From our book Nothing is Written:
In his book, Friends in Low Places, Dr James Willis describes research in which two groups of people were shown a photograph of a face. After seeing the photo the first group was asked to recall details of the face. The second group didn’t have to do this.
Later, each group was tested to see if they could remember the faces they had seen in the photos.
The second group – those left to use only their innate and wordless ability to remember a face – were twice as likely to remember it.
By attempting to make learning more detailed and explicit, we may be getting in people’s way.
Malcolm Gladwell relates the studies of tennis coach Vic Braden. Braden would ask top tennis players the “secret” of their technique. He found that although they had detailed explanations for how they did what they did, these descriptions were inconsistent and often false. Famously, Andre Agassi insisted that he would roll his wrist as he hit his forehand shots. In fact, stop motion photography showed that this simply wasn’t true. The fancy term for this is confabulation.
Our rational mind invents a plausible explanation for a behaviour, and believes its own propaganda.
Fresh experiences beat old explanations.
Bonus link: The gondola kitten experiment. When you’re busy explaining things to people, are you putting them in a gondola or helping them to discover for themselves?
