okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Monday, March 19, 2007
Why orienteers practice
An interesting quote I read in the New York Times yesterday:
The automatic mind generally takes care of things like muscle control. But it also does more ethereal things. It recognizes patterns and construes situations, searching for danger, opportunities or the unexpected. It also shoves certain memories, thoughts, anxieties and emotions up into consciousness.
It is from an Op-Ed article by someone named David Brooks.
Brooks was talking about how baseball players are developing the unconscious mind by, for example, doing lots of practice. Here is more of what he wrote:
Over the decades, the institution of baseball has figured out how to instruct the unconscious mind, to make it better at what it does. As we know the automatic brain only by the behavior it produces, so we can instruct it only by forcing it to repeat certain actions. Jeff Kent is practicing covering first after all these years because the patterns of the automatic brain have to be constantly and repetitively reinforced.
