There's this story of a student, having just given his thesis defense talk, freezes at the first question with his chalk describing an arc as he faints. The same story with different details has been told and retold since the 50s. But there is real pressure. It's rare, but some students fail their dissertation defense. Just last week a friend told me about a failure at the University of Michigan.
Temporary choking is much more common. I've seen it in at least a third of the defenses I've been to. Usually it's minor and people recognize it happens. Questions are rephrased or breaks take place and things come back to normal. It's just part of a rite of passage for many.
Choking is more recognized in sport. People talk about choking and 'the yips' - I'll stick with choking here was it's more common and easier to deal with.1 I've seen it in several events at the Olympic and National and World Championship levels when a lot is on the line. Recent work published in Neuron shines some light on a neurological basis. The experimenters monitored the motor cortex in the frontal lobe and watched a simple task requiring manual dexterity when the stakes were low, medium and high. What they found was a big drop in activity as the stakes went up - the subjects suffered a big performance hit. The effect was non-linear.. subjects didn't perform well at low reward levels - there was a sweet spot. It's part of becoming an elite athlete to learn how to deal with the pressure, but it still happens on a regular basis.
I've been interested in what the dynamics are in a team sport - specifically the simplest example with only two athletes on a team. Beach volleyball is a textbook example as there isn't a lot of overlap in responsibilities and players need to trust each other. Over time - say an Olympic run - the best teams tend to have stable partnerships. When one player begins to crumble, it's up to the other to shoulder the load somehow and communicate - often with a few words or a bit of body language like a glance. It's an impressive skill to pick up on this in a couple of seconds in the middle of a point and figure out how to deal with it. Interestingly there's evidence of sexual dimorphism in both style and success dealing with choking. Sarah summed it up: men fight to bond, women bond to fight. On average women may be more effective team players.2 Casual observation tells me this applies outside of sport.
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1 Some use the terms interchangeable, but differ in severity and treatment. Choking often occurs when an athlete over focuses on mechanics under pressure and lose the fluidity, grace, ability to analyze etc, that they've spent their career building. Their effective skill level falls dramatically. The yips, on the other hand, take place when anxiety is so high that it becomes difficult to execute even simple actions. It can be chronic requiring help from specialists.
2 For this reason I tend to prefer women's team sports to men's. Men's sports are more athletic, but the women often show superior team tactics and strategies.
tools for serious thinking
Om has mentioned several - often a fine pen, ink and paper. My sister's creative artwork often starts with the right paper and pencils.
One of the things you'll notice about top math and physics departments is the nearly exclusive use of high quality slate boards. There's something about the feeling of the motion of a good chalk against slate. A few days ago I saw someone with a t-shirt that said:
HAGOROMO
羽衣ファインタッチ
A member of the faith!
"math or physics?" "number theory", she replied. The tool is deservedly legendary. A mathematical introduced me to it in the early 90s and I've been a user ever since. It's really quite amazing.
I was a hoarder in the day. Thankfully the new chalk is just as good
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