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Gnomic baseball sage Yogi Berra asked that question, and it’s a good one. For sportsmen, it’s particularly perplexing. But in our daily lives we all encounter the problem: can you think and act at the same time?

An excellent New Scientist article explores this subject by looking at the case of Ralph Guldahl. At one point, Guldahl was the greatest golfer in the world, a model of metronomic consistency. Then, without warning, he lost form and faded away. The trigger, according to golfing mythology? Guldahl’s authorship of a book (not a book!): Groove Your Golf.

I’ve written before about confidence and the paradox of hedonism and the New Scientist has some evidence to support this theory:

Last year, psychologists Kristin Flegal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Michael Anderson of the University of St Andrews in the UK showed that thinking aloud had a lasting effect: after explaining a successful putt, skilled golfers took twice as many putts to sink their next ball. In fact, explaining at length had the effect of temporarily wiping out all their expertise.

The problem stems from the need to describe movements that have become instinctive, in effect switching the brain from autopilot to manual. To make matters worse, the focus shifts from motor skills to language, and the need to find words to explain something normally done without thinking.

In the end - and with pleasing roundedness - the article concludes that the book did not destroy Guldahl’s game. But there’s definitely something there.

I wonder if what always seems to me like the high incidence of OCD-type behaviours among sportsmen - Wayne Rooney’s fondness for the vacuum cleaner being the best known example - has anything to do with their need to avoid thinking? (For other examples, see Tait, Matthew and Bentley, David).

And, if this is the case: will the increasing importance of confidence in general inspire greater levels of OCD across the population as a whole?

Just a thought…

UPDATE (30.07.09): Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article on choking in Observer Sports Monthly. His conclusion: that having a meaningless phrase running through your head can stop you bottling it. An idea he clearly got from the Simpsons episode.

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