Page 112 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

font will have to be very small in order to fit it all on the pag e. You will no t be
able to see the details of the letters. But if that same tool (the cons cious mind)

is used for a much smaller amount of information in the same amount of time,
then we can see every detail of each l etter. N ow time feels slowed do wn.
Another way of understanding thi s di fference in per cept ion is with the
analogy of a camera. II With practice I am making networks of chunks and

paving more and more neural pathw ays, whi ch effectively takes huge pi les of
data and throws it over to my high-speed processor—t he unco ns cious . Now my
conscious mind, focusing on less, seems to rev up its shutter speed from, say,
four frames per second to 300 or 400 frames per second. The ke y is to

understand that my trained mind is not necessarily worki ng muc h faster tha n
an untrained mind—it is simply worki ng more effectively, whi ch means tha t
my conscious mind has less to deal with. Exper ientially, because I am looki ng
at less, there are, within the same uni t of time, hundr eds of frames in my mind,

and maybe only a few for my oppo nen t (who se cons cious mind is bo gge d do wn
with much more data that has no t yet been int ernal ized as unc ons cious ly
accessible). I can now operate in all tho se frames that he d oesn’t even s ee.
This is why profoundly refined martial artists can sometimes appe ar

mystical to less skilled practitioners—t hey have trained them selves to pe rceive
and operate within segments of time that are too small to be perceived by
untrained minds.
Now, returning to the scene that initially inspi red thi s movement of

thought in my life—does this type of trained enhan ced percept ion I’ve be en
discussing come from the same place as tho se wild moments in life whe n time
slows down in the middle of a car crash or, in my case, when my ha nd sha ttered
in the ring? The answer is yes and no. The similarity is that a life-or-de ath

scenario kicks the human mind into a very narrow area of focus. Time feels
slowed down because we instinctively zero in on a tiny amount of critical
information that our processor can then break down as if it is in a huge font .
The trained version of this state of mind shar es that tiny area of cons cious

focus. The difference is that, in our disciplines of choice, we cultivate thi s
experience by converting all the other sur roundi ng inf ormation int o
unconsciously integrated data instead of igno ring it. Ther e is a reason the
human mind rarely goes into that wild pl ace of hei ght ened per cept ion: if an

untrained fighter were to focus all his ener gy on his oppo nen t’s breath pa ttern
or blinking eye, he would get punch ed in the face or thr own on the gr ound. If