Human beings sometimes falter under pressure. Pilots crash and divers drown. Under the glare of competition, basketball players cannot find the basket and golfers cannot find the pin. When that happens, we say variously that people have panicked or, to use the sports colloquialism, choked. But what do those words mean? Both are pejoratives. To choke or panic is considered to be as bad as to quit. But are all forms of failure equal? And what do the forms in which we fail say about who we are and how we think? We live in an age obsessed with success, with documenting the myriad ways by which talented people overcome challenges and obstacles. There is as much to be learned, though, from documenting the myriad ways in which talented people sometimes fail.
Choking sounds like a vague and all-encompassing term, yet it describes a very specific kind of failure. For example, psychologists often use a primitive video game to test motor skills. They'll sit you in front of a computer with a screen that shows four boxes in a row, and a keyboard that has four corresponding buttons in a row. One at a time, x's start to appear in the boxes on the screen, and you are told that every time this happens you are to push the key corresponding to the box. According to Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, if you're told ahead of time about the pattern in which those x's will appear, your reaction time in hitting the right key will improve dramatically. You'll play the game very carefully for a few rounds, until you've learned the sequence, and then you'll get faster and faster. Willingham calls this explicit learning. But suppose you're not told that the x's appear in a regular sequence, and even after playing the game for a while, you're not aware that there is a pattern. You'll still get faster: you'll learn the sequence unconsciously. Willingham calls that implicit learning - learning that takes place outside of awareness. These two learning systems are quite separate, based in different parts of the brain. Willingham says that when you are first taught something - say, how to hit a backhand or an overhead forehand - you think it through in a very deliberate, mechanical manner. But as you get better, the implicit system takes over: you start to hit a backhand fluidly, without thinking. The basal ganglia, where implicit learning partially resides, are concerned with force and timing, and when that system kicks in, you begin to develop touch and accuracy, the ability to hit a drop shot or place a serve at a hundred miles per hour. "This is something that is going to happen gradually," Willingham says. "You hit several thousand forehands, after a while you may still be attending to it. But not very much. In the end, you don't really notice what your hand is doing at all."
Under conditions of stress, however, the explicit system sometimes takes over. That what it means to choke. When Jana Novotna faltered at Wimbledon, it was because she began thinking about her shots again. She lost her fluidity, her touch. She double-faulted on her serves and mis-hit her overheads, the shots that demand the greatest sensitivity in force and timing. She seemed like a different person - playing with the slow, cautious deliberation of a beginner - because, in a sense, she was a beginner again: she was relying on a learning system that she hadn't used to hit serves and overhead forehands and volleys since she was first taught tennis, as a child.
[snip]
Panic is something else altogether. . . . Panic in this sense is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reverting to instinct. They may look the same but they are worlds apart.
A not dissimilar thing can happen with emerging readers. If all goes well, there is an appropriate balance between their emerging skills and the level of textual challenge. As they become more practised at reading, acquire new words, understand the traditions of narrative flow, etc., they become more and more able to gulp down great masses of text in a state of Flow. Sometimes, through tiredness, stress, illness, or any of a number of other conditions, they lose that habit of flow temporarily: they choke. They focus on decoding, on the work of reading. Easing back to more familiar texts helps to reestablish the equilibrium that allows them to regain the momentum towards the condition of flow. If they choke too often, have little access to more comfortable books, are pressed to move forward at levels of challenge with which they are uncomfortable, a child becomes at risk of avoiding reading at all.
Building on Csikszentmihalyi's original graph, the chart, incorporating Willingham's observations, might now look something like this.
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