Automaticity

It frees up cognitive capacity.

Automaticity has a risk.

You stop noticing things.

How many experienced drivers have arrived somewhere and realised, hey, they barely remember the journey at all? the skill remains the awareness has reduced leadership can become like that experienced leaders recognize patterns this is like the last restructure i've seen this kind of thing or this person before we tried this 10 years ago and it didn't work then Pattern recognition is one of the gifts of experience.

The paper we talk about here has to do with automaticity, and I'll just let you go into that in the way that we go into it, because it happens in a really natural way.

But it's from 2014, the paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

It's called Delegation to Automaticity.

It's in the show notes.

It's one that means a lot to me in the work and things I'm trying to think through.

Without thinking about it, it becomes really natural, right? You know how to just go from work to home or to the grocery store or whatever.

But if you think about the first time you tried to learn how to drive and how difficult that was and how trying to figure out how to maneuver this machine well how does that happen how does that really difficult thing that you're trying to learn how to do with your body then become automatic so that's just a little kind of teaser of what we get into here mac works at the scale of the brain where he's trying to look at what single neurons are doing but also like these entire networks of regions at the same time i really enjoy as you would think this tension between those scales and how hard it is to hold that how hard it is to be really specific and also look at the whole, or be able to explain things in really wide strokes, as Matt can do, but also still look at more specific things.

So I was really drawn to his work for that reason, and also, of course, this paper, Delegation to Automaticity, The Driving Force Behind Human Cognitive Evolution.

We do want students to be able to recall facts within a short amount of time and typically within three seconds.

Automaticity is a real goal and it's worth working towards.

But speed alone does not tell you whether a student is truly fluent.

Think about a student who scores 90 on a time test, right? They got through most of the facts in two minutes.

When wording becomes automatic, conscious resources can be directed elsewhere, toward visualization, emotional engagement, posture, ritual timing, observation of the environment, or the perceived presence being addressed.

Automaticity does not mean unconsciousness.

A skilled musician can perform a familiar sequence automatically while remaining intensively attentive to interpretation.

A ritual practitioner can know the formula by heart while attending more deeply to its meaning.

As the formula becomes automatic, the effort required to produce it can decrease.

This may free attention to observe sensation, imagery, emotion, or the spaces between repetitions.

Automaticity can also encourage mind-wandering if the practice becomes too easy.

The speaker continues reciting while attention moves elsewhere.