Changing your mind.

I have been doing some thinking about how hard it is to implement meaningful and purposeful change in context to some comments here and my own experience. This started me wondering if there may be difficult for reasons other than simply having done something for a long time or for a large number of repetitions.

Looking into some of the research I do think there is more involved and something useful may come from a dialogue. "What we know from lab studies is that it's never too late to break a habit," Duhigg said. "Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure — that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change."

Unless cited otherwise these are strictly my thoughts, interpretations, and opinions based on what I read and in no way representing facts.

Paraphrased and oversimplified, I am starting to think that for a golf stroke the brain works on context cueing to call up pre-recorded action sequences (subroutines). These initially get stored when enough learning experiences become associated with contexts and then get reinforced as that set of context/subroutine is accessed repeatedly. Eventually the subroutine is fired autonomously when the context cue is present even if that is inconsistent with the desired outcome.

In the process of learning something new, a person has to actively think about what they are doing and that can be very difficult. However, over time less and less thought is required as they store away more and more subroutines that are associated with contexts, or learn. That is pretty awesome unless the first set of subroutines stored away is flawed as there is no way to to start fresh by overwriting or deleting them.

A totally new set must be created, usually by breaking or interrupting the context to the old one and then creating a greater chance for the new one to trigger in the desired context than the old one. This is possible because there is also a reward sequence at the end of the context cueing action sequence. However, the old routines will remain in storage and can fire at any time, usually the most inopportune time.

It is clearly rewarding when a person goes to an instructor and for whatever reason (nerves, setting, club being physically moved into unfamiliar positions by instructor) they are able to bypass their stored routines and hit shots more like they desire. However when they return to their familiar location (range) and hit balls at full speed they are unable to reproduce that desired result as their pre-recorded sequence is simply processed over and over and nothing is accomplished.

Thus the need to do drills, slow swings, segment the swing and perform each segment individually, or just about anything that will break the context cue from firing the old subroutines. Well not anything, it still needs to be productive in associating the new performance into a new context cue that actually produces the desired result. If this can be accomplished there is a good chance the new routine will be automatically selected as the reward sequence at the end should have a much higher value.

I do not disagree with anything you wrote. I actually never thought if a golf swing is a habit, just that it seemed to fit in rather well with a lot of the brain function pattern descriptions I was reading about. So I started to wonder if there was something to be gained by investigating and discussing it further. I was actually hoping someone here was a trained professional in this area of research that would be qualified to contribute and answer some questions.

In the literature they sometimes use the term automaticity instead of habit and define habits as having very specific subsets of features commonly associated with automaticity. Others use the two interchangeably and there appears to be no universal agreement on exactly what each very specifically and technically mean. Sometimes the technical meaning of a common word is not preserved in research papers. Regardless, I can not dispute what are and are not habits. My personal experience strongly suggests that athletic movement sequences can be habits and mine are, but you know just opinion.

In dual-process models, habit performance is mediated by a fast, automatic, unconscious processing system that reflects associations learned through experience.  This automatic system typically is contrasted with slow, deliberative, conscious processing that requires access to a working memory system of limited capacity. So the example you describe is specific to one system and it might be important to understand the differences, or not if you reject the whole dual-process concept.

In one post you mentioned that Bernhard Langer short circuited his yips by adopting a completely different technique. Really that is my basic premise, that he had something broken and to address the situation he replaced one technique with something completely different. I would attempt to say he changed his context so that the yips were not triggered in the new context because it seems to fit the research I was reading.

My golf seems very much like a habitual monster. I can review in front of a mirror or in my bedroom using foam balls very specifically what I want to work on that day but when I get to the range I can stand over a real ball and my mind just can not recall anything. It is almost ridiculous. I can start to take the club away from the ball and within a few inches know that I have reverted to my old swing pattern. What was so clear in the context of my bedroom is non-existent on the range.

I do not think it even has to be specific to golf. If a student habitually ignores what has been discussed and assigned by the instructor is there anything the instructor can do to short circuit this? Assign a fake primary goal and tangentially mention the real goal and stress that it is not important enough to bother with at this point? I do not know I am just spit balling here

Thank you very much. Quite a lot to capture in three succinct sentences.