Page 111 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

the game into a place where the neu ral pat hw ays are carved. Othe r times, it’s
like running a gauntlet. When the transition from the familiar to the foreign

takes place, it feels like the mind is fl ing do wnhi ll over fresh sno w and
suddenly hits a patch of thick mud. As an obv ious rul e, it is good to be the one
flying downhill while your opponent is in t he m ud.
Ahmed and I were in the swirl of free-training, moving fast. I was on my

feet, then I was head over heels and on my back bef ore my br ain kne w wha t to
make of the situation. I hadn’t been bl inds ided like thi s in qui te some time. I
immediately asked Ahmed to break down the thr ow for me and soon eno ugh I
saw that the blur involved five or six steps, the foundat ion of whi ch was a

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu sweep I had not really under stood. I deci ded tha t thi s was a
throw I wanted to cultivate at a very hi gh level. I fi ed that if it coul d catch
me, it would catch other people. So I started practicing. First I worke d on each
step slowly, over and over, refining my timing and precision. The n I put the

whole thing together, repeating the movements hundr eds, event ua lly
thousands of times.
Today, this throw is my bread and but ter. In time, each step of the
technique has expanded in my mind in more and more det ail. The slight est

variations in the way my opponent respo nds to my fi st pus h will lead to
numerous options in the way I will trigger into the throw. My pul l on his right
wrist will involve twenty or thirty subt le det ails with whi ch I will vary my
action based on his nuanced microrespo ns es. As I sit back on the gr ound and

trip his right foot, my perception of the moment might inv olve thi rty or forty
variations.
Recall that initially I experienced the who le thr ow as a blur, too fast to
decipher, and now we are talking abo ut a tiny portion of the thr ow inv olving

many distinct moments. When it felt like a bl ur, my cons cious mind was
trying to make sense of unfamiliar terrain. Now my unco ns cious na viga tes a
huge network of subtly programmed techni cal information, and my cons cious
mind is free to focus on certain essential det ails that , because of the ir

simplicity, I can see with tremendo us precision, as if the bl ink in my
opponent’s eyes takes many seconds.
The key to this process is understandi ng that the cons cious mind, for all its
magnificence, can only take in and work with a certain limited amount of

information in a unit of time—envision that capacity as one pa ge on your
computer screen. If it is presented with a large amount of information, the n the