Generativity

by Andrew Lynn

  How, then, do world-class batsmen do it? If it is impossible to rely on reaction time alone, then what gives them their edge?

  A team of Australian scholars led by Sean Müller went about exploring this. They filmed the actions of two bowlers (one a medium-pace swing bowler and the second a leg-spin bowler) as they bowled a series of different deliveries. The bowlers were instructed to deliver three sets of different ball types: an outswinger, inswinger, and short ball for the swing bowler; and a leg-spinner, ‘wrong-un’, and short ball for the spin bowler. The video clips of these images were digitally edited to create a total of ninety-six ‘trials’ (forty-eight trials for each bowler).

  The participants in the experiment came from three groups of varying levels of expertise. One group was composed of ‘highly skilled’ players: these were recruited from the cricket squads of the Australian Test, Queensland Bulls First Class, Queensland Academy of Sport, and Australian Institute of Sport. The second group was composed of ‘intermediate players’ recruited from the Queensland Cricket Association third grade competition. University students made up the final group of ‘low skilled’ players.

  Players from each of the three groups were shown the clips (projected at a size of 1.78 × 1.38 m) and asked to predict both ball type and ball length. There was, however, one additional difficulty. The images were hidden (or ‘occluded’) at certain moments in the delivery and the participants would be required to make their prediction on the basis of information available to them up to that point. Sometimes they would be shown the whole delivery and make their predictions on that basis. In other trials the image would be occluded at ball release, at first-foot impact (FFI), and even as early in delivery as back-foot impact (BFI).

  The results? Starting with the swing bowler trials, a curious pattern began to emerge. Players of all ability levels displayed a respectable ability to predict the type and length of ball when they were able to see the full video clip from run-up to release and beyond. Where the highly skilled batsmen have a unique advantage, however, is that they were able to predict the type of ball that would be coming their way even when ball flight information was occluded. The expert batsmen showed an even more pronounced ability to predict the type of ball well before it had been released (i.e., somewhere between BFI and FFI).

  What that means is that somewhere between

  and

  and at the very least between this

  and this

  the expert batsman has been able to extract and act upon some reasonably accurate information that the others were not able to capitalize upon. Simply put, great batsmen are able to anticipate the type and trajectory of the ball well before it has even left the bowler’s hand.

  Müller and his colleagues then took the experiment a bit further to establish what precisely it was that the world-class batsmen were seeing that the rest of us – you, me, the university students, and even intermediate players – seem to be missing. It’s this:

  The bowler’s head, torso, legs, and non-bowling arm and hand have been occluded. All that is left of the bowler is his bowling arm and hand in the pre-release stage. Guess what? If an expert batsman sees only this, he can still predict at accuracy levels significantly greater than chance what kind of ball will be coming his way.6

  * * *

  The idea that exceptional people perceive an alternative heightened ‘reality’ conflicts, of course, with the commonsense belief that the objective world ‘just is’. Samuel Johnson once famously attempted to refute the idealistic philosophy of Bishop Berkeley in the simplest way possible – by kicking against a large stone with such force that his foot rebounded from it. It’s no surprise that scientists have for a long time been broadly of Johnson’s camp. Sensory stimulation, it was thought, triggered neurological events that in turn gave rise to perception. The act of perception itself was considered to be essentially passive.

  There has, however, been a problem with this model. If it were indeed the case that perception is passive, people wearing light-reversing goggles would experience an inversed perceptual image of the world. But that isn’t what happens. In fact, people who wear the goggles for some time and intentionally interact with the world come to perceive a normal image of it. Even at this most basic level of raw perception, then, the mind is busy rearranging the information transmitted by the senses.

  In the same way that active perception can ‘fill in’ and make up for objective perceptual deficiencies, so inactive perception can erase or distort aspects of the environment that are objectively present. We suffer from change blindness: experiments have shown that people don’t notice when looking at a picture that the men in that picture have had their hats exchanged – an effect that occurred for fully 100 percent of observers – and we don’t notice when one individual is replaced by another wearing different clothes. We also suffer from inattentional blindness: while watching a group of people passing a ball to each other, observers have failed to notice a person dressed as a black gorilla walking straight through the group. And it goes further. Our subjective conditions don’t just blind us to aspects of reality, they also contaminate the world as we experience it. Those who fear heights perceive ledges as higher than those with less fear. Hills appear steeper for tired, elderly, unfit, and unhealthy people, as well as for those bearing heavy loads.7

  The world presented to us by our perceptions does not, in fact, need to be anything like reality. Darwinists may say that perceptions accurately reflect reality and that there is a good reason for this. ‘Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago,’ runs this line of thinking. ‘If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.’ Evolutionary fitness, though, doesn’t require that we know the world accurately; it merely requires that the way we perceive the world contributes to survival and reproduction. David Hoffman of the University of California, Irvine, compares this to use of icons on a computer: it doesn’t matter that an icon doesn’t look anything like the innards of the computer where the corresponding file is stored; all that matters is that the icon functions as a useful guide. Evolution ‘has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive,’ says Hoffman. ‘But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out,’ he adds, ‘the tiger would eat you.’8

  * * *

  The German-Swiss writer Herman Hesse spoke of this power of the mind in one of his most enigmatic works, Demian (1919), by reference to the unusual lovemaking abilities of the night-moth. There is a species of night-moth, says Hesse, in which the females are much less common than the males. If you take a female night-moth of this species, the male moths sense her as the only female in the region and will visit from hours away – even at a distance of several miles. ‘Nature abounds with such inexplicable things,’ he concludes. ‘But my argument is: if the female moths were as abundant as the males, the latter would not have such a highly developed sense of smell. They’ve acquired it only because they had to train themselves to have it.’ The male night-moths need to obtain a certain outcome; they therefore need to have the means to achieve the outcome; nature then rises to the task and provides it for them. The need brings outs the potentiality. Hesse draws the inevitable parallel: ‘If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it.’

  * * *

  Expert athletes in fast ball sports are somewhat like Hesse’s night-moths. They don’t necessarily have a physical advantage over the rest of us; research has shown that top athletes do not, in fact, possess faster reaction times than members of the general population. What they have is a cognitiveadvantage. They are able to use body cues (rather than just ball trajectory) to predict the nature of the shots they will face and to take appropriate action on that basis. Expert athletes make more effective use of information from the visual fie
ld than do relative novices.9

  Frame

  The research shows that perception changes – it heightens and becomes more precisely attuned to important features – as expertise grows. Where it is silent is on whether we can take deliberate steps to adjust the way we perceive the field of our activities – and if so, how? For that, we can examine what some of the really great athletes themselves have said and done.

  * * *

  Not many sporting events compare with the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa. The fight, which would come to be known as the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, was considered to be a historic event and has been called ‘arguably the greatest sporting event of the twentieth century’.10 It was not, however, a fight that Ali was tipped to win. Foreman was younger, looked fitter, and was indisputably stronger. He had won all of his forty previous fights, thirty-seven of them by knockout. If Foreman was on the way up, it looked like Ali was on the way down. After three-and-one-half years’ suspension for refusal to comply with the draft, he had failed so far to recover the title that had been stripped from him.

  From the outset, though, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary fight. The bell rings and Ali charges forward to meet a slower moving but equally resolute Foreman. Foreman presses Ali back. After circling and feinting, Ali fires out a light left jab, then a hard right into the centre of Foreman’s forehead. It connects. Ali dances around Foreman. Around fifteen seconds later Ali strikes home again – with another right. The pattern is set; Ali has been hitting with right-hand leads. This is the most dangerous and difficult punch – a result of the fact that the right hand has a lot farther to travel, exposing the fighter to counterattacks from the left. ‘Champions do not hit other champions with right-hand leads.’11

  Foreman recovers his composure in the ensuing rounds imposing upon Ali with his sheer physical strength. Then – in round 7 with Ali up against the ropes and taking a pounding from Foreman – something totally unexpected happens: Ali starts talking to his opponent. He would later recall the episode like this:

  I said, “Okay sucker, I’m backing up against the ropes, and I want you to take your best shots.” And I just stood there. “Come on, show me something. Show me something, kid. You’re not doing nothing. You’re just a girl, look at you. You ain’t got nothing. Come on sucker, show me something. Show me something, sucker.”

  What happens next is there for all to see in video recordings of the fight. Foreman keeps coming with punches: a right uppercut to the body, cross, jab and cross, and several body hooks – all with Ali simply taking the blows. ‘He was so tired,’ remembers Ali in an interview he gave later, ‘he was just falling on the ropes. I said, “Man, this is the wrong place to get tired.”’ Foreman recalls the fight in similar terms: ‘All he would say is: “Is that all you got, George?” And that,’ says Foreman, ‘was about all I had.’

  This interchange would be the turning point of the fight. The instant Ali got off the ropes he threw a lightning fast and devastating combination of blows, knocking Foreman to the ground and out for the count. The episode was totally unexpected and would change Foreman’s world forever. Ali had in effect overpowered his opponent not only with his physical force, but also with the force of his own reality. ‘I went out to beat and destroy a boxer,’ reflected Foreman later. ‘Little did I know I would be facing something greater than a boxer.’

  * * *

  The firmness of mind Ali showed at the critical moment can be called ‘frame’. Frames, according to cognitive scientists, are mental structures that shape the way we see the world – our goals, actions, values, and sense of reality.12 Frames were originally studied from a linguistic standpoint, and most framing theory has been directed at creating persuasive communications. This is because every word evokes a frame, and so the use of words to evoke preferred frames has been a centre of attention for linguists and communications experts. ‘Frame’ singular, however, refers to a much broader and deeper concept: the coherence of a person’s subjective reality. A strong or robust frame is one that retains coherence in the face of external shocks, whether from circumstances or people.

  * * *

  Can we reconstruct how Ali may have cultivated his impregnable ‘frame’ in the fight against Foreman in Zaire? One September afternoon seven weeks before the fight in Kinshasa, the American writer Norman Mailer had taken a trip to Ali’s training camp at Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Deer Lake is famous both for its replicas of slave cabins high on the hill as well as boulders on the entrance road painted with the names of Ali’s opponents. The mood had been gloomy as Ali prepared to face the man widely perceived to be his greatest challenge yet. Just a few months earlier, Foreman had destroyed Ken Norton in a fight in Caracas, knocking him down for the second time in only the second round and landing no fewer than five blows as he fell – ‘as quick in the instant as a lion slashing its prey’, as Mailer put it.

  In spite of this, Ali cultivated an unshakeable self-confidence. Every day he would subject his interviewers to the same speeches, the same poems, and the same mock punches flashed two inches short of their face. ‘One whole horrendous nightmare – Foreman’s extermination of Norton – was being converted, reporter by reporter, poem by poem, same analysis after same analysis – “He’s got a hard-push punch but he can’t hit” – into the reinstallation of Ali’s ego.’ A great fighter will not live with anxiety like other men, thought Mailer; to think of how much he can be hurt by another fighter would make him not more creative but less. Buried anxiety, Mailer suggested, was transmuted to ego. ‘What a wall of ego Ali’s will had erected over the years.’13

  * * *

  A further clue comes from what happened shortly before that fight. Before travelling to the stadium, Ali had asked to speak on the phone to the legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato. D’Amato had been Ali’s boxing mentor, and in this moment he focussed on the psychological aspect of the fight. Ali was to throw his first punch ‘with bad intentions’, instructed D’Amato. ‘Fear is like fire,’ added D’Amato, ‘it can burn your house down or it can cook your food.’14

  We don’t know, beyond this, exactly how D’Amato might have helped to strengthen Ali’s frame prior to the Foreman fight. We do know, however, how D’Amato worked with the boxer widely considered to be second only to Ali in the history of boxing – Mike Tyson. What Tyson tells us about D’Amato’s approach is unusually revealing as to how champions are made.

  At the beginning, D’Amato didn’t even let Tyson box. Instead, after a workout, he would sit down with Tyson and they would talk. ‘He’d talk about my feelings and emotions and about the psychology of boxing. He wanted to reach me at the root,’ recalled Tyson afterwards. ‘We talked a lot about the spiritual aspects of the game.’ ‘If you don’t have the spiritual warrior in you,’ D’Amato told his young protégé, ‘you’ll never be a fighter. I don’t care how big and strong you are.’

  The approach taken shows us how a resilient ‘frame’ can be built up.

  First, the starting point was to be the mind. The mind, for D’Amato, was nothing less than a battleground. ‘Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is 90 percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit.’ Sometimes D’Amato would say to Tyson, ‘You allow your mind to get the better of you’ – unlike the greatest fighters who ‘could fight the best fight of their life even if someone had just kidnapped their child or killed their mother.’ D’Amato ‘thought that punching hard had nothing to do with anything physical, it was all emotional. Controlled emotion.’

  Second, D’Amato set out to release some of Tyson’s limiting beliefs: ‘My job is to peel off layers and layers of damages that are inhibiting your true ability to grow and fulfill your potential.’ It’s clear enough that the ‘peeling off’ was actually a breaking down of inner limitations. ‘No one ever made me more consci
ous of being a black man,’ said Tyson. At the same time, D’Amato would remind Tyson that nothing could stop him but himself: ‘You’re so superior to those people. They can never do what you are capable of doing. You got it in you.’ D’Amato was dredging up and disposing of Tyson’s mental effluvia and inner resistance. ‘You could conquer any world. Don’t use the word “can’t.” You can’t say “can’t.”’

  Third, D’Amato went about remodelling the inner man. The method adopted for Tyson was inspired by the work of an early twentieth-century French pharmacist and psychologist by the name of Emile Coué. Coué had developed a method of self-suggestion based upon the idea that the unconscious presides over all our actions, and that we reach the unconscious and direct its purposes by active imagination and autosuggestion. Autosuggestion is not a choice, thought Coué; it happens anyway as a result of the way our minds work. The choice is as to what kind of autosuggestions we want floating around in our heads.

  D’Amato had a copy of Coué’s work and had managed – using its methods – to reverse the effects of a cataract on his eyesight. He was determined to apply this method to Tyson. The classic Coué affirmation is to say, ‘Every day in every way, getting better and better’. D’Amato had Tyson modify this. ‘So he had me saying, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me” over and over again all day. I loved doing that, I loved hearing myself talking about myself.’ But none of this came automatically; it came, recalls Tyson, from repeatedly going over the visualization in your mind.15