3 | plan like a scientist, play like an artist

In “Golf is Not a Game of Perfect,” Dr. Bob Rotella recounts the story of how Seve Ballesteros went from being a confident, freely performing golfer to one whose game suffered because of over-analysis in competition.

As we talked, it became apparent that Seve’s game had gone sour when he tried to change from the intuitive, imaginative and ball-oriented attitude of his youth to a mechanical, swing-oriented approach. A sincere desire to improve had prompted him to do it, but he had found that it was not easy – and perhaps impossible – to go from being an artist to being a scientist. (p.142)

Having worked with professional athletes across several sports, the story sounded familiar. I thought of a runner looking to reconnect with the freedom he felt while racing as a teenager who didn’t understand anything beyond simply trying to outrun his competitors. I thought of a baseball player trying to reconnect with the nothing-to-lose feeling that he had as a 20-something round pick in rookie ball. I thought of a basketball player who wished he could recapture the feeling of playground basketball at the professional level. I thought of a golfer trying to reconnect with the excitement-only feeling that he had ahead of competition as a junior golfer.

The details vary, but the narrative plays out similarly regardless of the specifics. Athletes enter professional sport and have access to a level of coaching and information that they may have never had prior. At some point, they may find it hard to connect with the sense of creativity and imagination that was at their core when they were younger.

To be fair, there is certainly a place for approaching your craft like a scientist. Rotella identifies the value of a “training” mindset in practice. And Dr. Molly Gebrian, a musician, neuroscientist, and author of “Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practice,” is even more explicit:

Broadly speaking…this is what good practicing should look like: identify problem spots, hypothesize solutions, try out those solutions, solidify the solution that works best, then move on to the next issue. (p. 10)

The question, it seems, isn’t about taking either a scientific or artistic approach, but rather how to establish a harmonious relationship between the two. To address this dynamic, performers may find value in thinking about when each approach serves them best.

In a practice or training setting, when the goal is development, a scientific approach offers incredible value. Objectively examining your performance and experimenting with different methods to improve separates those who continue to develop with those who plateau. And when it comes to reflecting upon your performance, a detached, non-judgmental, scientific approach may help you learn from experience without taking failures to heart.

When it is time to compete or perform, however, you may be better served to approach it like an artist. In other words, engage with the present and adapt as things unfold. Or, to paraphrase Rotella, trust your training and perform with feeling. Think of Bob Ross and his “happy accidents” approach to painting. Thinking in terms of “creating” rather than “executing” may also free you up to pivot and avoid being too rigid in your pursuit of an arbitrarily singular movement solution.

Yiren Ren, Sophia Kaltsouni Mehdizadeh, Grace Leslie, and Thackery Brown. 2024. Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: an fMRI study. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 24, 912-930.

Summary: Ren and colleagues designed an experiment to explore whether music could impact the emotional content of existing memories. The experiment lasted three days. On Day 1, participants memorized short, emotionally neutral stories. On Day 2, participants recalled those stories while listening to positive music, negative music, or silence. Brain activity was recorded with fMRI scans. On Day 3, participants recalled the stories again without any music. Ren and colleagues found that listening to emotionally charged music led participants to add new emotional elements into their stories and that those elements matched the mood of the music. The fMRI scans also showed increased activity in brain areas relevant to emotional memory processing. In plain language, the study suggests that listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember.

Potential Application: This study highlights the potential to use music to reframe previous experiences within sport or pre-frame future experiences. Imagine an athlete who struggles with free throw shooting in basketball, for example. Having them identify music that makes them feel relaxed and confident and then coupling that music with recall (or video highlights) may help change the emotional temperature associated with the memory (or skill). Additionally, probing athletes to identify their response to a stressful situation (e.g., heart rate jumps and muscles tighten ahead of free throws) and then selecting music with elements that produce the opposite physiological responses may supplement cognitive efforts to maintain composure in those situations. In short, music may be a much more efficient method of changing an athlete’s perceived relationship with a skill than cognitive techniques alone.

Kelly Oubre, Jr. provides a great example of an athlete who engages with music as a personal pursuit even during the season. It may be tempting to push back on athletes who pursue musical performance because of the perception that it will come at the expense of their sport. Such a response assumes that development is best achieved simply by a singular focus and increased quantity of practice. It also ignores the value of non-sport activities in recovery and overall well-being. In my opinion, athletes opting to feed their souls with non-sport activities should be encouraged!

I want to believe Tom Petty…

Most things I worry about
Never happen anyway.

Tom Petty “Crawling Back to You”

…but these days have me wondering if Tupac may have been more on target!

I ain’t paranoid
I seen the future and it’s hopeless

Tupac Shakur “R U Still Down? (Remember Me)”

I went with the art and the science theme and raided my brain for any tracks I could think of that vaguely met the criteria. I stopped once I got to 5 in each category. If you have other suggestions, send them my way and I will add them to the playlist!