“Why would “smarter” brains work less hard? One strong bet is that when we are inexperienced—when we still have a lot to learn—we have to make a conscious effort to think about what we’re doing. But later, after we’ve become more adept, much of what initially took effort becomes automatic.
The good news is that functioning on autopilot allows us to expend less brain energy on the routine aspects of the work. Our expertise allows us to direct our energy elsewhere. For example, novices use different parts of their brains than experts do. This happens in areas as different as playing chess and swinging a golf club.These studies show that less-experienced people think more about carrying out the mechanics of the task and encoding information.Experts, on the other hand, function on automatic pilot in these areas. In fact, experts sometimes falter—flubbing a basketball free throw or a golf putt—when their focus shifts back to the mechanics.
Functioning on autopilot can be a great advantage. But it can also work against us.
International rock climber Lynn Hill was preparing to climb a wall in Buoux, France in 1989. She threaded her rope through her harness but then, instead of tying the knot, she stopped to put on her shoes. While tying her shoes, she talked to another woman. “The thought occurred to me that there was something I needed to do before climbing,” she later recalled.29 But Hill “dismissed the thought” and climbed the wall. When she leaned back to rappel to the ground, she fell seventy-two feet. Fortunately, tree branches broke her fall and Hill survived.
Lawrence Gonzales, who tells this story in his book Everyday Survival, points out that more training would not have helped Lynn Hill. “In fact,” as Gonzales writes, “experience contributed to her accident.” She could tie her rope to her harness on autopilot but the similarity between tying shoes and tying the rope “tricked” her brain into thinking she had done what she needed to do.”
Madeleine Van Hecke
“… you can automate behavior. The simplest example is tying your shoes. Everybody can tie their shoes, you know, without thinking. You could do it automatically. But if you try to teach a 3-year-old to tie his shoes, it’s a very laborious process. It takes a lot of work to get him to do it. Once he learns to do it, he won’t have to think about it again. But this is an interesting system because it takes something that requires all of your attention and it turns it into something that requires none of your attention, so that’s a key thing in there.
One of the things that we automate, well, we automate almost everything, but most people have a behavioral script for driving a car, so you can drive a car literally without being aware of what you’re doing. And so, you can talk on the cellphone and drink your coffee and correct the children in the backseat or daydream or whatever, and be driving and not aware of what you’re doing. And this could be a very dangerous thing.
One of the examples I use in the book of the system in operation tripping us up is of a famous rock climber named Lynn Hill. Lynn Hill was arguably the best rock climber in the world at that time and she was preparing to warm up to climb a fairly easy cliff. And she was just tying her harness, tying her rope to her harness when she was interrupted and she had a little conversation with somebody and then she tied her shoes and went ahead and climb the wall. When she got up, about 72 feet, she leaned back to rappel and discovered that she hadn’t finished tying her rope and fell to 72 feet. She would’ve died except she landed in the branches of some trees and that saved her life. What had happened there is very interesting because she had a behavioral script worked out for tying her rope.
She’d had so much experience; she could do it without thinking. And she had another behavioral script for tying her shoes, which was very close to the one for tying her rope. So once she was interrupted and she tied her shoes, her brain accepted that as valid information that she’d finished doing what she needed to do. And without further deliberation, without further checks and balances, she went ahead and climbed with her rope untied. And I maintain that most of us are like Lynn Hill, we have an untied knot somewhere in our lives and it’s just waiting for us to put our weight on it. But by thinking through these things, thinking about these systems and how they control us, we begin to stop ourselves.”
Laurence Gonzales
