that working memory and IQ are highly correlated.

Working memory sits in an area of the brain called the Prefrontal Cortex. This prefrontal cortex is the main thing that makes us human. It’s where we think. See, the brain is made of building blocks. The “lizard” or “emotional brain” is the amygdala. It’s raw. The Prefrontal Cortex is a layer on top of the amygdala. It helps modulate the strong emotional signals sent by the amygdala. So if we have a strong connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, then we can spend more time in peaceful thought and less time in emotions. Maybe that’s why Socrates considered philosophy to be the pinnacle achievement of man!

So to recap, we have 3 concepts. The first concept is the “emotional brain”, also known as the amygdala. The next concept is the “prefrontal cortex”, also known as the thinking brain. The prefrontal cortex sits on top of the amygdala. The third concept is that “working memory” is in the prefrontal cortex.

(If you are interested in in learning more about the relationship between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, you should read the book EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE by Daniel Goleman. It has some really neat diagrams and they help you develop an intuitive understanding of the relationship. You can read my review of Emotional Intelligence.)

How Choking Happens, And The Two Types of Chokes

Now it’s time to apply our new knowledge to understanding how Choking happens. There’s actually two types of choking. The first one is choking on tests, interviews, or other stuff where thinking is involved. The second type is when we choke during skill executions, like at a sports competition, a music recital, a public speech. Some “chokes” can combine the two types: for example in billiards, you might need to think in order to determine where to aim, and then use your muscles to strike the cue ball properly.

Anyway, I’ll start by explaining the first type of choking.

The First Type Of Choking

When we get stressed, the ability of our Prefrontal Cortex to keep us calm and regulate our emotions, really disappears. The specific reason for this is because stress encroaches upon working memory! This is why when we get into an emotional argument with someone, our ability to reason goes out the door and doesn’t appear until much later. Our ability to reason leaves because our working memory is too filled up with stress to function properly, and it doesn’t come back until the stress leaves (when the “comebacks” are, ironically, no longer much use to us).

(You can speculate about all the “evolutionary reasons” for this, such as when someone pisses you off, your life might be on the line and you want the “fight or flight” component of your autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, (which is controlled in part by the amygdala) to help you kick their ass in case they want to kill you.)

Remember Howard Dean’s famous primal scream during the election in 2004? He was under stress and unable to control the emotional, primal part of his brain. His prefrontal cortex’s ability to perform was impeded.

OK, so we’ve established that stress impairs the prefrontal cortex. When we are thinking about a problem, we will often load it up into working memory. Once it’s there, we can calmly reason it through in a nice linear fashion. But when we’re low on working memory, we can’t reason things through – our logic is not available for us to use. So we resort to shortcuts and guesses. And that’s why we Choke on a test. Make sense? We can’t think things through calmly, so we throw out impulsive guesses. This often leads to our doom.

The Second Type Of Choking

There’s also the second type of choking, which I’ll call skill choking. In order to understand this we should have a basic understanding of how skills develop. Have you ever heard of the four stages of incompetence? They have fancy and pretentious names, but the concepts are actually pretty simple.

1. Unconscious incompetence (You don’t even know how much you suck, and you think you’re better than you are. This is can be seen in the phenomenon where people who suck think they’re great, and people who are skilled think they’re bad, because they know just how much they don’t know. This phenomenon actually has a name, and it’s the Dunning-Kruger effect.)

2. Conscious incompetence (You realize that you suck, and you take efforts to improve your level of skill)

3. Conscious competence (You can execute a skill, but you have to think about it every time. For example, in basketball, you might make sure that you don’t stick your elbow out when shooting.)

4. Unconscious competence (You do the skill automatically. When you do it, it just happens through your body. You’re able to get “into the zone”, also known as flow. Often times, you won’t even be aware of when you’re doing it or how you’re doing it.)

Because Unconscious competence is so automatic, in my humble opinion it makes it difficult for experts to teach students. This is because it’s all automatic and they can’t articulate what they’re doing or why. In my opinion, experts should illustrate form, and then people who have only recently learned a skill should be the ones to teach new students.

Okay. So people can only “choke” when they’re at the level of unconscious competence, because before that, they’re actually still learning the skill. Remember – choking is what happens when you perform BELOW expectations, not just when you perform poorly. It’s semantically impossible for a new beginner to choke!

But when we’re under pressure or stress, what happens is that we try to compensate. We’re nervous, so we think: I’m going to try extra hard not to mess up. This leads to people performing skills that should be automatic and unconscious — with a lot of “conscious”, mental effort! So instead of just performing your free throw, your golf putt, or your piano solo, you pay attention to your form and try not to mess up. This doesn’t work! When BEGINNERS and INTERMEDIATES are learning a skill, the more attention they put on it, the better they do. But when ADVANCED EXPERT MASTERS are executing a skill, the more attention they put on it, the worse they do, since at that point for them the skill is automatic! So if you’re still learning, think about your execution as much as you want. But if you’re advanced, then you need to let it all happen automatically through your body. This is a reiteration of something I mentioned in my review of W. Timothy Gallwey’s excellent book, *The Inner Game of Tennis*.

So this begs the question:

What creates pressure? And what can be done about it?

Pressure is anything that either stresses us out, or causes us to start thinking negative thoughts. A big creator of pressure is something known as stereotype threat. For example, if you’re playing basketball and you’re white, and someone jokes to you “white men can’t jump!”, then your likelihood of choking is way, way up. Basically, a choke can be prompted by calling attention to any stereotype known for poor performance in the field in which you’re practicing, and then you will compensate by paying too much attention to your performance. A good way to counteract this type of pressure is to provide counterexamples. For example, after Obama came into office, black students began to perform better on standardized tests. You can also use positive stereotypes to your advantage — if you’re the member of a group that is stereotyped to be GOOD at something, then go ahead and use that to your advantage, you natural talent, you! It’ll make you more confident, and confidence fights off stress.

How To Use These Things Against Your Opponent!

You can mess with your opponent by mentioning negative stereotypes. You can also encourage them to pay attention to their form, which will get them to think about what they’re doing instead of letting it happen automatically. A great question to ask is “How did you make that shot! What did you do, tell me, I want to know!” It’s one of my favorite ways to mess with opponents. Another great way is to call attention to their identity, making them outcome-dependent (which naturally ups the pressure!)

To combat these threats, you can think about all the ways in which you are a dynamic and multifaceted individual. This will bolster your self-esteem, which will enhance your ability to fight back against stress! For example, if you realize “I’m not only a golfer, but also a guy with a great family, a good job, and a terrific head of hair”, then you’re going to be less stressed about performance for two reasons: one, you become more confident and energized, and two, you won’t place too much emphasis on the outcome of an event as it has less importance to your identity. (Superstars can be more likely to choke under pressure because they have so much pressure to maintain their image of being a superstar!). These techniques are borrowed from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and in addition to being useful for stressful situations in sports, business, and other areas of life, have been demonstrated as truly effective for combating depression.

Another thing you can do is reframe your stress. If you’re stressed, it’s because the amygdala (primal brain) is pumping up your fight or flight system, the autonomic nervous system, releasing stress chemicals, making your heart beat faster and your palms sweat, et cetera. Now, this is going to create a lot of “arousal” in your brain. The good news is that you can actually choose to interpret it in a number of ways! The first way is that you’re excited and “amped up” to go kick some butt. The second way is that you’re nervous, anxious, stressed and overwhelmed. This is called “Reframing” and can turn stress into something called “eustress” — you can choose to “eat your stress” like a candy bar, and feed off it. It’s actually been shown that a proper amount of stress increases performance — especially in experts. (Remember Cziksentmihalyi’s “Flow”? You’re only in the zone when you have enough skill, and you’re playing against a strong enough opponent. The strong opponent triggers stress in you, which leads to higher performance.)

One other great way to ameliorate your stress is to recognize it. A great way to recognize it is to name the emotion that you are feeling, and also to write about it. In one study, students who wrote for ten minutes about their worries before a stressful math test performed roughly 15% better than students who sat and did nothing. Also, after several weeks of writing, traumatized mental patients exhibit fewer illness-related symptoms & show reduction in doctor’s visits.

(Source: “writing about emotinal experiences as a therapeutcic process” by j.w. pennebaker, in *writing to heal: a guided journal for recovering from trauama and emotional upheaveal*. I know I don’t often cite sources in the blog, but I’m doing this for me as this is a publication I want to cross reference later. Rest assured, however, that the vast majority of claims in Beilock’s Choke are backed up by an elaborate set of references available in the appendix of the book.)

Beilock writes about one study: “…when people viewed the emotional faces, they showed a lot of brain activity in areas such as the amygdala, which is involved in our emotional experiences and reactions. When the amygdala is highly active, it can prevent other areas of the brain needed to bolster cognitive horsepower from working their hardest. However, when people viewed the faces and picked the word that best described the face they saw-in other words, when they labeled the emotional face with a word-activity in the amygdala was dampened. Indeed, using words to label the faces led to increased activity in brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex, which in turn seemed to reduce the response of the amygdala, thus helping to alleviate people’s emotional distress.”

Remember how in my last post I wrote about transformative presence? Labeling emotions is one component of transformative presence. Labeling negative emotions reduces them, which creates room for positive emotions. The amygdala mirrors others’ emotions and creates them in yourself. So when we CLICK with someone via transformative presence, it might just be a mutual experience of positive emotions. So maybe we’re just backwards rationalizing the connection! (Then again, a connection might be more involved in that it recruits specific bonding-related brain areas, but I don’t know: I recall that the authors of Click were not very exhaustive in their academic approach to the neuroscience research [In fairness, I don't believe there is much neuroscience data on the topic of clicking and emotional connections. If there is, I would very much appreciate it if a reader pointed me in the right direction.])

RANDOM INTERESTING TIDBITS FROM THE BOOK, AND OTHER THOUGHTS

Skill experts’ mirror networks are activated when they watch others perform moves. This occurs in the ventral and dorsal premotor areas. BUT: this activation pattern is only found when experts watched dance moves from their own repertoire — moves that they, themselves, could perform. So to get better by watching an expert, maybe it’s better to watch an expert do moves that you yourself can do. This is how people can practice in their heads without actually having to practice the skill themself. Of course, you can certainly learn form and technique by watching an expert, but it won’t help you “practice” the skill. Significant distinction.

Have you ever wondered why faux pas occur? When we try not to think about something, two processes are at work. There’s a conscious process that searches for some new topic to focus on. Then there’s also an unconscious process that searches for the unwanted thought: the purpose of the unconscious process is to check for errors, and help strike the unwanted thought from mind. When we’re under pressure, like when Working Memory recruited by Prefrontal Cortex is under attack by stress, then the conscious process disappears. We only have unconscious process, the one charged with finding what we DONT want to focus on, working for us. We’re therefore more likely to blurt out exactly what we are trying not to say.

Note to self: At UT-Austin, Worthy, Markman, and Maddox had some interesting data that showed that in basketball, when the scores are close, choking is more likely to occur. The paper is “Choking and excelling at the free throw line” from the International Journal of Creativity & Problem Solving. For my machine learning sports prediction project, I might want to get in touch with them.

Merely writing about the stressful events in your life on a regular basis – say, twenty minutes once every week or so, can bolster your cognitive horsepower by decreasing the occurrence o intrusive thoughts and worries. This is research by Klein and Boals. “Expressive writing can increase working memory capacity”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001) 520-33. I may want to flesh out a whole article on this to encourage use of CompassionPit.com.

Watching videos of of our own poor performance (failing) creates learned helplessness. Have you ever thought about how you goofed up in the past? Often times thinking about your mistakes can make you depressed and not help you correct them. But an intervention process can actually help! There are three parts to this process.

1. Identify and express the feelings you have when you think about the failure: the feelings you experienced WHILE performing poorly, AND the feelings you experience ABOUT performing poorly.
2. Think about what went wrong in your technique: e.g. I was slow, or my stroke length needs adjustment
3. Imagine performance changes for the next contest, and then imagine yourself successfully implementing them.

Have you considered the relationship between Zen and skill performance? Ever hear of someone taking a “zen” approach to a skill — like in the book Zen and the Art of Archery? Zen is really about being able to focus our attention. And attention is controlled by Working Memory — because with more working memory, we can keep relevant information in mind and filter out what doesn’t matter. And a lot of this article was about how working memory affects skill execution! So hopefully this provides the link between Zen and skill with some neuroscientific/psychological grounding.

QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR:

1) You note how math phobia is, unfortunately, socially acceptable. But accordingly, the stereotype of women = bad at math should be socially acceptable, yet the phenomenon of stereotype threat still occurs. How do you reconcile the two concepts?
2) On Page 190, the sports statistics is cited: when the “home team was just one game away from winning the series, they won only about 38.5 percent of the time”. But that 38.5% might just be regression towards the mean, and not choking?
3) Working memory use depletes glucose, however, if you learned to wire the skill pathway with NTs that weren’t glucose dependent, then could that suggest that practicing while low on glucose could help make your skill more “resilient”? Are there any neurotransmitters that are less glucose dependent? I don’t know enough about the biochemistry to make an intelligent comment here, so I’m just speculating.

PROVOKED QUESTIONS/ ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT:

When does skill translate from conscious to unconscious? should you train as if you are unconscious (i.e., should you practice taking free throws without thinking, or should you think about them until you can naturally do them without thinking)? Or does it just matter that the movements occur? how and why do the movements become offline? when performance degrades from “online monitoring”…

When training, is it better to take a break every half hour to reset working memory? Take pressures and stress off? Or is it better to work continuously, so our working memory can stay loaded with the relevant information? Cross-pollination occurs when we switch our trains of thought, and during sleep.

Although paying attention to the specific tactics and movements involved in your expert execution of a skill will cause inferior performance, focusing on your high-level strategy can be a great place to spend your mental resources. Think about the ego and taking unnecessary risks: if your goal is simply to win, you probably shoudn’t show off. Then again, showboating feels good, and can amp up your confidence as well as create pressure and intimidation in your opponent. However, mostly this serves as just another recitation on the importance of premeditated goals and acting accordance with them. But then that encourages conflict, like, what if you gotta change plans and go with the flow. Sometimes it’s wise to deviate from the original plan. So how do you reconcile the two concepts of using your intuition vs. acting in accordance to premeditate strategy? In the United States Marine Corps manual Warfighting, they say that high level strategy should be coordinated with premeditation and low level tactical strategy should be coordinated via intuition. But what about the concept of “don’t know what you want ’til you found it?” Is that just backwards rationalization at play? These are unresolved questions.

Have you heard of “holosync”? what do you think of it? the idea is instant meditation: http://www.holosync.com. Does it curry the same benefits as Vipassana meditation, which has been demonstrated to strengthen people’s working memory after 3 months of training?

Do you know of any research concerning the relationship between “alpha” vs. “theta” brain waves and skill execution? I read a book that alluded to some research in this area by john eliot (formerly(?) of Rice) but i haven’t been able to find it.

I asked professor Beilock, “Do you know of any research concerning the relationship between skill execution and social status?” before the book came out, and now I should like to think that being near a person of higher status than you causes you to feel stress, and that will affect whether you pay conscious attention to the execution of a skill. Conversely, if you are of higher status than someone, you will feel a cognitive and emotional “boost”, which should improve your performance.

CRITICISM AND CONCLUDING REMARKS

When it comes to recommending this book, I’m somewhat biased: I’m a former student of Sian Beilock. I took her Cognitive Psychology class at University of Chicago, and although I performed extremely poorly (I think I passed with a C-), she was very nice to me (when I slept through a midterm, she let me make it up with limited time). With those caveat emptors:

I believe Choke is an important, useful, and practical book. There are four main downsides, however. The first downside is the book does not flow as well as it could. Beilock is an accomplished academic, and (appropriately) adopts a very academic and politically correct tone. Although via her political correctness she innoculates herself against alienating outgroup readers, she also makes herself less relatable (read my summary of the book on why people *Click* for more detail on this). The second downside is that midway through the book, she takes a serious digression into differences between the sexes in math and science. She spends way too much time on this topic. However, she presents a lot of compelling evidence that in many areas of academic performance, there are no differences between the sexes, and for this reason the book is important: she has the authority to make these judgments. (e.g. on the AP Calculus exam, females perform way better when the standard age/sex/race questionnaire is moved to the end of the test) The third downside is that her writing feels, in many ways, redundant; she makes the same points over and over. However, this may be good because we benefit from the principle of spaced repetition, which enhances learning. The fourth downside is that the book could have been more edifying for readers with a strong psych background if she delved deeper into, for example the process of how skills become integrated into automatic processes, or more precise information about the relationship between working memory, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala. This could enable the reader to draw more interesting conclusions about the best ways to practice. (She barely mentioned massed practice vs. distributed practice, for example, and it would have been great to read a discussion on the aptic structures that such things invoke.)

Finally, I feel that working memory impediments are something I struggle with in day-to-day life; when I get stressed, I PERSONALLY rely on social shortcuts–shortcomings in my personality–that were perhaps useful adaptations when I was a youngster in need of securing approval from adults, but no longer useful – and indeed detrimental – now that I am an adult. For example, I have insecure tendencies and will often brag a lot. It is only when I am calm and chilled out that I can be appropriately – and honestly! -humble. (Part of me does wonder whether a certain degree of narcissism and neurosis is actually beneficial; for example, haphazard disorganized thinking can lead to cross-pollination of ideas and exceptional creativity; and indeed, research shows that people pay more attention to narcissistic types than people who are humble [one of the ways we determine whether information is true or not is by the confidence of the person uttering information; incidentally, another is through social proof, which is the number, strength, and cultural capital of people who follow and affirm the speaker, and what the speaker says. The Ways of Knowing by Montague  has some excellent discussion on these concepts and others. (Two remarks: it was published in 1925, so you will have to get it used as it's no longer in print; I haven't fully read it, but I intend to.)])

Choke is available for $17.05 on Amazon.com.

RELATED READING

Learned Optimism
Emotional Intelligence
Mastery
The Inner Game of Tennis

Here’s a final list of tips on preventing a choke, copied straight out of Choke. Credit for all the below tips goes directly to Sian Beilock and all researchers whom she cited while writing Choke. Almost all of them are quoted verbatim from Choke, and copyright over them belongs to her.

COMPLETE LIST OF TIPS TO PREVENT A CHOKE

Cognitive Tasks

• Reaffirm your self worth: write about your many interests and activities. (==> boosts confidence and performance)
• Map out your complexities: diagram everything that makes you a multifaceted individual. (==> highlights that a single test doesn’t define you, so that takes some pressure off)
• Write about your worries: writing for ten minutes about your worries can thwart anxieties and self-doubt that emerge
• Meditate away the worries: train your brain to not dwell on negative thoughts, and instead recognize and discard them
• Think differently: think about yourself in ways that highlight your propensity for success. e.g. i’m a college student at a prestigious university. focus on your credentials.
• Reinterpret your reactions: get sweaty palms? “i am amped up for the test!” rather than “i am freaking out”
• Pause your choke: walking away for a few minutes from a challenging problem that demands working memory can help you find the most appropriate solution. this incubation period helps you let go of your focus on an irrelevant problem details and instead think in a new way. leads to epiphanies.
• Educate the worries: merely drawing attention to the stereotypes and reminding them that they are stereotypes and nothing more can help people from worrying about their ability when the pressure is on. It might seem counter-intuitive that teaching people about a stereotype quells it, but giving people an excuse for their worries allows them to see their performance as less diagnostic of their intellect.
• The Obama effect: seeing examples of people who defy common stereotypes can help boost the performance of people in these social groups.
• Practice under pressure – the adage that practice makes perfect can do with adjustment — practice under a PRESSURE situation. also, test yourself on material rather than simply studying it. spaced repetition as usual.
• Outsource your cognitive load: write down the immediate steps of a problem rather than trying to hold everything in your head. This provides you with an external memory source, one that may be relatively free of worries compared to your own prefrontal cortex. As a result, you may be less likely to mix up information or forget important details of what you are doing. For example, trying to solve “72-19″ is a task that becomes much more difficult when you’re under stress. But solving

72
-19
—-
???

is way easer, because you aren’t going to try to represent the problem in your working memory! So think of ways in which you can reorganize problems.

• Organize what you know: use chunking and categorization to organize information. that will let you store more information in working memory.

Sports and Skills

• Distract yourself: singing a song or even thinking about your pinky toe, as Jack Nicklaus was rumored to do, can help prevent the Prefrontal Cortex from regulating too closely movements that run outside awareness.
• Don’t slow down: don’t give yourself too much time to think. just do it- nike
• practice under stress. by understanding when pressure happens, you can create situations that will maximize the stress in your opponents.
• Don’t dwell: take that past performance and change how you think about it. See your failures as a chance to learn how to perform better in the future.
• Focus on the outcome, not the mechanics: focusing on the goal, where the ball will land in the net, helps cue your practiced motor programs to run flawlessly.
• Find a key word: “Smooth”. one word mantra. like “Swish”. this will help you recruit the areas of the brain that are involved in executing the skill, and also keep you calm.
• Focus on the positive: negative thoughts can quickly spiral into learned helplessness. (to learn more about Learned Helplessness, AKA depression, read Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, which I reviewed here.). don’t be helpless. if you focus on the negative this can trigger learned helplessness, and increase likelihood that you won’t work as hard as you can to obtain performance goals
• “Cure the yips by changing up your grips”: altering your performance technique reprograms the circuits you need to execute the shot. Could clear your brain of the hiccup.

Business

• Be a memory guide: in the interview, give a schema at the outset. FAVORABLE FIRST IMPRESSIONS => SCHEMA IS SET FROM THE OUTSET. Schema affects the way we interpret ambiguous information, and almost all information is up to interpretation!
• Subtle mimicry: mirror body language.
• Think about what you WANT to say not what you DONOT want to say. NLP
• Practice making a fool out of yourself in a comedy, acting or improvisation class. then you are less worried about what might happen if you stumble, because you have already experienced it. “it’s not to bad” (i disagree with this one, it hurts emotionally every time we fail socially as, the (perigenual anterior?) cingulate is activated)
• Know what you know: if you have memorized something, just go with it and try not to think about too much every word. if not, pause before key transitions and regroup.
• Write it out.
• Think about the journey, not the outcome. being so focused on failing or the monumental goals you are trying to achieve may prevent u from making small steps forward necessary to succeed.
• Remind yourself that you have the background to succeed and that you are in control of the situation. this can be the confidence boost you need to ace your pitch.
• Prepare well, but don’t ANTICIPATE TOO MUCH. often it’s stress you give yourself about worrying about the what-ifs that leads to failrue when the pressure is on – self fuflfilling prophecy