Kottke has found an older interview with the ever insightful writer Malcolm Gladwell at ESPN.com. Well worth reading on baseball and drugs, including this, the best description of choking I’ve seen.
For example, if you gave me a picture of blank keyboard and asked me to write in appropriate letters in the right places, I’d have to think really hard before I could do that accurately. My conscious knowledge of a keyboard is pretty weak. But right now I’m typing at perhaps 40 words per minute, and I’m having absolutely no trouble finding the right letter on the keyboard without thinking at all.
That’s my unconscious knowledge system at work, and in that mode I’m a great typist. These two systems are quite separate. And on tasks that we are good at — like typing, in my case, or throwing a baseball in, say, Derek Jeter’s case — our unconscious systems are way better than our conscious system. But sometimes under pressure, we get forced out of unconscious mode. And what are we left with? We’re left with painstakingly going over the keyboard, trying to remember what button goes with what letter. This is what choking is. It’s when you get jolted out of unconscious mode. You start thinking too much.
It’s slightly off topic, but I know exactly what he means about the keyboard and how our memories operate in separate functions for different things. There is traditional recall, and then there is body memory–the reason you can still ride a bike after 20 years. The last library I worked in used barcodes on the books and patron cards. There were 14 numbers. I could type my personal barcode in faster than you could blink. But ask me what the numbers were on my card and I would have to move my fingers in the correct configuration to mentally figure it out.