Try to Think Like a Kid In Sports Has Its Advantages

Even though a gimmick just like “count backwards by 3s” offers some original minor benefits like a distraction method for a few neophyte putters in a synthetic setting for a concocted test on pressure, the likelihood is that the gimmick would rapidly habituate for the person. What then? Count backwards by 4s? This is the problem with selling gimmicks instead of helping the performer make core lasting psychological change with regarding handling “pressure.”

Last month, Bill Penning, a sports reporter for a newspaper wrote about Alpenfel, who has spent thousands of minutes learning how run-of-the-mill golf players putt. What Alpenfel has observed is that children appear to sink most of their short putts while adults often struggle. Why is this? One reason, in accordance with Alpenfel, is that children practice putting while adults don’t, and practice helps ensure putting success.

Although practice is certainly important, there is some interesting scientific data that suggests that the ease with which kids hit their short putts is not only about practice, it’s about being a kid.

Brain science gives one root of this “innocence” and explains why thinking like a kid can be useful. Simply put, playing sports early in life can have its advantages. This is because performance is less dependent on the prefrontal cortex, which becomes more involved when the same activities are performed later in life. Because the prefrontal cortex develops with age (this brain area isn’t thought to reach full maturity until well into early adulthood), when kids perform, other brain areas like sensory and motor cortex often take a more prominent role.

Take music for example, early learning has been linked to the acquisition of skills like absolute pitch that are best performed with a heavy dose of input from sensory and motor brain areas. This is true with language accents, too. It’s no secret that we tend to have better accents for languages that we learned when we were young children. Scientists think this happens in part because the words we learn as kids are more closely linked to sensory and motor brain areas than words learned as adults.

Because these sensory and motor areas are involved in processing the sounds of the words and speaking the words, reproducing correct words and their accents is easier when these brain areas do a lot of the work.

Of course, it is somewhat of a leap from language to putting, but less so than you might think. Moreover, sentiments regarding lessening the input of the prefrontal cortex have been brought up in the sporting world too, especially when your goal is to sink a simple putt under stress.

As work in my Lab has revealed, under pressure, athletes sometimes attempt to control their performance in a way that disrupts it. This control, which is often referred to as “paralysis by analysis,” stems from an over-active working-memory. A way to circumvent this kind of paralysis is to use methods that minimize dependence on working-memory. Indeed, investigation suggests that getting adults to count backwards by 3′s or to concentrate on a one word mantra that encapsulates the whole swing while taking an easy putt under pressure helps ensure success under stress. These methods limit the involvement of the prefrontal cortex. In short, they get adults to think more like children.

On the other hand, I think the best elegant solution is for the person to know why they are experiencing too much pressure and thus over-rely on their working memory and thereby get in their own way. For instance, are they overly concerned with impressing others? Regardless, from a philosophical perspective, they incorrectly believe that making the putt at hand will make their life better or worse.