Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To
Sian Beilock
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1416596186
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Choke provides the missing link between brain and body, science and life. Here’s what really happens during mental and physical performance when we crack under pressure, and here are simple ways not to choke in stressful situations.
Why do the smartest students often do poorly on standardized tests?
Why did you tank that interview or miss that golf swing when you should have had it in the bag?
Why do you mess up when it matters the most—and how can you perform your best instead?
It happens to all of us. You’ve prepared for days, weeks, even years for the big day when you will finally show your stuff—in academics, in your career, in sports—but when the big moment arrives, nothing seems to work. You hit the wrong note, drop the ball, get stumped by a simple question. In other words, you choke. It’s not fun to think about, but now there’s good news: This doesn’t have to happen.
Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, reveals in Choke the astonishing new science of why we all too often blunder when the stakes are high. What happens in our brain and body when we experience the dreaded performance anxiety? And what are we doing differently when everything magically “clicks” into place and the perfect golf swing, tricky test problem, or high-pressure business pitch becomes easy? In an energetic tour of the latest brain science, with surprising insights on every page, Beilock explains the inescapable links between body and mind; reveals the surprising similarities among the ways performers, students, athletes, and business people choke; and shows how to succeed brilliantly when it matters most.
In lively prose and accessibly rendered science, Beilock examines how attention and working memory guide human performance, how experience and practice and brain development interact to create our abilities, and how stress affects all these factors. She sheds new light on counterintuitive realities, like why the highest performing people are most susceptible to choking under pressure, why we may learn foreign languages best when we’re not paying attention, why early childhood athletic training can backfire, and how our emotions can make us both smarter and dumber. All these fascinating findings about academic, athletic, and creative intelligence come together in Beilock’s new ideas about performance under pressure—and her secrets to never choking again. Whether you’re at the Olympics, in the boardroom, or taking the SAT, Beilock’s clear, prescriptive guidance shows how to remain cool under pressure—the key to performing well when everything’s on the line.
250273. For a general review, see also, E. L. Newport, ‘Maturational constraints on language learning’, Cognitive Science, 14 (1990), 1128. 7. C. Reverberi, A. Toraldo, S. D’Agostini and M. Skrap, ‘Better without (lateral) frontal cortex? Insight problems solved by frontal patients’, Brain, 128 (2005), 28822890. 8. B. P. Cochran, J. L. McDonald and S. J. Parault, ‘Too smart for their own good: The disadvantage of a superior processing capacity for adult language learners’, Journal of Memory and
identity and performance’, American Psychologist, 52 (1997), 61329, and T.Schmader, M. Johns and C. Forbes, ‘An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance’, Psychological Review, 115 (2008), 33656. 22. A. C. Krendl, J. A. Richeson, W. M. Kelley and T. F. Heatherton, ‘The negative consequences of threat: A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying women’s underperformance in maths’, Psychological Science, 19 (2008), 16875.
ability rather than what they had learned thus far in school. With this belief in mind, they only needed a short leap to the conclusion that more boys than girls are born with capabilities that push them to the top in maths. Nonetheless, their leap is not based on a clean assessment of inborn abilities, but of the boys’ and girls’ performance after years of schooling, during which cultural expectations and socialization pressure are in full swing. Larry Summers latched on to this study when he
across boys and girls in the first place. Maybe everyone in the low-socio-economic-status group, regardless of his or her sex, bombed the test, making it impossible to find sex differences that might exist. But this poor-performance idea doesn’t explain the findings because Susan went back into her data and specifically looked at the lower SES kids when they were performing at higher spatial abilities. To do this, she compared the spatial performance of the low-SES kids when they were in the
aptitude is to take a cue from some of our monkey relatives. Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta have found that, when given a choice, male rhesus macaques are more predisposed to play with wheeled and mechanical toys while female monkeys play with both wheeled and plush, doll-like toys an equal amount of time.26 If we assume that male and female monkeys have not been socialized differently, the way young boys and girls might be, and indeed there is work