The Neurobiology of High Performance

Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional Performance
by John Eliot, Ph.D.

(Page 5 of 6)

You can break down the Training and Trusting Mindsets into an almost bipolar set of descriptors. Take a look at the following chart:

The Training Mindset	The Trusting Mindset
Active Mind	Empty Mind
Judgmental	Accepting
Analytical	Instinctive
Scientific	Artistic
Wanting It Now	Patient
Calculating	Reacting
Effortful	Playful
Critical	Quiet
Intentional	Rhythmic
Controlling	Letting It Happen

These contrasting qualities of thinking, which produce different performances, also depend on a different neurobiology - as different, in fact, as you and a squirrel running across a telephone wire! When you stand fifty feet in the air at the top of a telephone pole and look at the infinitesimally thin wire you're trying to cross, a million thoughts are likely to race through your head: I'll never make it; it's too far; it's too high; the wire's too small, too unsteady; I can't balance on this thing; I'll kill myself; this is crazy; it has nothing to do with "real courage"; and so on. The squirrel, on the other hand, just scurries across the wire without thinking. Of course, that's because squirrels cannot think. Their sensory system receives sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches. Their brains are able to process this information, act accordingly, and execute skillful patterns of behavior. The human brain can do all of this, but it can also complicate matters: We can evaluate the sensory information and the situation, analyzing all the angles, and then intentionally train ourselves to improve our performance - all qualities of the Training Mindset. This ability to reason, evaluate, and make rational calculations is what separates us from other animals, and surely such rationality is a blessing in life - except when you are performing under pressure. Then you want to put aside the Training Mindset and respond to the stimuli bombarding you as much like a squirrel as is humanly possible. Squirrels are natural masters of the Trusting Mindset.

I want to help you find your inner squirrel. Consider that moment in a physical examination when the doctor taps your knee with his reflex hammer and your foot kicks straight out, reflexively (i.e., without a thought). It's called a "myotatic" or "flexor reflex," and the neurobiology goes like this: The blow of the hammer compresses a sensory nerve in the knee, altering its chemical structure, which, in a chain reaction, sends an electrical signal along the nerve up to the lumbar section of the spinal cord. This ascending nerve connects to a parallel descending motor nerve that dispatches the electrical signal down to the muscle group that causes the leg to extend. If you're sitting on the examination table and the doctor taps your knee without warning, your foot will actually kick out even before your brain gets the signal that the doctor is armed with a hammer. Neuroscientists call this chemical-electrical response "closed loop information processing." (Mention that to your doctor during your next physical - he'll be impressed.)

The classic flexor reflex is a human response that is far less complex than the neurobiology of a squirrel scurrying across a telephone wire. There are actually four types of closed loop processes:

1. Monosynaptic Reflexes (the flexor reflex), which are the shortest and quickest, involving the fewest neurons

2. Multisynaptic Reflexes, organized through spinal cord interneurons (e.g., responding to stepping on a piece of glass accidentally, or picking up a scalding cup of coffee)

3. Brainstem Regulatory Functions (such as controlling the heart and lungs)

4. Patterned Intentional Behavior, organized in the thalamus (the same kind of processing the squirrel is using)

With each progressively more complicated function, more neurons and more neural junctions are involved. Of the human body's roughly 100 billion nerve cells, the flexor reflex needs only two to function properly. Higher level closed processes, such as those at the brain stem or thalamus, might use a couple hundred thousand. The cerebral cortex, however - home of conscious thought, judgment, reason, and calculation - needs billions of nerves to do its thing. Information processing that occurs on that level, the Training Mindset, is called "open loop" - open, literally, to interpretation. Once the cerebral cortex gets involved, the transfer from incoming sensory data to outgoing action is influenced by any number of brain areas adding input, thus slowing down the system, impeding behavior efficiency, and increasing the chance of error.*

The squirrel essentially has no cerebral cortex. But the animal does have a thalamus, a bunch of clusters of neurons in the brain, or ganglia, called pattern generators. These produce programmed activity in response to stimuli. It's the highest level closed loop processing available to the brain. The squirrel runs across the wire or finds food by executing ingrained instincts - trusting them, so to speak. The signal comes in, gets turned into a pattern in the thalamus, and a response is sent out. If the wind is blowing the wire to and fro, that sensory stimulus is sent to the squirrel's thalamus, which modifies the motor pattern sent out to allow the squirrel to react to the change and stay balanced on the wire. With no influence from the cerebral cortex, the squirrel is not distracted by any complex assessment of information, and thus sticks with a closed loop process - with virtually no misplaced steps, loss of balance, or fatal falls.

We humans can assure a similar kind of closed processing by taking our cerebral cortex out of the game, as it were, and allowing ourselves to react to sensory stimuli with motor responses we have already stored. The star basketball player looks at the rim and shoots. No evaluating the distance, no decisions about how high to extend the shooting arm over a defender, how much to flick the wrist for perfect rotation, or what the consequence might be if the shot misses. No thinking period. Neurologically, the sensory information shoots up the spine to the thalamus into a central pattern generator - the "superior colliculous" is the one in charge of the kind of motor skills used in basketball - where it is organized, transferred to descending neurons, and sent back to cause the arms and hands to do what a basketball player has trained his arms and hands to do. In other words, look and shoot. For the star basketball player, it's as instinctive as it is for a squirrel, executed the same way as tossing a set of keys.

Unless you are distracted by external sensations or your inner critic, conscious thought will convert these to open loop operations. Once the cerebral cortex is activated, the system begins to look a lot like a California freeway at rush hour (particularly like intersections referred to as "spaghetti junctions") - millions of neurons releasing multiple kinds of neurotransmitters into hundreds of synaptic junctions all at the same time and converging at the same pattern generator (or worse, simultaneously at conflicting pattern generators). It is up to the brain to figure out where all the signals should go. When the cerebral cortex gets very active - all that reasoning and evaluating that goes with the Training Mindset - the brain's pattern generators get overloaded and thus the system gets bogged down, producing less efficient, less successful action, with a greater number of mistakes. In short, you don't perform with your "A game."

But you are still capable of being a skilled "truster." As the experiment showed, we are born key-tossers. Tossing a set of keys seems to require no thought; it's very squirrel-like. The consequences are minimal, so we don't bother to use our cerebral cortex. We just act, and thus the thalamus produces whatever pattern it has stored via a closed loop. But if I told a large group to come back next week for one chance to toss that same set of keys into my hand, chest-high - this time for a $1 million prize to the most accurate tosser - enter open loop processing. Things would likely turn scientific; people would start practicing. A few contestants would surely find a way to sneak into the room at night to get in some repetitions on the "game field." They'd set up video cameras to help them work on their key-tossing techniques. "Did I keep my wrist square with the target? Was my elbow aligned for the optimum toss?" I wouldn't be surprised if people started going to the gym to get into shape.

What was a simple, "minimal synaptic" task, not to mention a fun game, is now difficult and filled with potential for anxiety. Once the pressure is on, people try to toss a set of keys across a room and end up choking. Imagine if we turned key-tossing into a college sport with full-ride scholarships. Summer key-tossing camps for kids would appear. Coaches would pop up around the country, charging sixty-five dollars an hour for private lessons. How-to books would hit the display shelves at Barnes & Noble. Before you knew it, Fox Sports would sign an exclusive TV contract; Nike would buy rights to print their logo on the keys; and depending on the genius of the promoters and advertisers, we'd be on the way to forty million people watching the "World Series" of key-tossing.

If you think that's crazy, remember that the multibillion dollar professional sports industry evolved from games invented by kids in backyards and sandlots. And then consider the rapidly increasing popularity of the X Games (professional skateboarding, sky diving, and street luge). And there are those lumberjack championships on ESPN, in which men and women compete against each other, sawing massive logs. I recently read of people training for an annual hot-dog eating contest in New York City, featuring a point spread, performance enhancing drug accusations, instant replay review, and a two-time champion who has turned his wins into more than $150,000. But it's still just eating hot dogs - or skateboarding, or chopping down trees. What has changed is the mindset. That instinctive, free-wheeling, "What's the big deal?" trusting attitude has been replaced by an analytical, critical, evaluative, "there's a fortune hanging on this toss so I better make sure I've got it right" training approach to performance.

Superstars do not think that way. When it's go time, when it really counts, technique is not on their minds. Like a child playing tag or kicking a soccer ball against a backboard, they give their skills free reign and do not focus on anything but the target of that particular moment. Or in the words of the three-time defending hot-dog eating champion Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi, weighing in at a mere 145 pounds: "I was standing right next to him [6 feet, 5 inch, four-hundred pound foe Eric "Badlands" Booker], but I was too focused on my game. I didn't want to suffer the mistakes I had made in the past, where I was looking around to see what everyone was doing. It was just me and the dogs."

That is the Trusting Mindset at work, albeit for the curious honor of eating a "world record" fifty and one-half hot dogs in twelve minutes. ("The Tsunami" won his third title in a row in 2004, beating Booker again - and two other four hundred pounders.)

When the job is on the line, great thinkers resist the urge to be smart, cautious, or scientific. They manage to keep their cerebral cortex off the playing field or out of the boardroom. For them, performance is simply "child's play," which suggests a useful definition of the superstar's edge:

The Trusting Mindset is what you were in before you knew any better.

Copyright © 2005 John Eliot, Ph.D.. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Dr. teaches business and psychology at Rice University and is adjunct professor at SMU Cox School of Business Leadership Center. He is the former director of Rice's program in sports management and performance enhancement. In 2000, he co-founded The Milestone Group, which provides performance consultation and training to business executives, professional athletes, and corporations nationwide. Clients have included Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Adidas, NASA, the United States Olympic Committee, The Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and hundreds of elite individual performers.