Last week, Bill Pennington, a sports reporter for the New York Times wrote about Eric Alpenfels, the director of instruction at the Pinehurst Golf Academy in North Carolina, who has spent hundreds of hours studying how run-of-the-mill golfers putt. What Alpenfels has observed is that kids seem to sink most of their short putts while adults often struggle. Why is this? One reason, according to Alpenfels, is that kids 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. As Pennington put it:
"...to a child, playing with a general sense of golf innocence, a short putt is simple. You're just roll that little ball into a bigger hole."
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 (after all, both activities involve the coordination of multiple muscle groups into complex movement patterns). 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 Human Performance Lab has shown, under pressure, athletes sometimes try 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 (our cognitive horsepower that is housed in the prefrontal cortex). One way to circumvent this type of paralysis is to employ techniques that minimize reliance on working-memory. Indeed, research suggests that getting adults to count backwards by 3's or to focus on a one word mantra that encapsulates the entire swing (e.g., smooth) while taking an easy putt under pressure helps ensure success under stress. These techniques limit the involvement of the prefrontal cortex. In short, they get adults to think more like kids.
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