No Time.

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” in the past week has been a kind of enlightening experience. The idea behind the book is that as humans, our unconscious has a much stronger effect on our everyday interactions than we realize. Most interestingly, he discusses “quick-splicing”, the idea that our sub-conscious makes quick decisions on our behalf before we really have a chance to think about something. Without going deeply into examples and studies from the book, he essentially theorizes that we are all the time making decisions and judgments that we don’t realize we are making. These decisions and judgments range from seemingly unimportant, understanding what someone means when they point to a painting on the wall, to profoundly significant, hiring a tall person instead of a short person because we respond to taller people in a more positive way. Gladwell states that we are all more racist/sexist/discriminative than we want to believe and that the idea behind the book is realizing this so that we can do something about changing it.

All of this has little to do with volleyball, but as I started thinking about the connection between our “quick-splicing” abilities and sports it became clear that sports are all about fast decision making. It is generally accepted that the best athletes, the ones who reach the highest levels, are the ones that can separate themselves out mentally. To me, “quick-splicing” plays a huge role in this when someone steps onto the court. If you ask a great player, in the middle of a match, why they decided to step two steps to the left in order to be in position for a dig, I don’t think they will be able to answer that easily. Of course they will say, the position of the block, the tendency of the hitter and other things all came together to help make the decision. But, I would argue that there is more to it than that. Our brain makes calculations all of the time, whether or not we are consciously telling it to, and those calculations play a major role in how we react to stressful situations like the middle of a rally on the volleyball court.

We’ve all experienced standing at the net, saying specifically that the opposing team’s setter is in the front row, and as soon as the play takes place the setter dumps the ball down on our side and no one on our team makes a move for the ball. How can something like this happen? We just said that we should be ready for it. Everyone heard that the setter was front row, but no one registered the information. I think a lot can be explained by understanding that our brain is thinking without us realizing it. When the play gets underway, our brain begins to run automatically, we have little or no time to think about what is happening, the things we do are decided by a new part of our brain.

What about beach volleyball? I think many of us have experienced having the other team make a short cut shot, a shot that in the moment, seems impossible to get to. So, we don’t run after it because we have already decided it isn’t reachable. Yet, we all know that in reality, if we did try as hard as possible to get to that ball, we would reach it a certain percentage of the time. It is this negative reaction, deciding that we can’t, that is the challenge for us as volleyball players. How do we overcome the bad “quick-splice” where our brain gives us poor information?

Through experience mainly. In the book, Gladwell references a company that trains body guards. The guards are forced to undergo several severely emotional tests in order to be able to eventually have better control over their body in these stressful situations. They must fight with rabid attack dogs, more than once, until they are able to deal with the situation in a calm and rational manner. They go into a dark house where they are shot with rubber bullets at different intervals, they can feel the bullets and the experience is just like being shot for real, until their body can cope with the shock of the situation. Eventually, they are able to function and maintain a normal level of decision making because of the heavy testing. I’m not recommending that a volleyball player go to these extremes, but if you want to break these bad habits, these bad quick-decisions your brain is making for you, you have to force yourself to go beyond your normal comfort zone.

The idea behind the book is incredibly interesting to me. I’m not positive there is any real connection between sports and Gladwell’s thoughts but I feel strongly somewhere in my brain that there is something there that athletes can use. And I guess there isn’t anything wrong with trusting my intuition.