How mammals learn, Part Deux

Well, we learn many different things in many different ways. There is the "human see, human do" method, which involves watching someone do something and then attempting to translate what you've seen into your own movement.

This is very, very, inefficient. Years ago, I watched a lovely lady pianist attempting Rachmaninoff's Concerto #3, which demands a lot of fortissimo (very loud) playing. She struck the keys so hard that she actually lifted her ass off the piano stool. I know this because I was looking at her ass.

What I saw was a movement that was the RESULT of other movement. No one learns to play fortissimo by being told 'get your ass in the air'.

Golfers who watch good golfers 100 years ago noted how their hips (or, the front part of their asses) moved, shifting and rotating. That movement, in the early 20th Century, hadn't been part of golf instruction, but thanks to the keen eyes of the observers, it was soon incorporated into the lexicon of golf instruction.

It is, of course, bullshit. 

Those early observers noted that the good golfers -- who were pretty much self-taught -- didn't move their heads (so much that they'd be noticeable) or bend their arms (more than about 30º) at the elbows, and so more bullshit was added.

Then, there was the advent of the high-shutter-speed still picture, which enabled the observer to see what could not be seen with the naked eye, things like clubhead lag and shaft flexion. Sometimes, famously in Ben Hogan's first book, "Power Golf" the focal-plane shutter sweeping horizontally across the frame created a FALSE image! But true or not, there was much more bullshit added.

Now we have video, and complex discussions of the plane of the swing (wrongly defined; there's no such thing as a curved plane). Even more bullshit.

Then there are the "scientific" attempts to analyze the stroke; Ralph Mann's computer analysis of 100 pros defining (make that SWAGing) how "The Pro" swings. And too too too many others to mention. 

Well, let's just say that attempting to copy external observations is as likely to get you a good golf swing as playing "Hamlet" in Act V will get you to know what it's like to be dying.

Which brings me, at loooong last, to the point. The most efficient way mammals learn is by thinking of what we want to do, trying to do it, and observing whether we got what we wanted. If we did, we do it again; if not, we do something else.

Three steps: CONCEPTION, EXECUTION, CORRECTION.

Oh, but that's too simple. You can't make a living telling people to just hit it. Try, and if you don't succeed, try something else. 

But it is that simple. If you don't think so, go Google SEWGOLUM.