Several years ago, I saw a grainy but mindblowing video from the 1970s:
A tennis coach took an out of shape 45-year-old woman and had her go from never having held a racket at minute 0, to playing serviceable tennis at minute 45, running around, getting forehands over the net and into the court, even serving.
If you’ve ever played tennis — as I have, for years, before I gave up the sport in frustration — you know this is almost miraculous. It takes months to learn what this woman was doing with such ease, particularly at her age.
The coach in that video was Tim Gallwey, who wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. The book is well-worth a read even if, like me, you are naturally averse to ideas like “inner game” and “mindset.”
Gallwey’s technique for teaching tennis involved getting the student to pay close attention — to the sound of the ball as it hits the racquet, or to the rotation of the seams as the ball travels through the air, or to the exact spot that the ball crosses the net.
And that was it. Just pay attention, to one thing, closely.
Magically, inner-gamingly, this was somehow enough to get people like that 45-year-old woman to learn to play tennis in a single sessions of not trying very hard.
I found this very interesting at the time. It has stuck with me ever since. But as often happens, I never really dug much deeper.
And then, a couple days ago, I was reading a 2007 book about the discovery of neuroplasticity, titled The Brain That Changes Itself. From that book:
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Finally, Merzenich [the scientist who conclusively proved neuroplasticity exists] discovered that paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. In numerous experiments he found that lasting changes occurred only when his monkeys paid close attention. When the animals performed tasks without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last.
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Why do kids pick up skills and languages and social norms so easily and thoroughly, without seeming effort?
A part of the brain, known as nucleus basalis, is turned on in kids’ brains. All the time. The nucleus basalis makes it so kids pay attention to everything.
Eventually, the nucleus basalis gets turned off, or at least stops being on all the time, or even most of the time. Attention becomes more of a thing you have to do consciously, like Gallwey instructed his tennis students to do. But the results seem well worth it.
So if you want to master a skill, internalize a new belief, or learn Korean, pay attention — to something, anything. Don’t just go through the motions. Don’t do it automatically. Don’t just rote repeat. The results — so say neuroscientists and real life practitioners like Gallwey — will be rapid and almost magical acquisition of new skill and knowledge.
On the flip side:
If a stranger tells you to pay close attention — not me, but a stranger, particularly one in a tuxedo, with slicked back hair, and speaking in a heavy Italian accent — then beware.
You’re likely about to get fooled, and badly.
The topic of attention makes up a large part of my new 10 Commandments book. The fact is, nothing gets done in the world of influence, persuasion, comedy, magic, or hypnosis, without attention.
The difference is that influence professionals — the magicians, door to door salesmen, hypnotists — guide the attention of their audience or prospect or patient to achieve a specific outcome. Sometimes that’s aligned with what the audience or patient or prospect wants. Sometimes it’s not.
If this is a topic that interests you, click through to the following page, and pay close attention to the description of Commandment VII: