Coaches, coaches everywhere

One coach.
Everyone dreams about achieving great things.  In reality, very few people ever become world-class at anything.  What a bummer.

Obviously, most of us get stuck at mediocre because we give up.  Let's be honest, practicing is hard work and takes time; it's so much easier to pack it in and watch T.V.  I've been there.

However, many people - including myself - are willing to do the work.  For example, I'm committed to being a great scientist, it's my full-time job.  I crave improvement because my entire career rests on my ability to improve.  In fact, success may require that I am the very best in my field.  Because of this, I eschew the plateau. I must improve as fast as possible, for as long as possible.

On the one hand, I could always work harder, log more hours, and be more focused.  Yes, all of that contributes to my development.  But what really gives me pause is the possibility of a metacognitive blind-spot.  What if I'm not even aware of my weaknesses?  I'd be meta-clueless: clueless about being clueless. Egads.

In this purely hypothetical situation (*wink), my problem is that I don't know how to get better; I'm out of ideas for how to improve.  As Atul Gawande argues in his recent New Yorker piece, that's when I might benefit most from a coach: someone with expertise and a fresh perspective who can "tweak" my performance and allow me to break through a sticking point.

Many coaches.
A coach is particularly valuable because the feedback is often novel; ideas we might not have generated on our own.  Our coach's fresh perspective generates new ways of thinking about the "problem" of improving.

Unfortunately for most of us, and as Gawande points out, getting a coach is not a possibility.  Either we can't afford one, it would be a cultural faux pas, or a dedicated coach may not even exist (although, in my case, I was surprised to find an example of scientist-coaches).  So, what are we to do?  How might the rest of us improve if we have reached a plateau?  If we knew the best strategy for getting better, we'd execute.  The value of a coach, that fresh set of eyes, is not something we can provide for ourselves.

At its essence, coaching is feedback.  A coach examines our performance and provides feedback about how we might improve.  To that end, I propose a distributed model of coaching.  Instead of resting our hopes and dreams on a single, capital-C Coach to lead us to the promised land, why not think of each interaction as a mini-opportunity for coaching?  All our peers, mentors, subordinates, and colleagues can provide fresh perspective on our performance, no coach needed.  Often, to get this valuable perspective all we have to do is ask.

In practice, this process of seeking feedback from all types of people is easier-said than done.  In future posts, I will explore some of the challenges, and strategies, of effective feedback-seeking behavior.  I'd love your feedback, dear reader, so please post your thoughts in the comments!

Missing gorillas. What?

What gorilla?
Back in my younger days, as an impressionable undergraduate, I was exposed to a now-famous experiment in attention.  Sitting in a lecture hall at Yale University, my Introduction to Cognitive Science professor, Brian Scholl, played the class this video.  Watch the video, do the task, then read on.

The task was simple.  Watch the ball, count the passes.  Don't be distracted by the players in the black uniforms, watch the players in the white uniforms. And, like most of my fellow over-achievers at Yale, I wanted to do this right.  So, I got really focused and did the task.

The task ended, and the results were summarized.  Thankfully, I thought, I did it right - I counted the correct number of passes for the white team.  Hooray!  However, the video soon prompted: "But, did you see the gorilla?" An audible murmur vibrated from the audience: a group equivalent of "WTF"?  Soon, the murmur was followed by gasps and giggles as the video was replayed in slow motion.  There, walking right through the scene, was some dude in a gorilla suit.  Almost everybody in the audience had missed him.

Oh, that gorilla.
In the video, the task was clearly defined: count the passes for the white team.  And, for that task, I did very well - a perfect score.  However, in life, our tasks are usually less well-defined.  In life, picking up new information, being observant and open-minded, is just as valuable as extreme focus.  This relates back to my recent thesis regarding attention: for some tasks, we need to be very focused; but for others, we need to be open-minded.  In other words, if we reframe the task of the video above to "be observant", then I failed miserably.

What does this mean at a practical level?  My interpretation is that we must consciously select a level of intensity for our focus depending on the task.  In addition, since life's challenges are often so poorly defined, we must be sure to get into an open-minded state from time-to-time.  Otherwise, we might miss a gorilla.

Fruit Ninja and flavors of focus

Slice that bananna!
Recently, my wife and I have been obsessed with the game Fruit Ninja.  And, having been simultaneously obsessed with the idea of focus and obtaining metacognitive control over my intensity of focus, I couldn't help but start to analyze Fruit Ninja as a tool for fine-tuning my already ninja-like ability to focus.  Let me explain. (Also, I'm not getting paid to write this, I just like Fruit Ninja).

For those of you who don't know, Fruit Ninja is a game that originally became popular on the iphone and has since expanded to the Android platform, the iPad and (I think) to an online game.

The game is simple, grasshopper.  But not easy.  The goal is to slice up fruit by swiping your finger across the screen of your touchscreen device.  That's the easy part.  The hard part is that, in addition to fruit, there are bombs that fly into the scene and occlude your target fruit.  Hitting the bombs earns a point penalty in some versions of the game, and in other versions of the game can lead to instant failure. Check out some video footage.

What does this silly game have to do with flavors of focus?  Well, cynical adult, the game offers three "modes" of play: classic, arcade, and zen.  Ooooh, zen!

Just one more game, please?
Each mode places different cognitive demands on the player.  In classic, the number of fruit slowly increases over time and if you miss three fruit in total, your game ends.  In addition, hitting a bomb results in instant failure.  For these reasons, classic mode require intense focus and precision.

On again, off again

Smug monkey?
I've been all meta-focused: you know, focused on focusing?  And, I've come up with a little hypothesis.  Specifically, if I want to be as awesome as possible at my job, focus isn't just a matter of more is better.  Oh no, no, no, web-buddy. The name of the game is to attain an intensity of focus that is just right for the task: the Goldilocks Zone.... I couldn't come up with a better name.

I mean, sometimes we want to be a laser: when we're doing fine-motor work, or reading, for example.  During these activities, we want to pay some serious attention, because a wandering mind is a liability.  I've already talked about my experience with a wandering mind during fine-motor work, but I think more of us can relate to the effects of a wandering mind when we're reading: that sort of weird, absent-minded state where we "read" a whole lot of material, and then realize that we actually processed zero information.  I've had a similar thing happen to me when I'm driving where I won't remember much of the drive... What is up with that?!

However, at other times, we want our minds to wander.  A wandering mind is the kindling of the creative process.  (Nice metaphor, huh?) When we're trying to deal with complex decisions, or come up with new and inspired ideas, it's time to get our day-dream on.  It's in this state-of-mind where we incorporate all information at our disposal and we stumble on new ways of thinking about big-picture stuff.

Flexibility of focus: what and how much?

Multitasking?
Attention deficit: another modern malady of excess.  Too much food, and we became larger.  A surfeit of sitting, and we grew softer.  Now, with the information revolution, we wrestle with an excess of ideas, and we grow distracted.

Recently, science has begun to unearth the pitfalls of poor focus.  In one study, researchers at Stanford examined the cognitive consequences of multitasking and found that the chronically distracted lost the ability to control attention.  Cognitive performance suffered as a result.  Gross.

But regulating our attention is more interesting, and complicated, than focusing on one task at a time.  Yes, we must choose where to place our attention. However, we must also decide how much to focus.

A recent article in the Journal of Neuroscience, emphasizes the importance of intensity of attention as it relates to cognitive performance.  In this fascinating study, the authors rely on recordings from a group of neurons in the monkey brain that correlate with attention: the more neurons firing in this brain region, the more focused the monkey.  Intriguingly, the authors found that as the focus of the monkeys increased, so did performance on a visual discrimination task... To a point.  Surprisingly, when the monkeys were most focused, they often performed poorly when the task demanded recognition of large changes.  In these cases, focused monkeys were very good at detecting minute changes, yet large visual changes resulted in more errors for dialed-in monkeys.  Did the monkeys miss the forest for the trees?

Good hands and the Goldilocks zone

Stay focused.
As an amateur molecular biologist, I often wrestle with lapses of concentration.  This can be linked, I speculate, to the simultaneous terror and boredom that molecular work entails.

Picture this: six, clear tubes, labelled in a simple code that belies the complexity of the underlying experiment.  I add liquid, typically clear with no discernible color, hue or other distinguishing features that might signal that this is anything more than water.

I set a timer.  Ten minutes of incubation at room temperature.  I place the tubes in a centrifuge and spin, 15,000 cycles per minute.  I wait fifteen minutes more, remove some clear liquid and add more, but a different kind.  I repeat each step six times, one for each tube.

In between actions, I change the tip of my pipetman - the device that allows microliter control over the liquid added to the evolving biochemical reaction.  Change tip, add liquid, next tube. Repeat.

During these day-long exercises in repetition, I've experienced some failures.  These mistakes fall into one of two broad categories: external or internal.  In the external class, I become distracted by something happening outside my head.  A conversation between colleagues or a conversation I've started.  When these conversations reach some mystical level of distraction, I will realize in a moment of panic that I've skipped a critical step.  Or, I've lost track of the tubes.  Or, I've lost count.  Failure.