Figure 21. All input is created equal.
The aptly named inner game really can be played inside. In addition to gaining experience in the real world, you can gain experience inside your head as well.
Suppose you’re sitting in the movie theater, watching the big car chase at the climax of the movie. Your pulse is rapid, your breathing shallow, your muscles clenched.
But wait, you’re not actually in the car chase. You’re sitting in a comfortable upholstered chair, in the air-conditioning, with a drink and popcorn, watching flickering images projected on a screen. You are not in any danger at all.[129]
Yet your body reacts as if you’re in real danger. And it doesn’t have to be a movie; a book would work as well. It doesn’t even have to be happening in the present moment. Remember that really mean bully in grade school or that awful teacher? First love? These are just memories, but the remembering can cause appropriate physical responses. It turns out that your brain isn’t very good at discriminating between input sources. Real-time sensor data, memories of past events, and even imagined circumstances that haven’t happened all result in the same physiological responses (see Figure 21, All input is created equal).
The entertainment industry is counting on it.
In fact, the situation is a little bit worse—the memory or imagining of events often overrides more accurate real-time sensor data. This makes eyewitness reporting more than a little problematic: you really don’t see what you think you see.
Betty Edwards describes something similar in the phenomenon of color constancy. That’s where the brain overrides color information received by the retina. Just as we saw earlier with the simplistic stick-figure representation, you “know” that skies are blue, clouds are white, blond hair is yellow, and trees are green with brown trunks—just like in the set of Crayola crayons.
Edwards describes an interesting test that an art teacher performed on a set of students. The teacher set up a still life consisting of white Styrofoam geometric shapes (a cube, a cylinder, and a sphere) and an egg carton of regular white-shelled eggs. He added colored floodlights to make everything in the still life a bright pinkish red and set the students to painting.
According to Edwards, every student painted the white Styrofoam objects in shades of pinkish red just as they appeared under the colored light.
But not the eggs.
The students painted the eggs white. The memorized constant that “eggs are white” overrode their actual appearance caused by the colored lights. Even more remarkably, when the teacher pointed out that the eggs were really pink, the student’s didn’t see it. They still insisted, “But the eggs are white.”
Much of perception is based on prediction,[130] and prediction is based on context and past experience, so much so that current, real-time input takes a backseat. Have you ever had the experience of a friend who suddenly made a dramatic difference in their appearance? They grew or shaved a beard or changed hair style or color, and you didn’t notice right away? Or even after a while?
Perception is based on prediction.
The stereotypical story of the wife’s new hairdo that the husband doesn’t notice really happens: the husband “sees” based on old input. It’s just how your brain works.[131]
Since this phenomenon works just as well from remembered experience and imagined experience, you can use it to your advantage.
OK, you’ll need to bear with me here, because this is going to sound suspiciously like faerie dust. But, since the brain is kinda gullible with regards to its input source: imagining success is provably effective in achieving it.
You can improve your performance—whether you’re playing a violin, debugging code, or designing a new architecture—by imagining that you’ve already done so successfully.
First, let’s look at some practical examples. You may have noticed that if you’re at a conference, or some sort of get-together where you’re surrounded by more advanced practitioners, that your own ability increases. Maybe you can speak more articulately or argue your point a little better. Maybe the fact that you even have a point occurs to you.
Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny takes this idea one step further and offers this advice: “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there as well.”[132]
In other words, by surrounding yourself with highly skilled people, you will increase your own skill level. Some of that is from observation and application of their practices and approaches. Some of that comes from the fact that you’re conditioning your mind to perform at a higher level. You have a natural mechanism known as mirror neurons that help: watching someone else’s behavior triggers an equivalence for you to do the same.
The Inner Game folks suggest you should pretend you are the expert, the pro, the famous soloist. They observed that simply telling a student to “play like” someone famous in their field was enough to increase the student’s performance. We are natural mimics, after all. You’ve heard how Miles Davis sounds; you’ve read Linus Torvald’s code; you’ve read The Pragmatic Programmer.[133]
We are natural mimics.
You can imagine writing code in your head or pretend to have that requirements conversation. You can “play” an instrument when it’s not really in front of you—and you can imagine that you’ve got it nailed, that it’s perfect.
In a similar vein, Olympic athletes do this sort of offline practicing, too. They’ll envision themselves hurtling down the course, taking the turns, and reacting appropriately. By continuing this practice even off the field, the brain gets grooved.[134] It becomes used to the experience of doing things correctly so that when the time comes to do it in the field, success comes naturally.
| Recipe 38 | Groove your mind for success. |
Getting used to what “success” feels like is important enough that it’s worthwhile to fake it first. That is, artificially create the conditions that you’d experience once you learn to perform at that level. You add whatever scaffolding is necessary to provide an approximation of the experience.
Swimmers do this by being attached to a rope and pulled through the water at high speed.[135] Before a swimmer can achieve that sort of speed on their own, they get to experience what it will feel like. This isn’t just a courtesy; after this experience, the swimmer’s performance increases dramatically.
Experience using scaffolding.
You can go the other way as well, by using negative scaffolding, or unscaffolding, if you will. That’s when you make it artificially harder than it should be. Then when you’re doing it for real, it seems a lot easier. Runners might tie weights to their ankles or jog through waist-deep snow. Ruby programmers might work in something like C++ for a while. C++ makes a very effective mental equivalent to heavy ankle weights; after working in C++, more dynamic languages then feel a whole lot easier by comparison. :-)
You can imagine experiences and learn from them just as effectively as if you had lived them for real. Your brain doesn’t really know the difference. So, take the pressure off, become more aware of what’s wrong, and pretend you’ve made it.
And you will.
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