The Paradox of Learning May Be Ruining Your Golf
The Paradox of Learning May Be Ruining Your Golf
By Dr. T. J. Tomasi, Keiser University College of Golf Senior Faculty and Director of Research
When a lesson goes bad, the teacher tends to blame the student, and the student tends to blame the teacher – so who is most often responsible? You guessed it, it’s probably the teacher. Now this won’t make me very popular with my fellow teachers, and not all of them fall into the trap called The Paradox of Learning (POL), but the vast majority of them are not familiar with the havoc that the POL can wreak; thus, they cannot avoid it.
The POL is hard to avoid because:
(1) The research on it is relatively new, so golf teachers don’t know about it.
(2) The POL is massively counterintuitive, so an uninformed teacher can’t avoid it.
After all, how do you know what you don’t know if you don’t know it? Here’s how it works.
The Incorrect Lesson
You give a lesson to a 12-handicap golfer. Let’s say it’s on how to hit the driver farther, and the student begins to improve as the lesson progresses. How do you know? Because the ball flight improves, which, of course, is the whole idea of most lessons. Thus, both the student and the teacher are happy, and both are sure the student has got it, so all’s well that ends well. However, when the student returns for the next lesson, he’s right back to hitting powder-puff drives. Now the student thinks that he’s a bad learner, and the teacher (to him or herself, of course) thinks so too, so “all’s bad, that ends badly.”
Dr. Tomasi (left) with student
At this rate, the PGA motto of ‘golf is a game of a lifetime’ is correct because due to the POL, doing it the wrong way takes a lifetime to learn.
The Correct Lesson
Here is the anti-POL lesson. The student starts off hitting the driver, then switches to a 70-yard pitch shot, and then back to the driver, finishing up with more pitch shots and maybe a bit of putting. The performance on these tasks is mediocre or perhaps even poor, but after two weeks and some practice, the student returns for a lesson, and both the teacher and the student are pleasantly surprised at the student’s progress.
Of course, the paradox lies in the distinction between short-term performance and long-term retention. You can see from this example how easy it is for the teacher and the student to be caught up in this counterintuitive paradox that shows poor short-term performance during and directly after the lesson, but good long-term performance. If the teaching model is correct, and the student is not a beginner, then the learning tasks should be rotated during both the lesson and the student’s practice that follows the lesson.
A Paradox: Is Being Confused Always Bad?
So, we’ve seen that when you confuse the brain by giving it multiple, rotating tasks, your ability to perform each task during the lesson may not be maxed out, but in the long term, your retention of the skill is much better. One would think that confusing the brain is the worst thing your teacher can do to you, but it turns out to be the best course of action – if it’s done correctly. This phenomenon, known as Contextual Interference (CI), has been well documented except for one aspect, which is how it works. What causes you to retain information better when you toggle the task on and off, mixing the presentation of information by rotating tasks?
The answer comes from a research team led by Nicolas Schweighofer at USC. Their new findings show that when you focus on learning two or more skills together you may well struggle to perform during the lesson, but your long-term retention is superior. “Continually wiping out motor short-term memory,’ says Schweighofer ‘helps update long-term memory. In short, if your brain can rely on your short-term motor memory to handle memorizing a movement, then it will do so, failing to engage your long-term memory in the process.’
Apparently, when you focus on one task at a time, your short-term memory can handle it, because it’s mostly repetition with little new information needed. Thus, the information is never forced to spill over into permanent storage. But when you overwhelm your short-term holding tank with multiple tasks of low repetition, it forces long-term memory to kick-in to help out. You may not perform well during the “overwhelm period,” but your performance in the long-term will improve. Schweighofer’s research suggests that when you construct a learning environment that uses only short-term memory, the bin is automatically cleared when the task is over to make way for another task. Thus, the key is to create a learning situation where you continually over-load short-term memory by switching tasks, a strategy that forces your long-term memory to kick in to handle the overload of information.
If you’d like to study with Dr. Tomasi and other PGA Master Professionals, contact The College of Golf today.
