Golf Flow

are not able to see some of the other things that are happening. Underneath what we know as learning, a neurological process was taking place whereby electrical currents in the brain were firing, traveling down nerve fibers in the brain during every moment of the putting process (think of electricity traveling across the copper wires of an electric cord attached to your computer). One of the key differences between your computer cord and our participant is that the rubber cover around your computer’s power cord is fixed. It doesn’t change with use; a 1/4-inch (6 mm) cord remains a 1/4-inch cord even after a year’s worth of use. For my student, however, the cord that covers the wire is changing. With each successive putt that she hits, an ever-increasing sheath of myelin was wrapping around her nerve fibers. Imagine that each successive pulse of electricity to your computer causes the rubber coating to become thicker. In effect, this is what myelin does to the neurons that create learning.
    As we practice an action, myelin wraps and insulates the circuitry, allowing that circuitry to become, in subsequent actions, faster and more efficient. This is the neurological basis for what we commonly know as habit or, in sport terms, muscle memory. This process of myelination cuts across domains and activities. Practicing the piano, rehearsing a speech, and hitting a 9-iron all have one thing in common. They initiate the process of myelin wrapping nerve fibers, and this wrapping makes the neurons fire faster, with more accuracy and more efficiency.
    The role of myelin in strengthening habit or muscle memory provides the basis for the adages regarding practice and habit:
Practice makes perfect.
Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent.
We start by controlling our habits. Eventually our habits control us.
First, we make our habits. Then our habits make us.

Automaticity and Synchronicity
    Let’s examine more closely how this understanding of myelin and practice applies to golf. The two complaints that I’ve most frequently heard from golfers over the years have to do with (1) not being able to transfer their skills from the driving range to the golf course and (2) self-sabotaging good rounds of golf.
    Research reveals that after a habit is strongly rooted in place, which is to say that after a behavior is sufficiently myelinated, that habit will be the most likely behavior to come out of a repertoire of behaviors. In other words, all by itself with no active, conscious effort, the habits that we create will emerge on their own from the practice and repetition that we’ve engaged in to help myelinate those circuits. This process is known as automaticity, whereby skills that we initially have to think about go underground and fire without conscious effort (think of how easily you write your name or answer your cell phone—that’s automaticity and myelin at work).
    As we practice, various brain regions work cohesively in a manner that is consistent with flow. This collaboration by the various brain regions, rather than the dominance of any one region, is responsible for the “quiet mind” that is often reported by athletes after they’ve been in flow. Flow is such a mentally efficient state of mind that its defining neural characteristic is synchronicity; the various parts work together as one.

Avoid Getting in Your Own Way
    As you may have experienced in your life, the fastest way to undermine automaticity and internal cohesion is to try to think actively about the motor task that you are trying to enact. When we try to steer our putter face through the impact area or deliberately think about our club position at the top, we are inviting electronic impulses from our cortex, the part of the brain that is available to conscious awareness, into the temporal region, which is responsible for automatic motor patterns. The transfer of these impulses disrupts the coherence between the various brain regions. By the time that these processes make their way into conscious awareness, they typically come out in the following form of a frustrated golfer: “I feel like I am getting in my own way.” What’s the answer? Based on what we know about skill development, it could be as simple as this: Practice diligently and then trust your myelin.
    A more thorough explanation tying into the paradox of control might be this: You’ve practiced your game. Through that practice you have deepened the habits by myelinating the