Do you think too much?

[Skippy27]

Agreed! Get on the table. Play better players and ABSORB and ask questions. Practice with purpose and practice and play often. Very few of us can actually transfer the science ie. physics of the game into useful knowledge. Whether we want to admit it or not 95% of us are feel players.

Experience is knowledge just learned another way.

Experience without gaining knowledge will get you no further in this game than obtaining knowledge without gaining experience.

This is true of everything you do in your life except answering questions on a test.

Gaining knowledge before the experience lays the foundation down for speeding up the knowledge gained through experience. A good example of this is the most important shot in pool: sliding cue ball striking the object ball. It can take you thousands of shots to finally figure out that if the cue ball is sliding when it strikes the object ball it will go 90 degrees and the harder you hit it the further it goes down that line before any spin takes affect. However, reading a book or watching a video will teach you that in 30 seconds and then you can spend the next 1 million shots trying to master it through experience.

 

[app4dstn]

Great answer! Goes right to the heart of the matter, too.

Yes, some of us have no choice, either by nature or by necessity. I have a strong tendency to over think almost everything in my life. Always have. I suspect it's just in my nature.

I try my best to override this tendency when I do things like play pool, but I am aware that there is a huge collection of facts and understanding about numerous aspects from my life that is always trying to subvert my "higher" (unconscious) self with a bunch of trivial and unrelated thought processes. These facts I have dubbed my "block of knowledge". Everybody has one, some bigger than others. I'm very proud of my block, and love to impress friends and family with my personal cornucopia of useful (and sometimes useless) facts. Psychologists have a name for this block - "crystalized intelligence". It is the sum of all the things we "know" to be true in the universe, either learned by experience, or by the second-hand absorption of the experiences of others (reading, watching, lessons, and such methods).

"Fluid intelligence" OTOH has to do with problem solving, pattern recognition, spatial orientation, reasoning and logic, etc. It does not depend on the accumulation of factual knowledge, and has been thought to be inhibited to various degrees by too much crystalized intelligence ("information overload"). We seem to lose our ability to tap into our fluid intelligence as we get older (fluid intelligence has been shown to decline with age), and our block of knowledge expands with all sorts of facts. Why reinvent the wheel every time we need one when we already have a perfectly functional wheel at our disposal? Meaning, "Why bother to work out a new and novel solution when we can simply draw on the established facts already stored in our brain?

I believe that pool is best learned and played using our fluid intelligence. I even believe that may be a huge part of the allure of the game. This is our native intelligence, the intelligence we were brought into this world with before an ocean of facts came along and crystalized our thinking into an easier and more manageable world to live in. We secretly yearn to get back to that state. Playing pool offers an opportunity to return to our original nature, but first you have to be able to let go of the facts and just see what is presented in front of you and go with it. I would call that state "dead stroke".

seems to me you see the 2 entities as having a boundary, and somewhat mutually exclusive. i see them as just different states in a cycle. (btw, have you read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?)

and that was a great link in the 1st post. (i immediately latched onto having to know what the author's world record was.... wow ). i came away in high agreement and thought the message was about being able to transverse the divides within the brain. and facilitating that through physical action (or at least removal from the academic style setting of the cubicle/classroom). his suggestion that the cerebellum was part of the cognitive process was new to me, as that wasn't how we learned it in high school 30 years ago. so that was cool.

paraphrasing one of my wife's inspirational ceramic plates that clog up our kitchen, playing games keeps us young. i agree, and believe that is because playing a game well demands us to bridge the crystal/fluid divide.

i'm new to pool. totally addicted. as i was with golf a decade and a half ago (and had to let go when i started a new family). that i took up something new, rather than to go back to the spots/activities that started in my youth is mostly because of the novelty and having to learn from square one. fwiw, i'm considered an over-thinker at the pool table. it's gone from being a jigsaw puzzle of 5000 pieces to 1000. the picture is crystallizing. and that's exciting.

 

[Sloppy Pockets]

seems to me you see the 2 entities as having a boundary, and somewhat mutually exclusive. i see them as just different states in a cycle. (btw, have you read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?)

and that was a great link in the 1st post. (i immediately latched onto having to know what the author's world record was.... wow ). i came away in high agreement and thought the message was about being able to transverse the divides within the brain. and facilitating that through physical action (or at least removal from the academic style setting of the cubicle/classroom). his suggestion that the cerebellum was part of the cognitive process was new to me, as that wasn't how we learned it in high school 30 years ago. so that was cool.

paraphrasing one of my wife's inspirational ceramic plates that clog up our kitchen, playing games keeps us young. i agree, and believe that is because playing a game well demands us to bridge the crystal/fluid divide.

Very interesting comments. You've obviously given this question some careful thought.

No, I don't view them as mutually exclusive at all. One is totally dependent on the other, although they are probably inversely correlated with respect to age. It's just that as we learn more stuff, we don't need to use our fluid intelligence as much because we (or somebody else) have already figured out the stuff we needed it for it the first place. The balance begins to shift toward more crystalized thought because this is simply more useful in everyday life.

We need ways that stimulate our fluid intelligence it in order to regain some of what we've lost. Adding thousands of extraneous facts about playing pool, for example, does nothing to help us regain our fluid intelligence, and probably just hurts our game anyway.

Pool is really a simple game. Poke a ball at another ball and try to get that ball to roll down into a hole at the edge of the playing surface. Nothing is gained by knowing how to determine the duration and magnitude of the impulse between tip types - that is unless you are a tip manufacturer. Better to just empty your mind so you are free to focus on exactly how the ball is coming off the tip. I could come up with dozens of similar examples, but I'm sure you get my point.

The problem is, once you "know" something, it's pretty hard to "un-know" it at will (at my age I un-know all kinds of stuff against my will). Basically, it's stuck in there, and you will be unreceptive to ideas that may conflict with your prior knowledge. More importantly, though, the sum of all of these facts (pool and non-pool related) acquired over our lifetimes seems to diminish the amount of fluid intelligence we are able to tap into. So when the bad roll or or lock-up safety or other difficult problem comes up in the game, we will (theoretically) be less able to see a novel and intuitive solution.

What seems to be happening is a gradual decline in scores on the performance tests that psychologists use to evaluate fluid intelligence (which in and of itself is highly debated) as we get older. Kind of a "use it or lose it" phenomenon.

So, yes, your wife is correct IMO. Games do keep us young - both in spirit and, apparently, in the mind.


BTW I have read Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" twice.... and Herrigel's "Zen in the Art of Archery" numerous times. Guess which one I enjoyed the most?