Golf Flow

gaining acceptance within the scientific community. I’ll explain the psychology behind this momentarily, but first, a story.
    When I was 17 years old, I was a lifeguard, and on weekends I gave swim lessons to some of the kids who frequented the beach. I recall a 7-year-old swimmer, Benjamin, who got me interested in psychology by giving me a raw and visible demonstration of self-imposed limitations and the way in which the brain acts on us to subdue our capabilities.
    Because he was a beginning swimmer, our goals that summer were modest. Ben’s parents wanted him to be able to submerge his face underwater and to be able to swim a full length of their family swimming pool by himself. Although achieving this goal sounds like an easy task—the type of thing that many kids learn in an hour—it wasn’t easy for Ben. He was so terrified of the water that even putting his feet in the water was, for him, a monumental accomplishment.
    You could see the panic on his face build as he got closer to the pool. He would try all sorts of things to distract me from the task at hand. Part of the problem was that Ben was 100 percent convinced that he could not put his face in the water or swim on his own. When I asked him to put his face underwater, he simply couldn’t. He wasn’t being defiant. I watched him try for several days, and his brain would no sooner let him submerge his face as it would let me walk into oncoming traffic. His survival instinct kicked into gear, and I would watch him battle himself as he tried to submerge, get his nose wet, and then spring to the surface, looking at me hopefully. “Did I do it, Mr. Gio?” he would ask. “Not yet, Ben. Still have a ways to go,” I’d say.
    Similarly, when he got more than a body’s length away from the edge of the pool, he turned and swam straight back to his point of departure. Again, he wasn’t being defiant. When he got to a certain point, something in his brain would just click and send him back to safer ground. In a way, he reminded me of the actor Jim Carey in the movie
Liar Liar
, a man whose unconscious mind would not allow him to do what his conscious mind was ordering. Even at this early age, Ben’s brain was not allowing him to do what he was clearly capable of.
    Theories of the brain abound, but most scientists in the area of evolutionary psychology agree that the adaptations that have evolved in the brain serve the singular purpose of keeping us alive. Even the dreaded fear response that golfers experience is in place because fear, in a variety of capacities, leads to greater survival rates. This functionality of the brain and body reveals itself in many ways. When the temperature gets too cold on the skin, the brain send signals down the spinal cord for the muscles to contract and retract rapidly, to shiver, as a mechanism to warm up the muscles. In other words, the nervous system has a built-in threshold for cold. After the skin hits a certain temperature, the brain interprets that by saying, “OK, skin, you’re going beyond this certain point. Let me bring you back to a comfortable level.”
    The same thing happens when we get too hot. Again, receptors on the skin send signals up the spinal cord to the brain. The brain processes the information and signals back down the spinal cord to the eccrine and apocrine glands to produce the sweat that, as it evaporates, lowers the temperature of the skin. For that reason, patients with certain spinal cord injuries have difficulty regulating their body temperature. Similarly, when the brain misinterprets messages from the skin, some people sweat chronically or not at all.
    The brain’s action as the central regulator to keep the body safe and comfortable is well documented, but what does that mean for elite athletes or those looking to push beyond the realm of comfort? When distance runners push themselves too close to their limits, they experience fatigue and exhaustion, which signals to the brain to slow down, stop, and rest. Although athletes sometimes choose to ignore the fact that the brain is signaling that it’s time to stop, rarely if ever does the brain let people push themselves too far. Of the millions of people who run marathons every year, remarkably few ever die, even when pushing themselves to their limits. Runners usually collapse or vomit before they die. When the cognitive, conscious brain tries to push us past the limit, the unconscious brain fights back, saying, “You are in