I think this gave me a stroke...lol
Holding visual focus
- Thread starter The_JV
- Start date
Looking or focusing on the cb or the ob (or wherever) is 100% conscious effort. Thinking about position, planning a strategy, visualizing shots and outcomes is also 100% conscious effort. These things will always require conscious effort.
What you do with all of this visual and mental data, however (as far as performance goes), is primarily a subconscious process.
It's just how it is. Once you've developed a skill or a talent or a habit, the conscious mind hands the performance of that task over to the subconscious. This is so the conscious mind can be free to do other things without having to micromanage the actual performance of the task.
If we compared the mind to an iceberg, the portion of ice above water, where the sun is nice and bright, is the conscious mind. It's out there in the wide open air, experiencing its surroundings. The rest of the iceberg, the unseen massive bulk beneath the surface of the water, is the subconscious mind. It doesn't experience anything. It simply sits and waits to do something, like countless lines of machine code just waiting for the enter or start button to be pushed so it can cause the machine to perform a certain function or task.
Gotcha... I like to think I have concious control over the activity of aiming. However just believing it doesn't make it a reality.
...and we've circled back to my first post. I, for some reason either trained or allowed my subconcious to control my eyes in what my concious mind seemed haphazard. It really wasn't until I started digging into my game that I discovered this habit. However once discovered, the subconcious eye movement wrecked havoc on my confidence. Hence my experiment and query to ball focus.
Whew... took a while to get back to the root of it all...lol
Gotcha... I like to think I have concious control over the activity of aiming. However just believing it doesn't make it a reality.
...and we've circled back to my first post. I, for some reason either trained or allowed my subconcious to control my eyes in what my concious mind seemed haphazard. It really wasn't until I started digging into my game that I discovered this habit. However once discovered, the subconcious eye movement wrecked havoc on my confidence. Hence my experiment and query to ball focus.
Whew... took a while to get back to the root of it all...lol
Lol....yep... that's the bad side of subconscious programming through repetition: We can easily create bad habits or lazy routines that screw with our conscious awareness of what needs to happen.
...and that's the rub. I was a fairly decent shot with the haphazard eye darting. Dare I say, it didn't seem to effect me. Whether it was a bad thing or not I really can't say. I certainly wasn't upset with my success rate.
I'm still forcing the focus at this point and at times it still feels (<-there's that word) odd. Starting to become habit though. Not sure if it will make any difference at all, but here's hoping.
...and that's the rub. I was a fairly decent shot with the haphazard eye darting. Dare I say, it didn't seem to effect me. Whether it was a bad thing or not I really can't say. I certainly wasn't upset with my success rate.
I'm still forcing the focus at this point and at times it still feels (<-there's that word) odd. Starting to become habit though. Not sure if it will make any difference at all, but here's hoping.
I can't imagine changing something that was working well. Hope you get it all ironed out.
This is reminiscent of the quiet eye research....and that's the rub. I was a fairly decent shot with the haphazard eye darting. Dare I say, it didn't seem to effect me. Whether it was a bad thing or not I really can't say. I certainly wasn't upset with my success rate.
I'm still forcing the focus at this point and at times it still feels (<-there's that word) odd. Starting to become habit though. Not sure if it will make any difference at all, but here's hoping.
The poorer putter eye movements were more in the darting mode.
This has been found between pros as well, some are better putters than others.
The good putters had a longer gaze on the ball, but only about a half second longer, 400-600ms.
Tracking the eye movement of the better golfers found their movement was smoother along the shot line, where the less successful had more off the line jumps.
If I was going to describe it more simply, it would be to slow down and trace the track the ball needs to go down.
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boogieman
It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that ping.
Nothing wrong with building new neural pathways, even if you eventually decide to go back to your old method, it will still improve your overall game. I think to get better at pool, you need practice, but just as important, you need to keep learning new aspects of the game, no matter how minute. If you're not learning, it leads to boredom, at which point pool is no longer fun. I think the main difference between pool players and people who play pool is the level of enjoyment they get from learning and mastery....and that's the rub. I was a fairly decent shot with the haphazard eye darting. Dare I say, it didn't seem to effect me. Whether it was a bad thing or not I really can't say. I certainly wasn't upset with my success rate.
I'm still forcing the focus at this point and at times it still feels (<-there's that word) odd. Starting to become habit though. Not sure if it will make any difference at all, but here's hoping.
Sometimes visual focus comes quick and easy, other times we have to work at it. No matter which way you fall on a certain day, it's still just as important, even if it's difficult that day. Eventually visual focus takes much less effort as you master it.
I think visual focus is closely tied to mental focus. If you're tired etc, it makes both much harder to accomplish, so if at all possible be well rested for your practice sessions.
I think once you get the practice in, holding visual focus becomes will become much easier for you. You'll feel
(whoops) as if you're not even doing it consciously.
It means go anal with whatever you're trying to learn. That's how I took it.
Slow down, go fully conscious, think of every move in detail, analyze, re-do, re-analyze, etc. etc. until you're so sick of it, the next time you do it, you don't even know how or what you did but you did it well.
Jeff Livingston
My example of 'overlearn' would be my extreme efforts toward learning to hold visual focus on the OB. I'm still currently looking at nothing but the OB for several feathers of my cue before pulling the trigger on the shot. Eventually the goal is to only hold it from back stroke pause to follow through. I'm "overlearning" the focus in an effort to fast track the desired results.
I think that makes sense
I was reminded of the distinction between learning to make a shot and learning to the point you can’t miss the shot.
I think semantics and situational differences in meaning are in play here.
A sport scientist, Joan Vickers, the originator of quiet eyes, also developed a decision training model for Canadian Olympic athletes, for use at the National training center, located in her home town of Calgary.
In her findings she discovered that the best participants fought against what she called “automaticity”.
In a different educational learning model learning goes through unconscious/conscious and incompetence/ competence stages, and the use of the word conscious resembles automaticity or a habit based on repetition.
The consciousness levels of cognition are different and what happens there adds to our understanding.
First, competence isn’t your intended goal, a higher level of performance, expertise is the intention.
Pulling away from the automatic response, pulls the act into consciousness.
Jeremy Jones often commentates along those lines.
He sees that the automatic natural angles will run into danger if used for position and then tells us how a touch of stun or english can avoid the issue.
Those nuances, he calls shot keys.
While the consciousness I was talking about still functions like that, how it processes information, is what gives each of us each different profiles.
The conscious mind receives information, like an emotion.
An emotion bundles physiological responses, ongoing situation information, an historical timeline and even an automatic present oriented suggested response.
The conscious mind takes things apart, it decompresses the bundle into parts and reassembles into a bigger picture, subconsciously.
The subconscious assembles, it builds things into chunks, like habits.
The unconscious is the realm of wholes, some abstract, others symbolic.
No two levels are dominant in the same sense and each level is dominant in one.
If you are visually dominant in consciousness, you break things down into the visual components.
If your subconscious is auditory, then putting together plans or patterns, using narrative decision making would fit there.
If instead your conscious mind was auditory dominant, each word has specific meaning and each part of a written or spoken description carry specific information.
Based on the entirety of the conversations here your conscious mind is naturally dominated by visuals.
Your subconscious is auditory and you are trying to put it all together into a word picture, a bigger understanding.
Your darting eyes are sensed on the kinesthetic level, where feelings and physiological sensation exist, normally out of your consciousness.
Your conscious mind broke the whole of the eye movement dynamic down into parts and you are trying to organize them on a timeline.
Pulling stuff into conscious awareness is how we can work with its components.
It’s how we let the normally habitual be used as a starting reference.
It’s how we disassemble and reassemble, moving from mere competence, to excellence.
Waking conscious awareness - breaks into parts
Subconscious - assembles, chunks into components
Unconscious - experienced as wholes/understandings/concepts or their icons.
This is a different narrative asking different questions.
What level of consciousness is the player in and how does that level handle sensory data?
How does the predominance of sensory data in mind determine the level of consciousness experienced, in other words, what everyday trance state is subsequently accessed?
Oh I have zero doubt of that...lol
When I suggest that I would perfer to have full conscious control over my aim/shooting process, what I'm getting at is I'd rather actively process each step then have it computated behind the subconscious curtain. If I'm doing something on the conscious level, then I believe that means I can process what went wrong, (if something did). If we take to extremes for sake of the argument, and the whole process of addressing a shot, aiming, shooting is all done subconsciously and I miss.... How do I know which part of the process went bad...?
The above is a ton of guess work on how the conscious and subconscious operate, but my point remains. If the subconscious is fallible then I'd rather have it not control anything I'd perfer to have all the data on.
I guess what I prefer is what you were talking about earlier. Wherein we can pull subconscious processes into the conscious. From there I'd want to monitor the process, make any adjustments, and reboot the subconscious. So to speak...
Rather than a curtain, it’s a doorway, a liminal threshold through which sensory awareness comes and goes.
The threshold limit for consciousness is roughly estimated at 7 plus/minus 2 pieces of information at any one time.
By chunking we extend that.
A phone number of ten digits we deal with as three or four chunks, for example.
We build a stroke, a process of handling a shot, the same way.
In fact, our current state, will have a central sensory focus, that I call the foreground.
The other senses are not behind a veil, they are found on the periphery or in the background.
Some might even be part of the central sensory data, a surface can look and feel smooth at the same time, but the rest of the sensory information might be visual, not a digital either/or.
This is about predominance, not exclusion.
That's how it works anyway. So....you are normal. Sorry. Lol.
Seriously though, skills that require fine muscle control/muscle memory, like stroking a pool cue, building a stable bridge out of your fingers to support the cue, or hitting a shot with nearly the perfect amount of speed you want, are skills that your subconscious can perform more consistently and efficiently than conscious thought. The same applies to hand-eye coordination skills, like driving a car or riding a bike, or throwing a ball to a moving target or swinging a club at a golf ball, or whacking a 90mph baseball with the correct timing to send over the shortstop's head.
Conscious effort helped program the subconscious mind to perform these things. Once the skill gets repeated enough times, it automatically gets stored or transferred to the type of memory that conscious thought no longer has easy access to. The skill basically becomes a program, and conscious thoughts or sensory inputs simply trigger the program when needed, and sometimes when not needed....
A prime example: You jump in your car to run to the store. Once you're on the highway and a few miles down road, you inadvertently take the wrong exit and find yourself heading toward your place of employment. Of course you realize this mistake immediately, and you turn around and get back on track. This happened because the drive to work has been done so many times that it's now stored as a program in your subconscious memory. Consciously you were thinking about that grocery list you left on the kitchen counter, and when you glanced at that familiar work exit or familiar surroundings, you triggered the "drive to work" program and your subconscious took over.
Without this natural process where subconscious programs get triggered, we'd have no "fight or flight" response, no neural networks that allow us to perform complicated skills or talents that seem effortless. But the subconscious programs/networks don't negate the importance of conscious knowledge, such as mental strategy and physical awareness of what needs to happen in given situations.
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