WHY IT IS HARD TO TEACH OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS… BUT OLD DOGS CAN LEARN NEW TRICKS WITH EFFORT From a brain perspective all technical skills and competitive response tendencies can be understood as patterns of neural connections in players’ brains. As such, all habits, technical (e.g., a forehand swing) or mental (e.g., a response to fear), tend to strengthen with age and experience because each time a behaviour occurs it activates a pattern of neural firing in the brain that makes this state more ‘attractive,’ therefore increasing the likelihood that it will occur again. The emergence of a skill or competitive response pattern at any point in a player’s development therefore limits the characteristics likely to emerge next, and so on. This process is supported by the process whereby our brain gets rid of neurons that have been unsuccessful in forming connections with other neurons, called pruning. So these neurons designed to provide degrees of freedom in our responses are pruned with age meaning opportunities to form new habits by connecting these neurons reduce. By getting rid of what is not being used, pruning consolidates the neural connections (habits) that remain. A Path in the Forest… Consider this analogy. Imagine you hear of a beautiful lake deep in a forest that you wish to go to but there is no real path. The first time you hike takes effort as you wind your way through the long grass and scrub as best you can. Initially different paths to the lake form as people use varying routes. But over time as you go to the lake more and more there becomes a defined track as other paths become overgrown. Now everybody takes this track without considering other options. Over time as hikers continue to take the same path, what started as a tiny path becomes a clear road that people automatically take to the lake. And this is how tennis players’ habits form in the brain. With repeated brain activation, particular neural firing patterns become more automatic and deeply engrained with use, making it less likely that we will take different neural tracks. Over time these unused brain circuits shrivel and die. Continued Opportunities for Change… While it is true that players’ responses tend to habitualize over time through repetition and pruning, there is also good news for coaches and parents trying to impact players’ behaviour, and players trying to change their own undesirable competitive habits. First, although the brain’s creation of new neurons available to form new patterns of connection slows with age, this process does continue throughout life, meaning we can change habits at anytime with enough effort. We also now know that the basic structure of the front part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex, continues to develop well into our 20’s. This is the part of the brain that plays an important role in responding adaptively to difficult emotional experiences such as anger and fear. So as the prefrontal cortex develops through the teenage years so does the ability to use this brain region to respond more adaptively to difficult emotions and therefore competitive challenges. The Path in the Forest Continued… So imagine in our forest analogy that for some reason you wished to form an alternate track. This would first require you to recognize and resist the automatic urge to take the road already built. It would then involve the extra effort of clawing your way through the scrub and long grass to begin a new track. And the next day if you decided to take the alternate route again you would have to go through the same process. But if you did this enough the old track would begin to grow over through lack of use as the new track develops. Then one day the urge to take the old route will disappear because the new route becomes more defined and easier to take. The Tipping Point… And so it is with players’ patterns of neural connections. While developmental habits become stronger over time through automatic repetition we also have the brain mechanisms to assist changing habits (with increasing difficulty) through repeated effort. From a brain perspective, achieving changes in habits require us to ‘do what we don’t feel like doing for long enough until we feel like doing it.’ When this shift occurs the new behaviour has stabilized by strengthening it’s neural connections to the point it becomes more attractive than the old habit. As coaches and parents we can never be sure when a player is at that tipping point where a desirable response path is about to become more stable than an undesirable path for a certain situation. This is the time huge, rapid changes in competitive responses can occur. Because we can teach an old dog new tricks, it just takes more effort!
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:40:36 +0000
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