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by Rachelle Oldmixon
Over Thinking, Under Performing
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his week, I took my first vacation in two years. I went up to San Rafael and stayed with my cousin and her toddler. While that may not sound like the most relaxing time away, I did get the chance to do some serious bonding with one of the most adorable kids around. Anthony is in his terrible, curious twos and wants to know how everything works. One morning as I was heading out for a walk, he asked me how I tied my shoes. “Why do you do that?” he asked. “Because I need to keep my shoes on my feet.” “But how?” “I... uh... I just... do?” I offered to show him how to tie his shoe but he was only interested in hearing how to do it. I couldn’t. Every time I tried to verbalize how to tie my shoe, I would trip up, get it wrong, or just confuse the poor kid. Eventually, he got bored and wandered off to chase the cat. Sitting there with my shoe in my hand, I suddenly felt for every parent and kindergarten teacher who had to teach children such ingrained tasks like tying a shoe. It’s nearly impossible to verbalize such automatic behaviors. So, I began to look into why I, and so many others, choke up when trying to explain such a simple task. And as it turns out, someone at UCSB is researching just that question.
Smart People Research Some Bizarre Things
Dr. Taraz Lee, a postdoc in Dr. Grafton’s Action Lab in the Psychology Department, is interested in how explicit memory recall interferes with our ability to perform tasks we know by heart, like riding a bike or serving a tennis ball. Explicit memory is a type of long-term
Dr. Lee, I’m highly educated and quite intelligent. Can you please tell me why I can’t explain how to tie shoes to a two year old?
A self-professed science nerd, Rachelle has her B.A. in neuroscience from Skidmore College in upstate New York, and is working towards her Master’s in psychology at UCSB. In her free time, she blogs at www.synapticspeculations.com. She never could quite understand why she had to choose just one area of science; they are all fascinating. Especially when paired with some classic rock.
memory that we can easily verbalize: Who the 10th President was (John Tyler) or what happened at the last family reunion (I’d rather not print that here). However, we have another type of long-term memory: implicit memory. These are memories that we cannot seem to verbally express and are most commonly associated with “muscle memories.” For some reason, when people concentrate on movements or decisions that are based in implicit memory, they tend to make more mistakes. Have you ever tried to think about how you were supposed to ride your bike while you were riding it? If you haven’t, don’t. You’ll just end up with scraped knees
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The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is part of the human brain. Magnificent.
and a bruised ego. If you or I concentrate too hard on an implicit task, we might look like a fool in front of a two-year-old who wants to tie his shoe, or in front of other commuters on the bike trail. But, if a professional athlete starts to think too hard about serving that tennis ball or how to execute that final stroke in golf, he (or she) might lose a pivotal game in their career on national television. So Taraz’s research has been getting some attention lately. Taraz and his collaborators from UC Berkeley, Robert Blumenfeld and Mark D’Esposito, thought about the conventional wisdom to avoid choking in sports: don’t think, just do. Eventually, they came up with the theory that perhaps we choke up when we attempt to think about our implicit memories in an explicit way.
Proven Theories Don’t Help Tie Shoes
Testing this theory isn’t easy. But, Taraz and his colleagues decided to focus their efforts on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or the dlPFC. The dlPFC is an area of the brain that is involved in working memory, planning movements, and attention. Taraz brought participants into his lab and showed them a series of “kaleidoscope images” or images that were symmetrical, colorful and unlike most patterns the participants would have encountered
Looking at these pretty colors for long enough might help you stop slicing that drive on 18 into the water in every golf tournament you play in. Or not.
in their lives. After viewing the images, participants were shown a series of two images: in each set, one was new and the other was one they had previously seen. Participants were asked to pick the “old” image in each pair and then to report if they had remembered rich details, had a vague impression or if they were just guessing. During this process, Taraz was applying theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the some participants’ dlPFC. Theta-burst TMS is a safe, temporary method of deactivating a small area of the brain. The brain area only remains inactive so long as the TMS is being applied. What Taraz and his colleagues found was that the activity of the dlPFC made no difference when participants were explicitly recalling the kaleidoscope image. However, the activity of the dlPFC made a significant difference when participants claimed they were guessing which image they had seen before. Participants were more likely to choose the correct image when they were guessing when the dlPFC was inactive compared to when it was active. In other words, over thinking really can muddy the waters and make you choke. But that still doesn’t help show my cousin’s son how to tie his shoes.
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