Skill and intellectual training vs physical training – how different really are they?

An immediate note to say the following is mainly observational and speculative.

A mere five minutes into listening to a podcast in Japanese this evening, I got really frustrated and lost concentration. The content was more challenging than I can comfortably deal with and I was only understanding bits and pieces of the conversation – flooding in one ear and straight out the other.

My Japanese practice can feel like a a major uphill struggle. Perceived lack of progress relative to the effort put in, keeping up the daily routine is a war of attrition. Sometimes practicing a thinking-based skill feels athletic. Keep at an intellectual activity for long enough and chances are you will feel physically tired eventually.

This got me thinking – how different are physical and ‘brain’ training really? Can the processes of one contribute to the other, and if so, how?

In my experience, I don’t get nearly as frustrated with physical exercise as I do with training skills and knowledge. I feel it’s just widely understood within sport that you need to put the repetitions in for progress, and that’s that.

Yet for some reason there is a tendency to expect immediate results – or at least the brain seems to want it – when studying intellectual content. Take, for example, my quick loss of concentration when faced with tricky Japanese for a few minutes.

What’s the common ground?

Among high level athletes, the distinguishing features in many sports are often largely psychological. Factors like: the ability to handle pressure; skill in recognising weaknesses in both themselves and opponents, and acting on that recognition; or maintaining tremendous concentration

High level thinkers meanwhile appear to usually have established techniques, are highly analytical, able to be highly independent. They, like the athletes, also often command tremendous concentration.

A high level athlete and a high level thinker do, it turns out, have a lot in common. Concentration, handling pressure, maintaining composure are at the heart of both. These are all concerned with the mindset of a person, not the specific skill.

It’s a fascinating thing, really. There is a tendency (at least in the UK) to look down on psychology and philosophy as pseudo-sciences, but these are precisely the tools which the highest performers master. I think that says something quite damning about society – something well worth exploring properly at a later date.

Now, if the meta-processes are widely the same, how come it’s harder to concentrate on intellectual training? Time for some speculation:

• Endorphins – Intensive exercise rewards us with what aren’t far off body-produced drugs. Although it is possible to get a buzz off solving a challenging puzzle, I don’t believe it is as consistent as with sport (psychologists, biologists, sport scientists – Come tell me if I’m wrong !)
• Expectations concerning sport – We are socialised to expect sport to be fun and good for us. It is fun and it is good for us, but the expectation of that sets us up to perceive it as mentally less taxing than training a skill. Interesting, as this isn’t necessarily the case. Having great tactics in a team sport, or simply understanding complex rules (cricket, I’m looking at you), uses your brain. A lot.
• Expectations concerning study – Study is hard. Study is serious. Or so we’re trained to believe – perhaps one of the most stupid things society does to us. Even those of us who have realised study does not have to be serious are still surrounded by a culture that paints intellectual activity as taxing and painful – especially when actively labelled as intellectual in some way.

How about my frustration with my Japanese listening practice? I think the root of my issues was slacking on those meta-processes – the psychological mindset.

If I go for a long run, the endorphins hit and I feel good regardless of whether I make ‘progress’ or not. I associate the run with health, fresh air, the outdoors, which makes the run an overall positive experience even if I can’t knock a minute off that 10k. There are hardly any distractions either, and even when there is, running can very much go on auto pilot for a while.

When it comes to Japanese practice, there are a few barriers that aren’t there with running. Firstly, there is no handy endorphin release. The rewards for the process itself is more abstract and reliant on enjoying it – hard to maintain on the days where your language ability temporarily disappears.

Reaching goals and expectation can also be much less tangible than with athletics. You know immediately when you scrape another second off a top speed or lift a new heaviest weight, but intellectual progress is hard to measure. Imposter syndrome is also so often just round the corner to trick you into believing you’re no good just as you are actually improving. Maybe this is also a thing in sports and I’m not athletic enough to have realised this?

High level study really demands the learner get into ‘the zone’, that state that is so well recognised in a sport context. For some reason – that I do not understand and would need input from an expert – that’s easier to do in sport than in intellectual activities. However, look into people like Josh Waitzkin (former chess grandmaster/martial arts world champion), and it becomes clear the zone very much exists for both physical and intellectual training.

So where is the value in making this comparison? Even if only speculative, identifying possible mental blocks to training intellectual skills is a starting point for breaking the blocks down. I can experiment a while with treating my study like sport, and see if that can resolve some my Japanese study frustrations!

…Though I never had the same frustrations with Chinese. Might just be that Japanese is a nightmare to master. But hey, lets see!