Driving is a perfect and mundane example of unconscious competence most people have. If you could perform with the simple confidence of driving to work,you would probably be very good at what you were doing.
A friend once rhetorically asked me what trying to be funny meant, and of course it means being not funny, yet when we want to achieve some other end we approach it by trying. Yoda summed it up well, but we don't really get a chance to understand what it really means. Trying to drive on a highway is farcically dangerous, but simply driving on one is among the safest ways to drive.
There is a mental change that comes from physical competence where you no longer fear failure, and I'd argue its that lack of fear that makes the difference at elite levels where skills are largely equal. It also makes the difference in the rate at which you learn. The try/humiliate style of teaching is a way to produce industrial scale mediocrity, and so few can appreciate the difference that there is often no reason to change.
Physical realtime activities like walking, driving, dancing or chasing a ball require, what I would call, "fast thinking". There you're in a very tight reception/response loop where a mediocre decision made in a timely fashion is better than an "optimal" decision which takes longer to produce and makes you skip processing a few frames from the surrounding environment.
"Offline" activities are different, there you have enough time to evaluate different decisions and their possible outcomes.
I have been thinking about the concept of 'flow' and have come to think that it is a large part to do with your conscious mind correlating in a tight loop with your sensory experience, rather than it casting forward or back in time like it usually does. As soon as your conscious mind does skip to planning or memory, flow stops.
Everything you say is correct, but I also think people sometimes take away the wrong lesson from that dynamic, and that's what (IMHO) turns into the unhelpful "be yourself" advice.
That is, "When I'm funny/socially-adept, I'm [so unconsciously competent that I'm] not spending any effort to think about it. Therefore, if you spend no effort and relax, you will show the same skill. If you can't, you just weren't listening to my advice."
Meantime I failed two road tests and my instructor said I was overthinking it, I finally gave up and figured I'll wait till driverless cars come around
I don't know where you're from, but in the driving school I went to in Portugal most people failed their first exams. They asked for a lot of parking manouvres and were harsh on every error.
The purpose was to force you into buying more lessons, which you had to do if you wanted a second examination.
My second test was way easier, and everyone I knew there failed the first one.
Meanwhile, the IDF wanted me to drive a truck. And jailed me for 7 months for not being able to. They let me go, as I wasn't of any use to them otherwise.
FF to 2018 (that's 15 years I haven't had any sort of driving license) and lo and behold, I am a certified tractor operator. Turns out I can manage all that signage and other drivers bullshit, provided it all doesn't move too fast. And mostly doesn't come up in my work.
I've had my license for 12+ years now, but as soon as I moved into the city, I sold my car. Even with a child I get by just fine with carsharing services, Uber/taxis and public transit.
I've never needed to drive. It would be mildly more convenient if I could, but not enough for me to justify spending another few dozen hours practicing to pass the test when it'll be an obsolete skill soon enough
It's still nice to have it. You gain a lot of independence be it home or on vacation. It's nice not being dependent on taxis/public transport or anyone else. This holds especially true if you are not in an urban area, and busses that don't drive 24/7 classify as those, so it's not only the typical "rural" regions.
And no, it won't be obsolete soon. And by "soon" I mean what I wrote earlier, 10+ years.
This is one of the goals of Judo. It combines rational thinking, "How does this throw work? Why did not my attempt work?" with the end goal of not needing the thinking in practice. No Mind. It's what allows any musician or performance artist, race car driver, to be effective; Because they need to operate creatively at speeds that are faster then rational thinking. And this in our field is of course known as "being in the flow".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)
"Once mushin is attained through the practice or study of martial arts (although it can be accomplished through other arts or practices that refine the mind and body), the objective is to then attain this same level of complete awareness in other aspects of the practitioner's life. "
Consciously playing music seems nearly impossible to me. There's a whole world of physical technique that can be baffling.
I recently went through some deep study of my guitar picking technique. My playing nearly fell apart while I was doing it. Thinking about the angle at which the pick strikes the strings is really painful.
Such things seem like the same discipline needs to be applied except instead of practicing the music, you practice thinking about the music.
Specifically, thinking after the fact. If you play a chord, what do you remember about the angle the pick strikes the strings. Play it again, what do you notice afterwards. etc.
I have a strong hunch that its as much about developing the introspective ability/bridge to the skill as it is about bridging the write/edit flow gap (ie in writing its said to be better to write without reading, then edit in a separate session).
Yes, that's conscious practice. I do that a lot. Conscious practice to repetition to unconscious playing. Physical technique can be carefully studied in practice, in order to not think about it at all during performance - you already know what you're doing, and why you're doing it. The mind can focus instead on the ideas and feelings you are trying to express.
Develop instincts actually need thinking... At least for develop good instincts without being hurt and without have to rediscover the wheel a generation after another.
In my homecountry, Italy, there was an ancient theathral novel named "Re Travicello" (King little beam, literally) that say having thinking subjects it's a big problem: they contest, protest, convince other, they develop working solutions against throne interest etc. So he invented two concept: "trust the system" and "use your instinct" to stop people thinking...
Zen, in China, chan, is a mixture of Buddhism and Taoism, with Taoism originating in the 4th century BC during the warring states period along with most other influential Chinese philosophies (and, weirdly, much of Greek philosophy).
One rival was Mohism, sort of a mix of logic and sophism (logic has origins in rhetoric); Zhuangzi has some points about "disputation" that make me feel more kindly to modern analytic philosophy.
Not to be an arse but this is the shot described[1]. I was extremely confused when clicking you link then realizing it was actually a couple of minutes later.
If you are referring to the return when he was facing championship point, then that is indeed noteworthy. The spirit he displayed there made me a fan of his and to this day, I admire the cool-headedness and the resilience he displays.
> Federer’s inability to win Grand Slams in the last two years hasn’t been due to physical decline so much as a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments. In the jargon of sport, he has been “choking”. This, say the experts, is caused by thinking too much.
That’s the theory behind the article. Federer is 37, Dokovic is 31. Just saying.
In the nineties - in fact, the era directly pre-Federer - most players would be thinking pretty hard about retirement at 31! The current situation where all of the top three men's players (and six of the top seven) are over thirty is pretty much unheard of (with some notable exceptions of course, like Connors getting to the US Open semifinal at 39).
(The ages of the women in the top twenty currently is much more how it used to be in the men's game.)
I think (hope!) it's probably a combination of factors - firstly that the top three really are exceptional, probably the best men's tennis has ever seen; vast improvements in modern sports science - nutrition, strength training and conditioning, etc; being much more selective with their schedules (especially Federer of late); improvements in equipment; and some weird quirk that has meant the younger generation hasn't really come through and the older ones have been able to stay at the top with a periodic cycle of displacing each other as they get injured, struggle with form, and so on.
Or maybe it's just drugs, though they get tested regularly and punished very severely (but you could say the same about cycling...).
The ratio between the the gap in their ages and their ages is larger when they are younger. This is why age difference in a couple becomes less significant as they both grow older. Five years is a big difference between teenagers but not between octogenarians.
Tangentially related, I was reading about the negative aspects of pursuing high self-control[1], which could perhaps equate to overthinking. The text also includes links to research purporting the situations where relying on intuition is, perhaps counterintuitively, more advantageous than rationality.
Also quasi-related, a while back there was an article on HN about the human brain's Bayesian like processes[2], which again seem to form the basis of intuitive decision making.
Odd, I find the concept of high self-control to _include_ the ability to exercise no-mind at will. That is, high self-control is not limited to exercising control of your "rational" (System 2), but rather involves a Zen-like perspective over System 1 & System 2. No mind is both, yet neither.
I've had what seems like my greatest awakening this past week. Practice gets you somewhere, but I can't authoritatively say "where" is. Like some other commenter mentioned, I've found myself in an intentioned mushin [0] state.
This morning I was off the wagon a bit, but now I'm back. Can't wait to see what I accomplish with this focus ;)
The idea of a brain as doing Bayesian inference is pretty compelling. It makes sense evolution would eventually produce an an algorithm that approximates Bayesian inference, since the optimal decision is always found by maximizing expected utility over the Bayesian posterior.
I can't find the reference, but I have also read there is evidence that "gut" or intuitive decision making is also informed by information that the conscious mind does not have access to.
It reminds me of myself. This probably falls in the same basket, I used to game (online games) on a decent level, but I noticed that when I started becoming too concerned with winning a round that I'd start failing more.
Whereas when I played more 'happy go lucky' I could coordinate my actions much better.
There's probably other factors at play here, but overthinking really does have a downside on my ability to play well.
Another interesting datapoint is a friend of mine, who overthinks when gaming except when he was slightly intoxicated. Maybe like the Ballmer peak for gaming! :D
I find the arguments about "expectation" compelling, but isn't that fundamentally different from thinking/not thinking? Also, aren't we making a mistake by looking only at the upper end of the tail where high achievers achieve less due to self-doubt/risk aversion? Isn't the reverse true in many (if not most) situations, where risky behavior is mostly harmful?
I have one other qualm:
>But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.
Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the ball on the eye's optic plane. Just because processes are subconscious or effortless doesn't mean they aren't happening.
> Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the ball on the eye's optic plane.
The brain calculating differential equations doesn’t seem very plausible given the fact it has no access to data to perform those calculations. Perhaps it’s more about past observations or a priori knowledge? I think it’s worth noticing that catching things is an ancient predatory skill and is not exclusive to humans.
>Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball.
That's not at all how the brain works. It's a pattern matching neural net, so it trains a set of neurons to estimate the trajectory through trial and error, based on continually updating visual input, but the equations are nowhere in that implementation.
To drive parallels with programming - once you develop muscle memory you can become very efficient at coding. Thinking required only at the time of learning. Yes, learning Vim/Emacs is hard. But you have to go through that process only once. And after that typing/navigation becomes such an unconscious activity.
And if you choose simple and less obtuse language stacks, e.g. Clojure(script) - that will allow you to stop thinking about "mechanics" and concentrate your focus on solving the problem (instead of fighting the ecosystem, dependency management, language idioms, style guide, etc.).
Author is vague in defining thinking. To think is to be conscious not only of thoughts but emotions, movement, awareness, sight, instincts, etc...
His examples of people losing focus (ie. thinking about a movement) are right, but not because thinking is bad, but because one was focused on the wrong faucet of one's consciousness. Conscience doesn’t exist only in the intellect. Animals are not unconscious.
My (alpine) ski racing coach used to refer to "training your instincts", by which he meant that we needed to train in the correct neuromuscular patterns so that those would emerge without thinking (which of course is too slow at 35-40 meters/second in a Downhill race, or even 1/3 of that in a Slalom).
I also used to notice brain states that I'd call "fast meditation", completely calm and meditative, almost just observing the body doing it's work, but at speed. Happens even more in sportscar racing, i think because there's more time to get into a "flow state". Turns out there's a connection -- meditating monks generally slow down their sympathetic ('flight-or-flight") system and the parasympathetic (slow maint) system becomes primary, except when they achieve an exceptional meditative state they seek for years, when both systems kick into high gear. I suspect the same thing is happening from the opposite direction.
Miniature philosophical digression.
Given even more technology we get more and more power to do things unthinkingly. The problem with it is that the general level of training has not caught up. Most people do not attempt to train themselves, even fewer have the horizon far enough to "get" the consequences of what they're doing intuitively, or even logically.
I'm sure this was also an argument used against supermarkets, automobiles, and various other things.
Put simply, you can't learn the fundamentals of everything that affects your life.
There are consequences, of course. It is important to learn to balance between when you should learn something and when it really doesn't matter. This is easier said than done and up for constant debate.
>The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that much of our behaviour is based on deceptively sophisticated rules-of-thumb, or “heuristics”. A robot programmed to chase and catch a ball would need to compute a series of complex differential equations to track the ball’s trajectory. But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball
This is why neural nets are so powerful. They're encoding generalized heuristics, likely similar to those humans use.
I’ve seen this referred to as the mind/no-mind state or ‘mu’
You can get there fairly simply by playing any extremely fast-paced video game, like Tetris or Tempest 2000.
When I was djing regularly, I could get to that state, too. Given how introverted I was, it would have been impossible for me to actually get up in the DJ booth in front of hundreds or thousands of people and think about what I was doing. I had to lose myself in the activity. I often walked out after two hours not really remembering anything I did.
It is surprising that the exact mechanism of this behavior is not known. It must be related to habits. To the microbiome where most of our decisions are made. Would like to know more about how to leave out the conscious mind. I notice that when I'm doing a task on the computer which is interestingly repetitive that requires some dexterity I forget about the passage of time. So one can achieve this state even in daily life that does not require the return of a tennis ball under stress.
It seems that our logical side evolved to predict behaviors of others since empathy is limited to same species. It is probably the other side of the same circuit...
Similar to how A3C ANNs work, we have a reflective capability to change how and what we're training. "Superego" so to speak. A metric ton of automated systems for learning and action though.
At least two action oriented predictors - logical/heuristic and direct emapthic/sympathetic.
As to not noticing passage of time consciously, it is because conscious though likely it's more energy intensive, so to save it when subconscious processes are sufficient it gets throttled down. Of course this is a "just so" explanation and we do not actually know how exactly this works. Perhaps the consciousness related to sensing time and rhythm gets relegated to something else.
I believe loaded words like "subconscious" make it difficult to come up with new explanations.
It's interesting that when the body is happy and relaxed the mind is not aware of it. So there seems to be a continuous struggle between the ordering mind and instinctive body. Or the mind and the animal side.
The contentment might be like temperature in an annealing system or experimentation/forgetting tunable in an artificial system.
When we're content, nothing has to be changed, right? The trouble is, our "contentment sensor" has been evolved a long time ago for a different environment and is probably hard to train being so ancient and we do not know how to do it...
Of course this is another "just so" explanation. There's not enough science on contentment and discontent related to intellectual performance.
Mostly, a mix of what I have read and seen (Beginner's mind came to mind while writing and Stephen Curry's saying that he practices at level 10 so that the actual game feels like in slow motion)
“Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can’t unthink if you haven’t already thought.”
Put simply, unthinking requires extensive experience and training. This isn’t some magical monk super power everyone can reach for, it is only available to those who have devoted enough time and effort to the task that it almost becomes an instinct.
Driving is an example of this everyone can relate to. Imagine a newbie “unthinking”. Ouch!
This reminds me of the book "The Power of Now", which try to combine teachings of many religions, and basically says that you gotta "feel your presence now, without thinking" to fully connect yourself with the world. The author even mentions Descartes' famous quote.
To me it's unsatisfying that you have to offload the work to some part of the brain that you have no strong conscious connection with. It's like letting someone else do the work.
In my view, you really master something if you have conscious control over it. Perhaps that is what Federer was trying to do.
> you really master something if you have conscious control over it.
Quite the opposite - you master something when you can do it automatically, i.e. without conciously controlling it. The conscious mind has many limitations, one is that it's way too slow to handle real-time events - you can't consciously think about what actions to perform when you suddenly skid your car in a curve, or when you're performing the high jump on a sports field. The other main problem with the conscious mind is that it can't multi-task. So you use your conscious mind to practice, carefully, slowly at first, one part at the time, until, finally, your unconscious (or automated) trained sections of your brain can do it for you, and all the conscious mind has to do is to sit back, relax, and be the conductor. Or just watching.
Yes, that's a common view, and you worded it nicely. I think you didn't get that I'm taking about the next level of mastery.
The problem with training a neural net (or part of your brain) is that it is fuzzy. You don't know why it works, just that by trying hard enough, it often works. I'm saying that this is from a certain perspective unsatisfying. Also, talented people often do things automatically, without understanding why, and they have a hard time explaining things to a beginner.
I'm far from a master, but when I make a pot on the pottery wheel I'm thinking of the shape of the pot; when I teach someone I'm telling them to think mostly of the position of their hands, the feel of the clay, the speed of the wheel, ... etc.
Your're thinking of the shape of the pot. You're not thinking about the angle and other factors of your hand or other technical details. The student, on the other hand, has to concentrate on the mechanics of it. When that's automatic then you can think about the artistic part of it instead.
As you said, it's not mindless, just at a different level. You focus on what you want to achieve, not about the grits and details of how to do it. You're not really conscious about the latter.
A friend once rhetorically asked me what trying to be funny meant, and of course it means being not funny, yet when we want to achieve some other end we approach it by trying. Yoda summed it up well, but we don't really get a chance to understand what it really means. Trying to drive on a highway is farcically dangerous, but simply driving on one is among the safest ways to drive.
There is a mental change that comes from physical competence where you no longer fear failure, and I'd argue its that lack of fear that makes the difference at elite levels where skills are largely equal. It also makes the difference in the rate at which you learn. The try/humiliate style of teaching is a way to produce industrial scale mediocrity, and so few can appreciate the difference that there is often no reason to change.
"Offline" activities are different, there you have enough time to evaluate different decisions and their possible outcomes.
That is, "When I'm funny/socially-adept, I'm [so unconsciously competent that I'm] not spending any effort to think about it. Therefore, if you spend no effort and relax, you will show the same skill. If you can't, you just weren't listening to my advice."
FF to 2018 (that's 15 years I haven't had any sort of driving license) and lo and behold, I am a certified tractor operator. Turns out I can manage all that signage and other drivers bullshit, provided it all doesn't move too fast. And mostly doesn't come up in my work.
And no, it won't be obsolete soon. And by "soon" I mean what I wrote earlier, 10+ years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state) "Once mushin is attained through the practice or study of martial arts (although it can be accomplished through other arts or practices that refine the mind and body), the objective is to then attain this same level of complete awareness in other aspects of the practitioner's life. "
http://budobum.blogspot.com/2015/02/states-of-mind-mushin.ht...
I recently went through some deep study of my guitar picking technique. My playing nearly fell apart while I was doing it. Thinking about the angle at which the pick strikes the strings is really painful.
Specifically, thinking after the fact. If you play a chord, what do you remember about the angle the pick strikes the strings. Play it again, what do you notice afterwards. etc.
I have a strong hunch that its as much about developing the introspective ability/bridge to the skill as it is about bridging the write/edit flow gap (ie in writing its said to be better to write without reading, then edit in a separate session).
In my homecountry, Italy, there was an ancient theathral novel named "Re Travicello" (King little beam, literally) that say having thinking subjects it's a big problem: they contest, protest, convince other, they develop working solutions against throne interest etc. So he invented two concept: "trust the system" and "use your instinct" to stop people thinking...
Zen, in China, chan, is a mixture of Buddhism and Taoism, with Taoism originating in the 4th century BC during the warring states period along with most other influential Chinese philosophies (and, weirdly, much of Greek philosophy).
One rival was Mohism, sort of a mix of logic and sophism (logic has origins in rhetoric); Zhuangzi has some points about "disputation" that make me feel more kindly to modern analytic philosophy.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/zhuangzi/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/
See also Arthur Whateley (?) and especially Angus Graham.
[1] https://youtu.be/EjvSx0ipO0k?t=10181
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjvSx0ipO0k&feature=youtu.be...
That’s the theory behind the article. Federer is 37, Dokovic is 31. Just saying.
Anyway Federer seems to have lifted himself well.
You mean that both of them were considered to be in their prime.
(The ages of the women in the top twenty currently is much more how it used to be in the men's game.)
I wonder if that has anything to do with modern sport science keeping people at peak longer or even to do with steroids.
Could also be that they're just all exceptional, but I've been burned by optimism about sport personalities before.
Or maybe it's just drugs, though they get tested regularly and punished very severely (but you could say the same about cycling...).
> 25/31 < 31/37
Also quasi-related, a while back there was an article on HN about the human brain's Bayesian like processes[2], which again seem to form the basis of intuitive decision making.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321621803_The_Intri...
[2] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...?
I've had what seems like my greatest awakening this past week. Practice gets you somewhere, but I can't authoritatively say "where" is. Like some other commenter mentioned, I've found myself in an intentioned mushin [0] state.
This morning I was off the wagon a bit, but now I'm back. Can't wait to see what I accomplish with this focus ;)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)
I can't find the reference, but I have also read there is evidence that "gut" or intuitive decision making is also informed by information that the conscious mind does not have access to.
Whereas when I played more 'happy go lucky' I could coordinate my actions much better.
There's probably other factors at play here, but overthinking really does have a downside on my ability to play well.
Another interesting datapoint is a friend of mine, who overthinks when gaming except when he was slightly intoxicated. Maybe like the Ballmer peak for gaming! :D
I have one other qualm:
>But baseball players do so by instinctively following simple rules: run in the right general direction, and adjust your speed to keep a constant angle between eye and ball.
Humans definitely do calculate "complex" differential equations to estimate the trajectory of a ball. If not, they literally wouldn't know which direction the ball is traveling in, as you'd only have the position of the ball on the eye's optic plane. Just because processes are subconscious or effortless doesn't mean they aren't happening.
The brain calculating differential equations doesn’t seem very plausible given the fact it has no access to data to perform those calculations. Perhaps it’s more about past observations or a priori knowledge? I think it’s worth noticing that catching things is an ancient predatory skill and is not exclusive to humans.
That's not at all how the brain works. It's a pattern matching neural net, so it trains a set of neurons to estimate the trajectory through trial and error, based on continually updating visual input, but the equations are nowhere in that implementation.
And if you choose simple and less obtuse language stacks, e.g. Clojure(script) - that will allow you to stop thinking about "mechanics" and concentrate your focus on solving the problem (instead of fighting the ecosystem, dependency management, language idioms, style guide, etc.).
His examples of people losing focus (ie. thinking about a movement) are right, but not because thinking is bad, but because one was focused on the wrong faucet of one's consciousness. Conscience doesn’t exist only in the intellect. Animals are not unconscious.
I also used to notice brain states that I'd call "fast meditation", completely calm and meditative, almost just observing the body doing it's work, but at speed. Happens even more in sportscar racing, i think because there's more time to get into a "flow state". Turns out there's a connection -- meditating monks generally slow down their sympathetic ('flight-or-flight") system and the parasympathetic (slow maint) system becomes primary, except when they achieve an exceptional meditative state they seek for years, when both systems kick into high gear. I suspect the same thing is happening from the opposite direction.
It is endlessly amazing . . .
Put simply, you can't learn the fundamentals of everything that affects your life.
There are consequences, of course. It is important to learn to balance between when you should learn something and when it really doesn't matter. This is easier said than done and up for constant debate.
This is why neural nets are so powerful. They're encoding generalized heuristics, likely similar to those humans use.
Currently the state of the art is some sort of ad hoc correlation between behavior and explanations.
The topological ANN explanation makes their thinking seem vastly different from what logical heuristics would be...
You can get there fairly simply by playing any extremely fast-paced video game, like Tetris or Tempest 2000.
When I was djing regularly, I could get to that state, too. Given how introverted I was, it would have been impossible for me to actually get up in the DJ booth in front of hundreds or thousands of people and think about what I was doing. I had to lose myself in the activity. I often walked out after two hours not really remembering anything I did.
As to not noticing passage of time consciously, it is because conscious though likely it's more energy intensive, so to save it when subconscious processes are sufficient it gets throttled down. Of course this is a "just so" explanation and we do not actually know how exactly this works. Perhaps the consciousness related to sensing time and rhythm gets relegated to something else.
It's interesting that when the body is happy and relaxed the mind is not aware of it. So there seems to be a continuous struggle between the ordering mind and instinctive body. Or the mind and the animal side.
When we're content, nothing has to be changed, right? The trouble is, our "contentment sensor" has been evolved a long time ago for a different environment and is probably hard to train being so ancient and we do not know how to do it...
Of course this is another "just so" explanation. There's not enough science on contentment and discontent related to intellectual performance.
Currently I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/6846034/
However, really successful tilt this balance unnaturally (see above).
“Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can’t unthink if you haven’t already thought.”
Put simply, unthinking requires extensive experience and training. This isn’t some magical monk super power everyone can reach for, it is only available to those who have devoted enough time and effort to the task that it almost becomes an instinct.
Driving is an example of this everyone can relate to. Imagine a newbie “unthinking”. Ouch!
In my view, you really master something if you have conscious control over it. Perhaps that is what Federer was trying to do.
Quite the opposite - you master something when you can do it automatically, i.e. without conciously controlling it. The conscious mind has many limitations, one is that it's way too slow to handle real-time events - you can't consciously think about what actions to perform when you suddenly skid your car in a curve, or when you're performing the high jump on a sports field. The other main problem with the conscious mind is that it can't multi-task. So you use your conscious mind to practice, carefully, slowly at first, one part at the time, until, finally, your unconscious (or automated) trained sections of your brain can do it for you, and all the conscious mind has to do is to sit back, relax, and be the conductor. Or just watching.
The problem with training a neural net (or part of your brain) is that it is fuzzy. You don't know why it works, just that by trying hard enough, it often works. I'm saying that this is from a certain perspective unsatisfying. Also, talented people often do things automatically, without understanding why, and they have a hard time explaining things to a beginner.
It's not mindless, it's higher level.
Maybe I've just never attained mastery.
Mastery involves training the unconscious parts well enough to be able to offload work onto them.