Can you become a better skier by reading a book? Unlikely as it seems, the answer is yes.
My father started teaching me to ski when I was small enough to snowplow with my skis inside his. Dad was an old-school alpine athlete who believed in long boards and sharp edges. You could spot him on the slopes by his signature carving turns. His informal lessons focused primarily on the technique of edges, weight, and stance, with a sprinkling of philosophy.
Despite this excellent instruction, I remained a middling, timid skier well into adulthood. I understood the concepts, but rarely seemed to put them together on challenging slopes.
When my children were in elementary school, Dad would visit us annually during the February “ski week” in their school system, and we’d all head off to the mountains. As this was often my only ski trip of the season, I wanted to make the most of it. One year, I read the book Inner Skiing by W. Timothy Gallwey and Robert Kriegel in hopes of finding clues to better performance on the slopes.
Inner Skiing describes two selves: Self 1 and Self 2. In an athletic endeavor, Self 1 is the logical, rational mind, and the part I’d been learning with. Self 2 is the physical intelligence that controls the body. And when you’re sliding down a steep incline at high speed, the Self 2 physical intelligence takes over—in my case, experiencing hesitation and fear.
The rational Self 1 understood that, when starting down a steep bowl, the skier should lean down the hill. But when fear set in, the rational mind was overruled by the instinct to back off. And as I demonstrated repeatedly, when you lean back on a steep slope, your skis keep moving forward and you skid downhill on your backside.
The book offered ways to get these two selves working together by paying attention to and labeling how things felt in my body. It helped me understand how thoughts can interfere with physical performance. When Self 1 and Self 2 collaborated, putting the concepts into practice, I started skiing with more assurance and enjoyment.
The “inner game” series started in 1974, when Gallwey published a book titled The Inner Game of Tennis. This book sold more than a million copies and spawned others covering additional sports as well as music and business. Clearly, Gallwey was on to something with the idea of the two selves.
If we have multiple selves participating in sporting activities like tennis and skiing, then certainly they are present in other parts of our lives as well.
The Myth of the Rational Self
Have you ever read a novel with an unreliable narrator? You read along happily, only to discover growing numbers of inconsistencies, or worse, that the narrator committed the murder. (A few Agatha Christie readers might feel my pain here.)
We’re the authors and narrators of our own life stories. Our thoughts provide constant commentary, claiming to own the experiences and our very identities. We may mistake our thoughts as the triggers for our actions, rather than after-the-fact rationalizations. Psychologists can prove that, like the unreliable narrator in fiction, the voices in our heads aren’t telling us the whole story.
The first lesson of cognitive science is that there is more—much more—going on than appears on the surface of your thoughts.
Your brain is like cable television, with hundreds of channels but only a few worth paying attention to.
For example, how do you make important decisions? We may imagine ourselves drawing rational conclusions based on evidence. Behavioral economist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman argues otherwise. He suggests that often, without being aware of it, we rely on cognitive shortcuts to save ourselves the effort of analysis.
In the book Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains our decision-making processes using two fictional entities:
- System 1 is automatic; it relies on gut feelings, shortcuts, habits, and heuristics to make decisions, sometimes very effectively, and in other cases with suboptimal results. System 1 is terrible at assessing probability, as any statistics teacher will tell you.
- System 2 is effortful, engaged when we concentrate to compute math problems or give someone detailed driving directions. This system consumes a great deal of energy, so we avoid using it as much as possible.
Both decision-making systems are vital for our survival. The modern world presents an abundance of choices for everything from the route to take to work to the type of coffee to order. (Decaf? Macchiato? Venti or grande? Colombian or Sumatran?) We would exhaust ourselves before breakfast making rational decisions if we approached everything with our effortful, analytic System 2.
The key is understanding when to use each system and which decisions merit deeper analysis.
The written word is the output of the thinking mind. Productive and creative writers learn to tap into the automatic, intuitive processes as well as the intentional ones. We’ll borrow from Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 to create a similar two-part model of the mind.
Our Two Writing Selves
Brains are complex, interconnected networks.
You have probably heard of the left-brain, right-brain distinction. The left hemisphere of the brain lines up with our analytical and verbal skills, and the right hemisphere with creative, intuitive, and nonverbal activities.
Mapping activities to brain regions may be too simplistic for complex tasks like producing written language. According to Dr. Daniel Levitin, professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University and author of The Organized Mind, “Language ability does not reside in a specific region of the brain; rather, it comprises a distributed network—like the electrical wires in your house—that draws on and engages regions throughout the brain.”
Knowing where a mental process happens doesn’t tell us how to activate it. The brain is hidden, but we can perceive our thoughts and behaviors. Rather than focusing on exactly where things happen in the brain, let’s label groups of mental processes that we can activate when needed.
On the one hand, writing requires focus and discipline. We’ll refer to the mental systems behind these behaviors as the Scribe. In ancient times, scribes were the people who wrote things down. In societies in which few people knew how to read, the skill of writing itself was highly valued. Scribes were not always the authors of the words they recorded.
Within each of us, the Scribe summons our verbal skills to find the right words, assembles them in grammatically correct sentences, and creates sensible structures. The Scribe manages deadlines and gets the work done.
But writers also access intuition, creativity, and empathy. These processes are the domain of the Muse.
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