"We Don't Need to Copy the World in Our Head to Interact With It" - a conversation with Julia Blau and Jeffrey Wagman - The Talent Equation Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, Stewart here before we get into today's podcast,
I wonder if I can ask you to do me
a favor. I'm hoping that I can get the podcast
to grow to a wider audience. But further it goes,
the more people that it can impact. I often get
letters of messages on social media from many of the
listeners who often talk to me about the impact it's
had on them and the people that they work with.
Sometimes that impact goes as far as family members and

(00:23):
relationships that you hold. I'm hoping that I can get
that message out call wider audience.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Now.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Obviously, the more people that listen, the more impact the
show can have, but also the more people that subscribe
and download, then that helps me to invest in the
show and put out more content. As you know, my
podcasting of late's been a little bit sporadic, say the least,
and that's partly due to the fact that I've just
been struggling with capacity. Now I'm hoping to be able
to enlist some help so that I can improve the
quality and improve the amount of podcasts I put out there.

(00:49):
But I can only do that with your help. To
please share it far and wide, you know, use social
media if you want to use your networks through WhatsApp
or other messaging channels that you use, or even if
you're face to pay with people, conferences, seminars, those sorts
of places, let them know about it, encourage them to
sign up and listen. Now, I've got loads of ideas
for a new ways to take the show. I want
to bring on new co hosts other than the world

(01:10):
famous Flow the Dog. I want to do some live
streamed episodes that people can interact with and do Q
and as live Q and a's, and I'm also thinking
about doing live podcasts from conferences as well as bringing
on some big name guests. But I can only do
that with your support. Every single subscription is a massive benefit. Now,
if you want to go a bit further than that,
then there is a Patreon page, and if you go

(01:30):
to the Patreon page, there's opportunities for you to buy
me the equivalent of a cup of coffee. If you're
are to do then that's amazing and that's massively supportive,
but it's not essential. The main thing is if you
could just take the time to share it on your
social media channels or share the episode with somebody that
you know and if you find some value in it,
then pass it on to others and pay it forward.
And if you can do that, I'd be enormously grateful.

(01:53):
Thanks in advance via support.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Welcome to the Townent Equation Podcast. If you are passionate
about helping young people to leash their potential and want
to find ways to do that better, then you've come
to the right place. The Talent Equation podcast seeks to
answer the important questions facing parents, coaches, and talent developers

(02:17):
as they try to help young people become the best
they can be. This is a series of unscripted, unpolished
conversations between people at the razor's edge of the talent
community who are prepared to share their knowledge, experiences, and
challenges in an effort to help others get better faster. Listen, reflect,

(02:38):
and don't forget to join the discussion at the Talent
Equation dot co dot UK.

Speaker 4 (02:44):
Enjoy the show did and I sent it to Michael Claudia.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
I've got it, but normally I would wait. It's preficult,
but I can't not record this, Jeff, what were you
just telling me about a shop that sells affordances?

Speaker 4 (03:05):
I was in Oxford, and there was a shop on
the corner, or maybe on the corner, but on the
street that solder Fordance is called objects of Use.

Speaker 5 (03:15):
Hey, I need a picture of this.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
I have one. I will send it to you. I
sent one to Michael and Claudia. It turns out it's
not quite as exciting as it seems. But it's like
a kitchen gadget store. But I was like objects of Use.

Speaker 5 (03:29):
I mean, okay, but we're going to include this photograph
in our new book. I'm just putting that out there.

Speaker 4 (03:34):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Well, I'm I nearly always say that I'm extremely excited,
but on this occasion, I am extremely excited. I'm always
extremely excited, but in particular in this case because I'm
joined by Julia Blau and Jeff Wagman who've written this
amazing book which I can't I can't quite see, but
here it is there an introduction to ecological psychology, a

(04:04):
lawful approach to perceiving, acting, and cognizing. I am going
to touch on that a little bit, but I feel like,
I mean, I know this book's been out a couple
of years now, a couple of years, is that right
about it? Something like that? And I don't know why
I haven't found it before. I stumbled across it because
of an interview you had with a YouTuber called brend
does Movement, who I'm due to get on the show

(04:26):
actually because I feel like we are kindred spirits. And
it was a fabulous conversation. I really enjoyed it. I
enjoyed the fact that you moved from location to location
in the conversation. But it was really nice. And you
guys made some quotes that I'm absolutely shamelessly going to steal.
One in particular, you said, I think Jeff, which was
about physics, is good for chess, but not so good

(04:49):
for frisbee, something along those lines. I can't remember.

Speaker 5 (04:53):
That one too.

Speaker 4 (04:54):
I think I think I said and and fairness. I
think I stole this from Andy Clark, who's a philosopher,
and it was a computers are good at chess, a
bad at frisbee, something like that. But it's a way
to think about what I think. It's a it's a

(05:15):
way to take all of the skill that we've built
into computing devices, including AI nowadays, and completely flip it
upside down. Because as good as AI is at doing
what it does, it doesn't do the things that very
simple creatures like insects do easily. And so we're solving

(05:43):
you know, you could call you they say we're solving
the hard problems before we're solving the easy problems. Or
you could say that we've actually going after the easy
problems and trying to figure out chess. And you know
how to generate a sentence from must stem and the
harder problem is how to play frizze be or you
know how to intercept a to drive your car or whatever.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Remind me, I must come back to AI, because I
discovered something about AI that I think you'll both find
really interesting, or at least I hope you will. Before
we jump into that, I wonder if I could ask
you both, maybe Julia first, if you wouldn't mind just
giving a little bit of your potted history in this
field and how you ended up exploring and writing about Fred, who,

(06:29):
by the way, I've become a love and is now
a little friend of mine personally too.

Speaker 5 (06:35):
Oh, thank you, I love Fred.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (06:37):
No, So my name is Julia Blow. I got into
this field. I was a undergraduate at the University of Connecticut,
and I was a psych major, and I took Sensation
and Perception with Claudia Corrello, and I was, I mean,
maybe a month into that class, and I went up
to her after class and I just went, how do

(06:58):
I become you when I grow up?

Speaker 4 (07:03):
Because I had just I.

Speaker 5 (07:04):
Had fallen in love with the class and I had
fallen in love with her, and I was just like,
this is this stuff is incredible and it's you know,
making my brain explode, like I just it all feels new,
and it's like it finally puts together some things that
I learned in all these other places. They all kind
of came together in that class, and I got very
excited about it. And I and she pull goes into

(07:24):
her bag and she pulls out an application to do
an independent study and she's got a sticky note on
it that says my name, and she says, I've been
waiting for you to ask and hands them to me. Wow,
this is you know how? So I started doing research
with her, and then towards the end of that, she says, Okay,

(07:45):
now you got to come be my grad student. So
I applied for the program there. She actually wrote me
my recommendation letter to get into her program. So I
always sort of wondered how that went right, like Dear Me,
Julie's fantastic Love Me like that. But anyway, it was.
It was great and I and I really loved it.
But I will say that I spent the first couple

(08:05):
of years in that program drowning. I mean just drowning
because there was so much and so much of it
was written at a level that was very difficult to
enter into. And so we, Jeff and I have one
of the goals of this book that we're here talking
about was to try and make it so that people

(08:27):
didn't have to have that experience the one I did,
where you're sort of run into a wall. Your interest
is there, your desire is there, the intelligence is there,
but man, it's just a wall, a barrier to entry.
So we just we were trying to write something that
would that would help us get in, help someone like
me get into the field just a little bit easier.

(08:47):
So that was that was where this is how I
ended up here.

Speaker 4 (08:50):
This is where I met amazing Thank you and Jeff Well,
I'm Jeff Wagman. I I a a similar entry to
the field. I went to college at a small liberal
arts college in Pennsylvania, called Franklin and Marshall College, and
we were extremely fortunate to have one of the pioneers

(09:15):
of ecological psychology there when I was there. His name
was Ed Reid, and he died tragically young, but he
was there long enough to make an impression on me.
And while I was there, I also did some research
with a professor who studied perception. He wasn't an ecological

(09:36):
psychologist per se, but he was interested in applied questions
like driving at night and things like that. So he
was kind of you might call him a human factors
or perceptual just a straight perception psychologist, but he appreciated
the ecological view and what it could bring to trying

(09:58):
to understand problems like that. And so when it came
time to apply to graduate school, I applied to a
few different programs, some of whom were It's Some of
those were led by the students of Michael Turvey and

(10:19):
Claudia Corrello. But I also applied to that program a
University Connecticut, the same program that Julia went to, and
when I went to visit, I was completely bored by

(10:39):
really it was by the students who I met. The
older students in that program were so impressive to me,
and I could do some name dropping if you want,
people like Mike Riley and Brett Pagen and Ramesh Bala, Supernamium,
Kevin Shockley. These people were all so impressed to me,

(11:01):
and I wanted to be like them. So Julia wanted
to be like Claudia. Well, I wanted to be like
these students. And then on top of that, realizing that,
you know, there were Michael Turby and Claudia Corella were
in charge of a whole lot, and I thought, well,
this is where I want to be. I just felt

(11:23):
really at home there. It felt at home both just
in a personal level, but also an intellectual level, and
off I went.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
I mean, I love those stories. It's not dissimilar to
one of my stories, but in a very different route.
I found and discovered sports ethics for a guy called
Professor Mike mcnamie when I was at University of Cardiff,
and he encouraged me to follow him to do a
scholarship at a new institution that he was going to.

(11:56):
So I started my postgrad in sports Forlosos for sports ethics.
I didn't fully complete it into a PhD, as I
was originally supposed to largely just because of life stuff.
But it's the itch that's never been able. I've never
been able to scratch, so I've always wanted to come
back to it. But I've now obviously discovered a love
of ecological dynamics, and might I might come back to

(12:16):
you actually a little bit later on, because I believe
that I've got, well, I've got some interest, hopefully fairly
interesting thoughts around the role of ecological psychology in sport
and the ethical dimensions it brings to sports coaching. We
come onto that a little bit later on. This is

(12:36):
going to be a magical mystery tour, there is no
It's not going to be linear. Of course, it's not
going to be linear. I'm a very very non linear
approach to this conversation because I very often read books
sideways and backwards and all these sorts of things. There's
so many areas that pique my interest. I genuinely felt
as well when I listen to you guys talk. I

(12:59):
then immediately got the audiobook and started listening to it
on my various journeys, and then I've got the actual
book itself. Well, I found what I thought was actually
what you said, Julia which was this idea that actually,
this is the kind of introduction that you need in
order to really get into it. Now, Rob Gray, as
we mentioned, so you guys have met Rob, and I
said that, you know, his podcast and mine, they sort

(13:21):
of we started at similar times. And Rob's been on
my podcast several times. I've been on his couple of times.
Rob has actually done a He's come on the my
pop I have a learning group, kind of community of learning,
and Rob's actually come on that group on a couple
of couple of occasions to road test some theories with

(13:42):
that group. He and he says that he he took it.
It's a Gibsonian idea, what called what was called Gibson
apparently had a purple peril, which was when he would
take his ideas in front of the students. And so
Rob's done that, been brave enough to do that and
put it out there on the podcast. So I've got
a lot of admiration for the stuff that Rob's been doing.
And obviously Rob, you know, I said, Rob the podcast
is like the brainy older brother. He you know, Rob

(14:06):
and I have like sort of been you know, kind
of like going back and forward and all those sorts
of things, and I felt like his books have been
brilliant as well. He's made them particularly particularly the first one,
How We Learned to Move, which was like from a
sporting practitioners perspective, really grabbed, you know, in terms of
sort of got some of the concepts and applied them

(14:27):
in the sporting dimension. And then he's obviously written a
couple of other ones, but this one, for me, what
it did that was slightly was different from what Rob
did was like, really got to grips with the you know,
the underlying theories around ecological psychology, because the sports world
have sort of melded together ecological psychology and dynamical systems
theory and created sort of ecological dynamics as a way

(14:49):
of us trying to make sense of like kind of
the sports world. More to talk about there. But what
I liked was, firstly, you've got your character Fred who's
navigating his way through the world with all these different problems.
What I really like was the way you brought to
life some of the experiments that have been done over
the years in this field, and those experiments, the stories
behind those experiments, and all those sorts of things. For

(15:11):
me really gave some of that kind of empirical you know, well,
in fact, evidence shows the evidence of evidence based behind
ecological psychology. And that's one of the criticisms sometimes leveled
at those of us in the sports world advocating for
principles of ecological psychology. Often you know, oh, you've got
no evidence base, you know this, that and the other,

(15:32):
And I genuinely find that really quite frustrating. And so
I genuinely think this has made a massive contribution to
those of us in sports world because we've got a
lot more to talk to. But in a way that's
kind of what's the word approachable, you know. I could
talk about some of these experiments to friends of mine
in coaching world and they get them and it would understand,

(15:54):
we'd understand it. So anyway, well done, great, I love it, well,
thank you.

Speaker 5 (15:58):
I mean, I can't say that we were like actively
reaching towards the sports world when we were doing it,
but we were actively reaching towards that exact idea though,
where somebody wants to do this, they're interested in it,
they or they're frustrated with what they have been doing,
they want to try something else, but they just need
an entry. They need some way in that is understandable.

(16:19):
We've told this story, I mean probably one hundred times
Jeff and I about how when we were writing the book,
the goal was to be able to write a book
that I could hand to my mom so that she
would know what I did for a living.

Speaker 4 (16:34):
Right.

Speaker 5 (16:37):
She's a very bright woman, but she's educated in a
completely different field. She's an artist, and I wanted to
be able to say, all right, here to my mom,
the artist, read this, and then you will understand my field.
So whenever we were writing it, we were sort of
passing it back and forth. That was the biggest note
we frequently gave each other, right, was was you've got
a mom. This part up. Moms are confused, right, And

(17:00):
so for exactly the reason that you're talking about, to
make it accessible, right.

Speaker 4 (17:07):
We weren't. You're right, We weren't shooting for a sports
or coaching audience. But boy did we hit that audience.
We had people reach out to us. We had football
coaches reach out to us, Basketball coaches read out to us.
For a while. We've worked with the baseball coach, helping
him develop practice plans. We've met with martial arts coaches.

(17:31):
I was floored by all these people who found value,
that kind of value. It wasn't really the audience we
were expecting to find value. But great, I'm glad they did.

Speaker 5 (17:41):
I remember we got we got an email from one.
It was a martial artist, right, so it wasn't the coach.
It was the one, the guy who was coaching, and
he said, our book is the first book he ever completed. Right,
it was the only book that he has ever read
all the way through. Okay, I think it's bread. It's fread,
that does it?

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah? Yeah, definitely, Fred, you want to know what's going on?
I was read. I was actually reading the other day,
reading the bit about Fred doing the playing the game
with the controller with ben Wan taking his controller away.
I love that bit. I was just like that was
like a little soap opera. That one.

Speaker 5 (18:15):
I'm like that, that's a good one.

Speaker 6 (18:18):
Well, you know, I had a professor when I was
in college who tried to write some fiction and he
said he had to stop because the characters kept.

Speaker 4 (18:28):
Doing things without telling him. And that's kind of how
I felt about Fred. We were writing this book and
I was like, oh, well, I guess it turned out
Fred Douglas to do this okay, now, yeah, well, he jousts,
he you know, that's okay, Fred, you tell me what
does you want to do?

Speaker 1 (18:47):
I forgot about that one really took me me too.

Speaker 5 (18:54):
I invented Fred back in grad school, so Michael Turvey
had we all had to take this teaching class on
how to make things understandable. And I invented Fred as
a teaching tool way back then. And he did not
have anywhere near this kind of personality or or you know,
he sat in front of a tree most of the time, right,
That's sort of all Fred did. And then one of

(19:15):
the things that was really fun during this was discovering
he jousts, and he's he's got a whole competition going
with his neighbor's son who's always leaving his you know,
skateboard out, and you know, just discovering all these sort
of fun things about Fred. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
I did notice actually, as you read through the book,
Fred's capers become more and more kind of outlandish, and
other characters come into the play, so you could see
how you were starting to well, I felt like you
were exploring Fred's landscape of affordances more and more.

Speaker 4 (19:49):
A friend was just telling us who he was, you know,
and one of the things we did. This is just
an aside. The secondary character ures are all named after
luminaries and ecological psychology. So when Fred plays video games,
he's playing against his his friend ben Wa, who is

(20:10):
named after ben Wa Bardie, who's a very well known
movement scientist.

Speaker 5 (20:14):
Yeah. And the cheeky blighter who lives next door is
Michael after Michael.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Oh, I see, I get it, I get it. And
what about Fred's crush? Who's that representing?

Speaker 7 (20:26):
Carol?

Speaker 5 (20:27):
Carol after Carol Shaw, Not Carol sorry Carol Bowler Powler?

Speaker 4 (20:34):
Yes, sorry, who's Carol? See? This is Fred again doing
his thing.

Speaker 5 (20:41):
Yeah, I was just thinking of Jeff Show, Bob Show,
because Bob's in there. Bob is the physicist friend who
lets the ice cube melt on the counter Bob Show.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. We probably need to talk about
some of these because actually otherwise we're you know, I mean,
we know obviously these are good teasers and you know,
let's do it now, let's go. But it's interesting, can
I I want to jump in with them because you
it's it's actually one of the later chapters or the
later sections and you presented something that for me was

(21:16):
like something I've been kind of playing around with in
my head. As a way of explaining the difference. I'm
just very quickly tell you a very quick story. So
it was a recent I guess it was a bit
of a debate. So that seems to me anyway that
the grappling and BJJ world are there's a lot of
people who are all in when it comes to the

(21:37):
ecological approach, and it's but the interesting thing about the
grappling world is, as I'm as I'm understanding more and
more of is it's extremely combative, as you'd expect, I suppose,
And so the camps are now formed and there is,
you know, quite a lot attention which was debate very
quite quite well known fitness YouTuber guy called Mike Israel,

(21:58):
who is also a EJ enthusiast and very you know,
he's a exercise scientist, you know, really really you know,
kind of like fall fully into the science of it all.
And he debated a colleague of a friend of mine
who's part of my learning group, a guy called cal Jones,
as a judo coach recently, and there was a little

(22:19):
bit back and forward between the two of them, and
there was almost this kind of impass around. Mike could
not get to grips with the idea that when we
talk about information processing, which is obviously a kind of
way of contrasting the two approaches, and by the way,
I like the way you guys with your lists actually

(22:40):
map out the contrasting approaches of the traditional approaches, which
we might need to get onto. But they have this
debate and Mike was like, yeah, but the brain is involved, right,
The brain's involved, like there is information processing going on, right,
So why would you sort of create this like sort
of dichotomy. And I was thinking about it, and then
something later on occurred to me, which is to say, yeah,
but there is something going on. The brain is involved,

(23:02):
but not in the way we used to think, or
not in the way most people think. It's in a
different way. Yeah, And I've got some different ways of
explaining that. But I wonder if I could just invite
you both to maybe just sort of like set out
the argument really around sort of the traditional views of perception, action,

(23:26):
et cetera, et cetera, and then what you present in
the book and what the ecological research basically is sort
of articulating, don't know who wants to go first.

Speaker 5 (23:39):
Sure, I mean, we've got this down right, because we're
forever having to give the elevator pitch right. And more
than that, I teach sensation and perception. Now I work
at the university and I teach this, so I teach
this to my undergrads. But you know, the classic view
of perception starts with critical assumption, which is that the

(24:01):
world needs to be copied in the head in order
for us to do stuff right. So for me to
reach out and pick up my water glass, I need
to first copy that water glass in my head, and
then I can make a motor program to reach out
and pick up that water glass. But the problem is
that when you treat that water glass or the properties
of that water glass from physics variables, which is what

(24:23):
we assume would be involved in picking up a glass,
you start seeing that we're like really bad at copying
those variables, and so we end up with this imperfect
copy of the world. And then all of perception is
about trying to make that copy good enough to use,
and then they just never really get there. So ecological

(24:43):
starts over and says that first assumption was nonsense. We
do not need to copy the world in our head
in order to interact with the world. We can just
go ahead and interact with the world. You don't need
to make a copy in order to make a motor
program in order to do this thing. Just reach out
and pick up that glass. Provided we make some different assumptions, right,

(25:04):
one of which is that we're not separate from the environment.
And you can't understand us separate from the environment. It's
all of a piece, and it's all this dynamically evolving
you know, set rather rather than these individual pieces that
sort of have to be smashed together, all right, And
zo ecological focuses on not the like copy and the head,

(25:26):
and therefore not about the processing of the brain, but
rather about that interaction between organism and environment. Right, So
the focus is there rather than on the what is
happening to the thing inside? So you were talking about
people saying, okay, well what does the brain do? Then
what does the brain do? And it's not that I
it's not that I don't think the brain is interesting.

(25:48):
It's just sort of beside the point, right. The point
is the interaction between me and my environment and the
brain is only part of that, it's not the whole
of it.

Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yeah, So it has to do with assumptions that underlie
the approach and the reason why. So the assumption of
separateness is really key in the traditional approach that in
our experience we sort of feel like we're separate from
our environment, like there's me and then there's not me,

(26:22):
and the stuff that's not me has to get into
me for me to know that stuff. Right, how can
I possibly I'm separate from this from my surroundings, yet
I know the surroundings. How is that possible? Well, somehow
it has to get to me or in me. That's
the copies that Juli was referring to. And one of

(26:43):
the fundamental assumptions of ecological psychology is that separateness is
not true. It's a myth. So instead of having a
separate animal and environment, it's a unified system. And if
the animal environment system is the starting point, rather than
having two separate components, then nothing needs to be sent,

(27:05):
nothing needs to be received. Perceiving is not a it's
not a communication between the environment and me. The copies
don't need to be made, and instead it's a relationship.
It's a relationship of knowing and to establish that relationship,

(27:26):
an animal just has to be sensitive to stimulation patterns
that are informative about its relationship. And it's a very
different problem than trying to figure out how rays of
light get in the eye and make a copy that
needs to then be you know, decoded by the brain.
And so the brain's job is not to decode the copy,
but instead this just sort of maintained this relationship between

(27:51):
the animal and the environment and guide its behavior. And no,
it's it's just not in charge. It's part of the system.
And you know, it's just not the computer that we
tend to think it is.

Speaker 5 (28:10):
Yeah. I was actually just talking about this with my
students about how the classic view of the brain is
this very linear and hierarchical processing machine. Right, so you
have sort of these inputs that are small and meaningless,
and out of small and meaningless inputs, you have to
build up into something complex and meaningful. Right. That's the
classic view of perception in the brain. And so that's

(28:34):
where the research assumes that you're going to do that. Right,
You're going to go step step step step step step up.
Now I have a tree, right, it was like I
had spots of light and then eventually somewhere down the line,
now I have a tree. And so the research on
the brain was done with those assumptions in mind. So
they found things based on those assumptions. But when you

(28:55):
make sort of different assumptions about the way that the
brain works, so for example, instead of it being a
linear processing machine, you instead think of it as a
dynamic system that comes to you know, things are emergent
properties of it, right, So our consciousness is an emergent property,
our awareness of the world is an emergent property. Then

(29:17):
you don't have these like individual processing units. You instead
have a whole lot of things kind of working at once,
and out of that that relationship is being maintained. So
it's like, on the one hand, like a lot more
complex because it's sort of a strange wooy idea of like,
oh well, it all just emerges, But at the same time,

(29:39):
it ends up being quite a lot more simple. You
don't have to go through all these like processing units
and all of this step by step stuff that is
very hard to pin down in the brain, probably because
it isn't happening, And instead imagine it as a as
a system that evolves dynamically over time.

Speaker 4 (29:55):
I'm yeah, the brain and I'm just building up something
that Sly said. Treating it as a machine will get
you exactly this information processing approach, but it's not. If
it's not a machine and it's a system, then what
makes a system different than a machine is the relationships.
Because a machine, you can take a part. It's it's

(30:17):
context independent. It doesn't really matter. It does what it
does independently of where it is and what it's connected
to and the system. The connections are what create the system,
and so it doesn't you can't look at it the
same way. It's like, you know, my lungs, they're part

(30:38):
of my respiratory system, an important part of a respiratory system.
If I didn't have my lungs, I wouldn't have a
respiratory system. But my lungs don't do respiration. It's they're
just a part of the They just they are an important,
necessary component, but they don't do it. What does it? Well,
the piece is together, It's like okay, yeah, so what
does the My brain is a part of my cognitive system?

Speaker 7 (31:01):
Is it?

Speaker 4 (31:03):
You know? I'm glad I do I am I glad
that I have a brain, absolutely, but is it the
thing that does the cognition not really.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
So lovely I mean, and in the sports world, you know,
the traditional approach to learning sports and learning sports skills
and participating in sports. I think well largely borrowed from
the traditional approach because it's sought to break sports down

(31:40):
into movements techniques and then reassemble them in context when
you've got all of the environmental variables in place, and
the assumption being that that would magically translate into sports skill.
And my experience as a coach for a good fifteen
years and frustration was when that didn't happen, Like it

(32:02):
was the athlete's faults and it really wasn't their fault,
it was my fault. And it wasn't really my fault.
It was to people who educated me's faults. But anyway,
that was why I went on a journey. But it's
so dissatisfying, it's well, so unsatisfactory, and it then boiled
the sports experience down into right, well, you've got to

(32:25):
do is now now, because we've got to do sport
in its component parts, and we've got to take away
all the variability because that's actually noise that just gets
in a way, right, So we've got to get that
napped down into its competit bit and we're going to
work in isolation, and then we're going to move towards complexity.
And this still, by the way, this is like people

(32:46):
will argue with me for hours and hours and hours
that they are absolutely right about this, or at the
very least they will argue something around compatibility, which I
do want to come on to anyway. And then but
the problem I have with that, you see, this is
where some of my ethical stuff comes in, is that
what we've done then is we've said, right, okay, children,
we want you to be physically active and get involved

(33:07):
in sport and get all the health benefits from that. Right,
And when they came and have their first go, they're
in a queue and they're waiting for their turn to
do something that doesn't equate the sport whatsoever, is not
really that enjoyable, isn't actually that good for them, And
all of a sudden we're like, what are we doing here?
So for me, ecological psychology and it's influence in the

(33:28):
sports space because I've worked in policy making as well
around policy directing, the policy for coach development and coach
education across England. You know, I'm like, we need to
start to bring some of this thinking in because if
our goal is to help young people be physically active
and to enjoy sport and physical activity, and we know
that lots of them aren't enjoying it. Forty five percent survey,

(33:51):
forty five percent of children in England that they didn't
really enjoy sport that much. So the kids were doing
sport didn't really enjoy it. And then we're trying to
encourage more into this really quite impoverished experience. So the
only way we can do that, really, if we're going
to spend all the time and energy and money, is
to try and get your people to be physically active,
so making the best experience possible. And lo and behold,

(34:11):
the vast majority of coaches are working from the wrong
assumption around how we should how they should be exposed
to it. So it's really important work. I think.

Speaker 5 (34:21):
Yeah, again, not an aspect of it that crossed our minds,
I think when we were writing the book. But I'm
delighted to hear that it's it can help in that way,
because yeah, I mean I had exactly that experience when
I was doing sports as a kid because I did
I did. I was into baseball because my dad was
into baseball, and so I got into baseball. And it
was exactly the same. You walk up to the tee,

(34:42):
you hit the ball. Then it's somebody else's turn to
walk up to the tee and hit the ball. Where
you stand in a line and they hit you a
ground ball, and you pick up the ground ball and
you throw it to them, and then you then you
go back to the back of the line. And that's
not fun. That's not an interesting way to do it.
And it also, according to our theory, isn't going to
result in So the reason why it would make sense

(35:03):
from a traditional view is because remember the goal of
getting the copy in the head was then you could
make a motor program. And motor programs are made up
of individual units of movement, and so the idea was
if you could like train them on those like individual
units over and over and over and over again, then
the way and they went to go do that individual
unit as part of a thing. Oh, then suddenly you

(35:24):
can you can hit a baseball. Right, Sorry, my son
just got home from school then, But that doesn't that
just doesn't work in an ecological perspective. Instead, you need
to explore the space. You should be doing all kinds
of crazy movements and seeing what happens when I throw

(35:44):
the ball straight up as opposed to throwing it over
there or any kind of variability rather than being noise,
just like a crazy making thing. When I hear that,
instead of being noised, variability is the point. Variability is
how we.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Wilson said to me and on the podcast and night,
I say it all the time. Very ability isn't noise,
it's signal correct correct.

Speaker 4 (36:07):
So I thought of two things. Well, while you guys
were talking about this, and uh, I don't evercall them.
So practicing these sort of isolated movements does make you better,
but at a very specific thing. And like you were saying,
when you change the context, and what you've learned is

(36:29):
this movement in this context, you change the context, well,
I can only do this movement this way. I can't
do it that way. It reminds me of a few
years ago there was a fad of these sort of
brain training apps where I don't know, it was like yeah,
reaction time apps and this and that, and it turned
out it you got in their their their dependent measure was, look,

(36:52):
they got better on this on the app. You were
improving all the way through your app, but that's the
only thing you got good at. So it kind of
reminds me of that. And it also made me think,
my wife and I are watching this nature documentary and
it was I get what kind of predatory cat? It

(37:15):
might have been tigers or something. But the point is
tigers learn to hunt not by practicing like particular movements
in the hunt, right. They don't like the mother lion
doesn't line up the cubs and say, okay, everybody practice
this movement and this movement and this movement. What the
cubs play with each other like, they attack each other

(37:37):
and that's the way they learn to hunt, by a
smaller compact version of low stakes version of the.

Speaker 5 (37:47):
Bank or in my experience, they hunt my toes under
my blanket.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yeah oh yeah.

Speaker 7 (37:55):
So I'm just wondering what lessons we might be able
to learn from outside of the sport context of how
other kinds of animals learned these complex, coordinated activities, and
not just coordinated in terms of an.

Speaker 4 (38:17):
Individual's behavior, but like a group, like it's a team effort,
like let's go as a team and do this thing together. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
Well, I often say to people that before there were coaches,
and before there was the ability to analyze sports to
the nth degree using video analysis and various other things,
and before there were named movements techniques, people did this.

(38:45):
They did learn to do it somehow, you know. So
they found ways of doing things. Famously, Dick Fosbury, with
a high jump, found his own way of getting over
a high bard. Then everybody then everybody then followed. But equally,
you know that people have also famously. I don't know
how well you know the world of soccer, but there's
a really famous footballer called Johann Kreif who did a

(39:10):
famous move where he sort of like he pretended he
was going to cross the ball and then he pulled
the ball back and behind his leg and then went
a different direction. And apparently he'd never done that before
until he did it in that moment because it seemed
like the thing to do, at least that's the way
he tells the story. And that now became that's become

(39:30):
known as the Kroift turn, and now children are taught
to do the Kroift turn. And it was about only
it's about was it eight years ago maybe something like that,
where my own sport I'm a field hockey coach, and
my own sport, our talent pathway was entirely given over
to information processing based ideas of skill acquisition, and we

(39:55):
genuinely had children running up to cones and doing perfect
move moments with a high left elbow and using the
stick and moving in anyway. I now have seen a
generation of young people who do this perfect movement but
completely wrong. It can be the wrong time over and
over again. Because as I always say to people, what

(40:17):
you learn outside, what you learn in isolation, you have
to relearn in context. So when coach you say to
me they've never got enough time, I always say, well,
stop wasting it doing things that aren't going to be helpful.

Speaker 5 (40:28):
Right, it's no good. They can get it into the net,
but only if they're standing directly in front of it
and have to wait it in mine.

Speaker 4 (40:37):
It is challenging because they do need to have some
level of fundamentals right there is you kind of have
to have some a little bit of well, this is
how you hold the stick and this is like there
is there is technique involved, but at some point you've
got to transition I think from the that those sets

(40:58):
of behaviors to applying that technique or maybe even removing
the technique. And I was just thinking about, you know
the field hockey players, you know, having them you're saying
to have them going around cones and they do this
perfect technique with their elbow up. What if you know,

(41:19):
it reminds me some of the rough grades research, but
having to go around the cone with one hand on
the stick or hopping or something I mean, or something
like that where it's Okay, I'm going to explore this space.
I'm still doing it in a way that's allowed under
the rules of the game, like you're soccer player, but

(41:41):
I'm going to find a creative way. It's the it's
the the constraints that create that bring up out the solution.
That's what yields the creativity. That's where I'm sorry forgetting
your your footballer. It was a particular set of constraints
at that time that led him to go, well, I'm

(42:02):
going to have to do this.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, so on that point of technique. Actually, So one
of the things that launched this podcast was I did
my second ever episode was called The War on Drills,
and it was basically a campaign I was launching to
remove the sports world from the isolated queues waiting for

(42:27):
your turn to do this isolated technique. It was basically saying,
let's we can do better. And by the way, there's
a whole body of research out there suggesting that actually
what we've been doing for a long time isn't actually
that beneficial. But to your point about technique, Jeff, I've
basically had a experiment and a live experiment running. It's

(42:51):
not by any means scientific, but it's as good as
I can do in my field based work. And basically
it involved my own son who from the age of
about eight or maybe a bit younger nine seven, I've
been coaching with a cohort of you young people in
field hockey and I have hardly ever, but I have

(43:16):
on occasion, but hardly ever, taught them technique. And I
did it deliberately. I put a constraint on myself because like,
I'm all about that, that's what I'd learned to do, right,
and most of us as coaches, we've got all this
knowledge about technique and all we want to do is
put it in and give people that knowledge and show
them how to do things. So I deliberately constrained myself

(43:39):
and said, right, I'm not going to do that. What
I'm going to do is I'm just going to create
environments that enable exploration, and I'm going to manipulate those
environments using constraints in order to attract towards different movement possibilities.
And for quite a long time, we lost every game
because we didn't have some of the techniques. But what

(44:00):
we did do was adapt. So what we did do
because we in field hockey, in case you don't know,
you can only it's not like ice hockey where you
can use both sides of the stick. You can only
use one side, the flat side. The rounded side is illegal,
so you have to turn the stick over, quite quite
a strange move until you learn to do it. So,
but you can still play. You just it means you're

(44:20):
sort of a bit more limited in terms of your
ability to manipulate the ball, but you can still do it.
So what if you can't, If you've got that constraint
in place where you can't manipulate the ball and move it,
what can you do? Well, you can, that's it, or
you can you know, and your teammates can coordinate with
you and you can move the ball into And I
noticed this happening, and I know this is all massive
confirmation bias, and I know what I was looking for.

(44:42):
I'm looking to see and this, that and the other
because I'm working in these assumtions. But I just thought
I'll do this because it's interesting. And I did notice this.
So what I noticed was this group of players with
these constraints on technique. Their adaptation was how do we
coordinate to make up for our our technique limitations. And
after a while, through a process of observation and natural

(45:04):
kind of exploration, their own techniques emerged as to how
they can maniput the ball, and they all did it
slightly differently. Some of them did it this way, someone
did it this way, and some did it the other
way around, with the hands of the other way round. So fine,
we can just we can play with that and we
can explore it. And through this journey, I will get
to the end of this story. I did tell you
I love very good. Through this journey that we've been

(45:28):
on together, what has emerged is a group of individuals
who have superpowers, and some of them, I've got superpowers
that I would never have been able to teach them
because they do things that I would never even know
to teach them. The game has changed as we've gone
and new rules of emerge where you can do different things.

(45:49):
You can now hit the ball in different ways, and
they've all learned that because and some of them are
better at hitting the ball on that side than the
other traditional side, which wasn't available to me. And it's
really interesting to see how actually not deliberately not utilizing
technique has But one of the things I've noticed with
all of them, and I get a lot of feedback

(46:10):
from others, is their game appreciation is extremely high. And
I put that down to not having not being thought
technique early, so that all they want to do is
use their techniques kind of semi selfishly, because boys can
often do that when they're like eight, nine and ten.
They had to coordinate and they learned about how they

(46:31):
work together as game in the game to solve the problem.
And as the techniques came in later, they then started
to then win everything and they were unstoppable. So it
was really interesting experiment. And again, you know, I'm conscious
that I'm you know, I've basically just told you a
whole story about how I think the world's work because
I wanted it to work that way. But I genuinely

(46:52):
feel and I've had others tell me that this has
happened with this particular coon. And here's the most important thing.
They're all still playing.

Speaker 5 (47:01):
Well, that's because you made them into superheroes.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
They did that. All I did was create an environment
for them to explore within.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
Right.

Speaker 5 (47:08):
But that's what I mean is that I think that
when you expect everybody to look exactly the same, you
do get people who go, well, I don't fit that mold,
and so I can't possibly do this, and I don't
want to do this anymore, right, But you allowed them
to be themselves, and I think that that, to me
was the thing that stood out the most in that story,
is allowing people to explore their own dynamics and their
own bodies. In that space, you get people who are

(47:31):
very good at this thing or very good at that thing,
or they find their own way of doing it that's
completely different than somebody else because it works best for
their body mechanics, you know, and our body dynamics, I
should say. And and that to me, like we do
that with like walking, you know, talk about like a
basic behavior. It's not like we break down walking into well,

(47:51):
first you're going to lift your foot like this, and
then you're gonna push it forward. We just let them
all kind of stumble around until they figure.

Speaker 4 (47:56):
It out, and everybody walks differently.

Speaker 5 (47:59):
That's right, right, And everybody's a little different because it
works best for their body, you know. And you did that,
But in a more complicated sphere, it's the same idea.
Just let them stumble around for a while, and they're
going to fall down a lot, and they're going to
be terrible at it for a little while, and then
they're going to find their own dynamics in that space
and turn into superheroes. And I love that, you know.

Speaker 4 (48:22):
It also makes me think of some of these complex
behaviors that emerge from very simple sets of rules, like
the flocking behavior, where you get these complex patterns the
multiple of dozens of insects or birds or schooling behaviors
and fish, and it's just one or two parameters that

(48:44):
need to be programmed in. And I'm thinking about that
in terms of sport, because any sport as its own,
the constraints are there in terms of the rules of
the game, right so on field hockey, you cannot the
ball cannot go outside this area. Right, there's a boundary
you a goal is defined in this way. There are

(49:06):
only so many players on the field this time. And
there's probably other rules as well, but those are like
and then one, when you have play unfolding with those
sets of rules, you might find these creative solutions that
they're okay, well, given those sets of rules, how would
you get the ball from here to there? And how
given these sets of rules, And it's not the movements themselves.

(49:34):
And again there's this trade off because but the movements
themselves don't need to be specified. The rules are specified.
And in the context of those rules, achieving a given
end given these rules, right, and be done lots of ways.
And I think that's that's the moral of your story
with the with the these creative solutions that your players

(49:57):
were finding.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
Yeah, and if I I would start most sessions where
they would play one v one tag style games, but
with a stick and a ball, so they get lots
of opportunities to manipulate the ball. And actually, if I
use a very simple constraint then or create new rules
in the game, and I very often would call it levels.

(50:20):
So I'd say, right, ah, you're ready to go to
level two, You're ready to go to level three. And
then we bring in a new constrain and a new challenge.
And then what that does is that creates well, it
attracts to different different solutions, which then ask them to
do different things with the stick and the ball, which

(50:41):
then they have to then work on how to do.
So a very simple example was, if you can't turn
your back on your opponent, you've got to manipulate in
different ways. So I create all these different lyps of
rules and guide so that they have a But the
main thing for me was always to have an opponent,
because at the base level of the game, you always
have a fundamental information needs to be that there's someone else

(51:04):
trying to stop you doing what you need to do
in some way, and your solution should be at least
in part defined by what they're doing, yeah, rather than
it always be I'm just going to do my thing,
So I want to do my move. You know, well, what
happens if they do this, Well, they're going to get you,
aren't they.

Speaker 4 (51:25):
Yeah, I'm going to maneuver the ball around a cone.
It's not going anywhere. And it's not trying to stop me,
and it's not try it yet.

Speaker 5 (51:31):
Yeah. Yeah, well, and I think you've highlighted one of
the most important parts of teaching it this way is
the adaptability. Right, If you do things in static circumstances,
then when the circumstances changed, you're lost. But if you
do things in dynamic circumstances, where the circumstances are always changing,
then the circumstances changed, Well, that's just another Tuesday, you.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Know, I can I ask you. I wanted to have
to just get into a couple of the bits in
the book actually because there's some area that I'm really
fascinated by. So I'm currently writing a book or I'm
helping to edit a book all about ecological approaches to
different sports, and I've pulled together a lot of different

(52:15):
coaches who are basically just talking about, you know, how
the approaches they take. So trying to make it quite
practitioner led targeted at actually kind of year one undergraduate
coaching students, so that it talks about, you know, use
of constraints and stuff. But one of the things I
want to present in that so we use you know,
there's a fairly strong body of like work around. That's

(52:35):
what's called the constraints lad approach within sport, which you'll
be aware ously And CLA has been around a long time,
and I don't know if I like it anymore. I'm
interested in your thoughts on this, and you've got a
few chapters that really speak to this. For me, the
reason I don't like it anymore is what has tended
to happen is that in the world of coaching is

(52:57):
people go, oh god, yeah, we've been doing coke and
strengths for ages. Something new. We've done conditioned games. And
those condition games might be something like this, you're only
allowed to touch the ball twice, so one to control it,
want to pass it. That's a conditioned game, right, So
that is we often refer to that as constraining to constrain,

(53:17):
right you What if the choice is to run with
the ball, right like, oh, you're two constrained right now,
there might be an argument to do it, but for
different reasons. And the problem you've got is the word
constraint makes people think of condition, makes people think of
so lots of people who've done condition games using a
traditional approach, and they think they're doing the CLA and

(53:38):
then they call the CLA a wine in new bottles. Now, oh,
the fundamental assumptions behind the CLA are completely different about
why use constraints. So I kind of want to change
the language a little bit. And I actually want to
talk more about an affordance led approach, because I think
my coaching has often has tried to be as much
as possible affordance led. So what are the properties of

(54:01):
the environment and the invitations to action that we want
to draw attention more or less? Attention to can be
a really wide landscape, it can be a very narrow one.
And then how do we use constraints in order to
draw towards those affordances? But the starting point of the
affordances what is present in the environment that we want

(54:24):
that we want to you know, maintain, you know, full
visibility of. And obviously the book speaks to that in
lots of different places. And I'd just be interested to
just well, a like, please, you know, take take me there,
take me into the book and talk to me about
those areas. But I'd just love to sort of have
a bit of a conversation with you about what you
think of that as a construct. And then what of

(54:46):
what within the book kind of speaks to that a
little bit.

Speaker 5 (54:53):
I'm not sure I understand the difference between the constraints
based approach. I'm sorry, this is I'm showing my ignorance
of sports right now. Could you give me a prime
real quick?

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Well, no, it's good. I mean I'm glad because i'm
in many respects. I'm hoping that you're going to tell
me I'm completely off my rocker and maybe I should
just put this idea back.

Speaker 4 (55:10):
In the start.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
But what I mean is, so to give you an example,
very often when people are using constraints, what they're doing
is they're putting a constraint into an environment in order
to bring about a different movement choice. So very often
they get trapped into this idea of or they're not
doing what I wanted them to do, so I'm going

(55:34):
to use a constraint to make them do what I
wanted them to do, Okay. And I feel very uncomfortable
about that approach because that, to me feels like you're
just going down the conditioning world. Yeah, whereas an affordance
let approach, this is just a change of language, full
of that says no. Actually, there's a range of movement possibilities. Yes,

(55:56):
And there's a problem to be solved which is presented
by the environment and the problems that the environment is
presenting and the opportunities for action that it presents. And
what we can do with a group or an individual
is enable them to do some exploration in that space,
and then we can narrow the search space down or
open it up, depending on how well they're getting on

(56:16):
trying to solve the problem. But what we shouldn't be
doing is constraining to bring about certain idealized movements, or
at least I don't think we should.

Speaker 5 (56:25):
I was just going to say, it sounds like conditioning
but with extra steps, Like it just sounds like doing
the same sort of drill thing, but this time I'm
not going to tell you what the drill is. You
have to guess it, right, Like I mean again, like
I'm probably showing my ignorance about sports here, like I'm not,
this is not my world. But it just seems and
again it sort of seems like it's taking away the

(56:46):
best part of this other thing that we were talking
about before, which is taking away the creativity and solving
a goal. Right, So it should be about the goal.
It should be about the thing that you were trying
to achieve. It should be about can I get the
ball from here to hear? Not can I do this kick?
Because I mean, maybe you can do that kick, maybe

(57:06):
you can't, but but can you get the ball there?
Is more important for winning the game. I think, I'm
pretty sure. I mean, yeah, right, depending on the sport.
But it's like, so if we're talking about football or
you know, soccer, right, the goal is to get the
ball in the net. That's the goal. And so it

(57:27):
doesn't matter if you use this special kick or this
special technique, or you move in exactly the right way.
It matters if you get the ball in the net, right, Yeah,
focusing on the movement feels like we're looking at the
wrong thing.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
Again, And that's what I was going to say. If
the constraints are in place to produce a particular kind
of movement, then it's the wrong kind of constraint. If
the constraints are in place to ensure a particular outcome,
that's a different story, right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
So what I'm trying to argue is that we're not
going to be led by the constraints. We're going to
be led by the affordance. The constraints are used to
support the athletes in their search because some athletes don't
don't perceive the landscape the same way, and so what
we you know, So for example, if I'm let's say
we've got a game going on, and there's a five

(58:16):
y five game, and actually what we're looking to try
and do is we're looking to try and encourage to
try and find a way away through not over in
duce soccer, to weigh through a group. Well, there are
gaps that appear or don't, and they're momentary and they
flex there, so we have to draw attention to those.
So we'd use constraints as a way to draw attention

(58:36):
to those, as opposed to saying, you know, I want,
you know, to constrain it down, so that the natural
way to do that would be to say, for example,
you know, oh, the opposition aren't allowed to move, they
have to stay still. So the gaps are always there
and you can use them. No, no, no, no. So this is
the point. You're you're wanting people to attune to the

(58:58):
properties in the environment which fleeting. You don't want to
artificially create properties that wouldn't be fleeting because otherwise you're
not learning about the fleeting nature of those properties in
that example.

Speaker 5 (59:10):
Right, absolutely, Yeah, So yeah, like I said, it just
sounds like conditioning with extra steps.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
So one thing I want to talk to you about,
because I'm obviously involved in a sport that has implements stick.
So you've got a lovely piece that I want to
talk about, which is where you talk about Fred playing
his video game called Humunculously Infinite Regress. I imagining that
is an actual video game.

Speaker 5 (59:38):
Oh no, No, the Infinite Regress is one of the
we didn't end up I think talking about it in
the book. But it's one of the philosophical troubles with
having a central executive is that you've got, well of
how if you've got the central executives running the show,
then who's running the central executive? Well, he's got to
have a central executive. Well, and who's running that central

(59:58):
executivel he's got to have one, and so on forever.

Speaker 1 (01:00:01):
I kind of thought he was, and I thought it
was a kind of a nod to that, but I
figured that must be a game. Someone needs to invented
that game, surely, No, and that.

Speaker 4 (01:00:11):
Game was was Spirker named after Sperker Runissent, who's another luminary. Anyway,
I continue playing the game, so yes.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
So anyway, yes, So Fred's got his controller that he likes,
and he's controlling Spirker really well and having a really
good time. And he's at one. He's at one with
his his controller. And then ben Wir, his scheming friend,
this controller is better than Benoit's controller, and pretend and
suggest to Fred that his crush Carrol was outside. Fred

(01:00:44):
goes to look for Carol. Carol's not there, but in
the meantime ben Schemer has twitched over the controllers. And
then Bred is playing with this bad controller and he's
all discombobulated, so much so that ben Wi feels sorry
for him. This back, which is a lovely nice finish
to the story. But anyway, this notion of oneness with

(01:01:06):
a implement and the sense of the field, and now
I'm with you, right, I can literally hick up a
field hockey stick and I'll tell you whether it's going
to be any good or not. I couldn't tell you why,
I couldn't tell you how, but I could. And that
really spoke to me about that, And I've really wanted
to speak to some people who can tell me about

(01:01:26):
implements and how important they are and the sensations you
have and haptics and everything else. So I'd just love
to riff on that for a bit, if you'd be
so kind.

Speaker 5 (01:01:35):
Sure, there was a whole series, I mean, keeping with
the sports game, there was a whole series of research
studies on baseball players and also tennis players about where
the sweet spot on a tennis racket is right, so
you know, if you hit the ball, it's just the
right spot on the tennis racket. It doesn't vibrate in

(01:01:55):
your hand because all of the energy gets put into
the ball and the ball will go better and further,
and you know, with more accuracy. And tennis players can
pick up a racket and immediately sense, oh, well that's
where that sweet spot is. The same thing with a
baseball bat, right, it's got a sweet spot. And so
people who play enough baseball can do that as well.

(01:02:15):
But the thing is is that we do this with
everyday objects too. You think about, you know, taking notes,
You pick up a pencil, and you're so used to
picking up a writing implement that you don't you don't
really think about that as being well, I'm picking up
a tool and I'm using this as a tool, it
just becomes an extension of you right immediately, and naturally

(01:02:37):
it just becomes that extension. So you can do something
like right on your piece of paper and explore that
piece of paper with the end of the pen and
know everything about the paper and what you can do
with it just by exploring it with the pen instead.
So it's in sports, but it's in like literal every
day as well.

Speaker 4 (01:02:55):
It's about where your awareness is. And in playing field hockey,
and you mentioned I play ice hockey, your awareness is
at the end of the stick when you're using it,
and because it's incorporated, it's become a part. It become
a part of you. You are now perceiving the ball

(01:03:18):
by means of how it is affecting the stick, and
you are subject to that, those those mechanical disturbances through
the stick, and your awareness is at the end of
the stick. It and so and that's and if that
were to change, then that sort of system, it's the

(01:03:39):
you've it's a person plus object system that you've created,
like these systems dynamics we were talking about earlier. If
your awareness has suddenly shifted, then the system is broken down.
And that's what happened to Bread in his game when
all of a sudden, what he's his actions are not
creating the outcome he was and it feels now he's

(01:04:02):
aware that he's holding this device in his hands. And
that's what would happen if you know you have a
bad field hockey stick or a stick that isn't doing
what you want, it would feel like you're holding a
stick instead of I'm manipulating the ball. Instead you're feeling
like you're manipulating a stick. You feel what's in your

(01:04:25):
hand rather than what's at the end of the stick.
And I was thinking about something else along those lines.
You have the same experience with your own body. You
are not.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
You.

Speaker 4 (01:04:39):
Sometimes you are aware of your body, but that's sort
of a disconcerting experience. So I'm talking and making all
these movements with my vocal tract in my face, but
if I were to stop and be aware of my
face with the whole thing would break down because what
I'm aware of is the outcome, not of the movements.
And it's so it's the same thing, same conference is

(01:05:00):
we're having before about about the outcome being important rather
than the movements themselves. And so when you're manipulating an object,
it's not about what you're doing with the object. It's
about the effect you're having with that object, right, And
that's what you become aware of. It just becomes you know,

(01:05:23):
it's it's it becomes incorporated into you. It becomes a
part of you. That and the means by which you
are perceiving and acting.

Speaker 5 (01:05:34):
This is making me think of the Bernstein hammering study,
you know, the repetition without repetition. You look at somebody
hammering over and over again, and they don't. Expert hammerers
don't hammer the same way every time. Expert hammerers strike
the nail every time, but they don't move the hit

(01:05:54):
because you can't. I mean, like the breeze comes out
of the east instead of the west for a moment,
and all of a sudden, you've got a slightly different scenario,
or you start your arm in a slightly different place,
or your arm's just a little more tired than it
was a minute ago, and so you've got a completely
different set of constraints. You can't possibly hammer exactly the
same way every single time, but you can hit the

(01:06:15):
nail every time, right, and so it becomes about controlling
the goal rather than controlling the bits that get you
into the goal.

Speaker 4 (01:06:25):
You're learning how to control the device or the implement
to achieve the goal. It would be like, you know,
driving your friend's car that doesn't quite move the way
your car moves, and so it feels very it feels
like it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like. Things
don't move the way you think they're going to move

(01:06:46):
when you do the things you're doing. Just like Fred
and the game.

Speaker 1 (01:06:52):
It's interesting that so many areas that that really resonates
for me. I mean the writing thing. I mean, I've
got this pen. Really like this pen. It's just the
right weight, it's just the right size. It writes very smoothly.
And if I'd pick up another pen now and start
writing with it, I can't write as well because it's
scratchy and not nice, and the weight's not as good
and all those sort of things. But that's kind of

(01:07:13):
like one of those imperceptual, imperceptive things that you wouldn't
know until you know. It's really really interesting. My son's
been really struggling with his field hockey. Can't he can't
strike the ball on one side particularly well. We could
not work out why. I've got a whole video of
me working with him, and we did a whole piece around.

(01:07:35):
We did like various constraints, and we did some differential learning,
and we were trying to discover different ways that he
might want to try and attack the ball, and where
his attention was and all these sorts of things, and
none of it seemed to make much impact. And then
we discovered something the other day actually about the design
that was really interesting. So he's got this particular stick
with a particular design. It's very similar to an ice

(01:07:56):
hockey stick. Oh and by the way, Jeff, you play,
you play hocky, You're in trouble now. So I work
with USA Ice Hockey and they are all their coach
education is really focused on the ecological approach. Are they
listened to this podcast? And I wouldn't be surprised if
you'll be getting a call.

Speaker 4 (01:08:20):
I coached my son for several years while he was playing,
and we followed this developmental model and I could yeah,
and so I could see that it was much more
enlightened than some of the other kinds of ways of coaching.
So I was quite impressed. We can come back to that.

Speaker 5 (01:08:38):
But yeah, a year ago it was different somehow.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Yea, oh, sorry, I'll get back to that, yeahs myself
at the end of the story. Sorry. Yeah. So he's
got a stick that's made it similar to an ice
hockey stick. It's designed with a curve in the body
of the stick to enable him to generate a lot
of power when he flicks. So when he strikes, but
when he flicks, it's like a it gets like a

(01:09:05):
slingshot action, very very normal to ki you, very normally,
but that bend means that when he tries to hit it,
the thing goes flying up in the air. So he's
had he's learned to adapt by kind of putting his
hands way in front to keep the thing on the
ground so that he can hit the ball to other people,
but also so he can shoot. And I got this

(01:09:27):
thing in my hands and said, oh, it can't be
about that. Let me have a go, and the thing
really flew over. We're doing it in our backguard and
it really flew over and smashed into the neighbor's fence,
and I was like, oh my god, how can you
even play with this thing? And it's like it's interesting
how he I needed to do this. I can't swap
it in the game, but when it comes to shooting,

(01:09:48):
I'm gonna have to. So we're now we're in a
bit of a so we're now to think about do
we play with weight? Do we moved? But there's a
whole rabbit hole now around the implement and how we
can adapt it to make it.

Speaker 5 (01:09:57):
Help him hit it, get him a different one.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
But he's like, no, no, no, I need it for
this particular because the particular flicking action he does it's
when he score all the goals, right, Julia, I get.

Speaker 5 (01:10:11):
It, of course, No, I get it entirely. That makes
perfect sense. That's so interesting, you know, you hear these
stories of people doing exactly this sort of thing. They
had something as a kid and they had to overcome that, right. So,
like there's a story of a baseball player who he
was always wearing his brother's batting gloves, but they were

(01:10:33):
two big for hims, so he always had to tighten
up the you know, the the straps at the big
right before he hit. Every time before he hit, he
had tightened up the straps. Of course, now he's like
a famous baseball area you can buy all the gloves
that he wants, and they fit him perfectly. But every
time before he goes to to go up to bat
he adjust that the straps of his thing, and so

(01:10:53):
it's like, you know, you've got him. He's locked into
the dynamics with this one sticks. So he's putting his
hand in a funny place. Wouldn't be surprised if you
gave him a new stick, if you'd just be putting
his hand in that same space, because he was so
used to that that dynamics have that stick. That's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
One thing, one thing I was going to say I
was going to ask you about as well, is obviously
in team games the interactions between for the players to
coordinate and the interactions with opponents are obviously key. So
our opponents, largely to a certain extent, what they're doing

(01:11:34):
is something that's interesting to us. We need to be
aware of what they're doing so that we can find
ways to solve that problem. Because if they mass in
a certain place, we need to they flock in a
certain place, we need to flock in a different place
or interact with different places. And likewise, how we coordinate,
how we space, and all those sorts of things that

(01:11:57):
become important. So you mentioned flocking, liberations of starlings, and
there's a lot of stuff like that. But you talked
a lot about you talk about interpersonal and intrap personal interactions,
and I'd love to just sort of maybe just dwell
on that a little bit more and get you guys

(01:12:17):
to sort of talk a bit more about that. And
because I'm really fascinated by that, because I'm not sure
how much this has gone into the sort of why
do ecological psychology will but as this notion that a
lot of people are playing around with, which is a
shared affordance, So how do we design environments where people
begin to interpret the space, the search space, or the

(01:12:41):
landscape in a similar way. They're following similar ideas about
the ways in which we'll navigate. So I do a
lot of design of environments to facilitate this notion of
a shared affordance. But I'm interested in these dynamics anyway,
intra into all of that stuff. So sorry, it's a
big areas to explore, but I just love to get

(01:13:02):
you to open it up. Forgive me for just like
going all over the place.

Speaker 5 (01:13:08):
No, it's fine, it's not an area I know A
ton about. But it makes me think of there's these
there's a series of studies on in sports, in based
in soccer. I think about how moving with a partner,
so they create virtual environments, and you move with a

(01:13:29):
partner to try and create an affordance essentially, and so
it's the same idea. It's like you've got a shared
landscape or a shared space with another person. And I
think one of the earliest studies too, is looking at them.
I think we talked about this one in the book
with the planks, right and moving from holding the plank

(01:13:49):
from one hand to two hands and from two hands
to two people, right, Like, that's another shared affordance, and
you can do that without with very minimal communication, right,
you don't yet we can both see and we need
this to both go do this. So that's what that
makes me think of. But Jeff probably knows more.

Speaker 4 (01:14:09):
Well. It made me think of some studies that I've
done on soccer, where people were they were perceiving the
minimum distance through which they could kick a ball, depending
on whether the things that comprise that gap were teammates
or opponents or cones. And as you might expect, they

(01:14:32):
wanted a larger difference when those the objects that made
the space were opponents than if they were teammates, and
if depending on how they were facing, if they were
facing in as if they could intercept or facing away.
I can send you that one, but we're done here.
So in terms of intra personal coordination, so just coordinating yourself,

(01:15:00):
are you know? What you're getting is the propagation of
forces through the system, and the system, you're muscular skeleton
system is set up in such a way that that
those forces arrange themselves and you undergo phase transitions from
one kind of coordination to another, like from walking to running.

(01:15:22):
As you get to a particular speed, you achieve now
a new as the constraints change, you've achieved a new
coordination to better distribute those forces appropriately. In the case
of interpersonal coordination, the same things can't happen, but those forces.

(01:15:44):
Then you have to be getting information about those forces.
There has to be stimulation pattern that is carrying that
information across or between people. And I was thinking about
another example on our book about the horse and around study.

Speaker 2 (01:16:05):
M hm.

Speaker 4 (01:16:06):
So, so if you have two people walking, one in
front of the other, but that they just walk, they
will walk and they will fall into a coordination. But
if you have them walk and hold a piece of

(01:16:26):
poam so that the movements sort of carry back and forth.
As this person steps that it compresses the phone, which
bumps the person in front, which causes them to walk
a little differently, which compresses the phone, which causes the
person that back to walk a little differently. Eventually a
coordination pattern emerges that as if they are a four
legged animal their cord that that walking pattern emerges naturally

(01:16:51):
because it's the only way to sort of keep the
system moving in a comfortable fashion. But you can also
get these phase transitions between people informationally. So one of
the classic examples is that if you have if you

(01:17:15):
move your fingers one up and one down alternatingly, and
then you go fast enough, eventually they'll start moving together.
You can get that same pattern between people if you
sit next to somebody and you swing a pendulum or
you kick your legs. Eventually you'll fall into a an
in phase pattern moving together. You're not connected with that

(01:17:38):
person except for the stimulation patterns that are being structured
by that person's movements and newer movements to them. So
I guess if you're trying to get a team. You
want that team to be coordinated together. They've got to
have shared access to the same structured stimulation pattern. You've

(01:18:02):
got to get them attuned to the looking for the
right thing at the right time.

Speaker 1 (01:18:15):
So, so you use the word there. Actually, and I'm
going maybe ask you talk about this a little bit.
Use the word there. That has caused quite a lot
of controversy in the sports world, attunement, So I'd love
to dwell on that a little as well.

Speaker 4 (01:18:33):
Well. What I mean by attunement is developing a sensitivity
to the stimulation pattern that is lawfully related to the
property you're trying to perceive. It's almost like a tument,

(01:18:54):
like you know, tuning an old fashioned radio with dials.
You're just trying to find You're trying to to become
or developed sensitivity to the right stimulation pattern.

Speaker 5 (01:19:06):
Yeah, one of the things that we talk about in
the book. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure we talk
about in the book. It's been a while since I
read it, But one of the things that we talk
about too is that attunement is not just there's a
lot of pieces to it. Right, I think the sun
went down over there, you've been getting for resonably darker.

(01:19:27):
There's the attunement to can I do this thing in
this space, but there's also the necessary like getting your
body to do it too, right, And so the idea
that you would become attuned and then you'd never make
a mistake is that that is nonsense, Like that that
isn't going to be accurate because you still then need

(01:19:49):
to get your body to do the thing. And so
I don't know that was what was making me think of,
is that I think that when people hear the word attunement,
they think of something other than we mean right. They
think of it being like, oh, well, I'm just getting
better at a skill, right, And it's we mean it
in a perceptual sense.

Speaker 4 (01:20:08):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:20:09):
We mean it in a like Jess said, right, becoming
awareness of the information gradient whatever it might be for
this particular thing. But that's not the same thing as
being eight. Like I might become aware of whether or
not a goal would afford making for a soccer player,
but I'm not going to be able to make that goal, right, Like,

(01:20:30):
that's not a thing I'm capable of doing. But I
might be able to tell that that person could, right,
That would be I could become attuned to the affordance
of goal making without actually having the ability to make
the goal.

Speaker 4 (01:20:45):
And I think that you're trying to teach a skill,
right then what you need to get the person to
learn about is not the movement, but the relationship between
movement and the perceptual experience. That's what they and then
from that. It reminded me of another study of the
study from our book about transfer, because that's really what

(01:21:13):
practice is. You want to get them to learn a
skill that they can then take from here and put
in here. And this study was done in VR, and
people learned that when they walked straight, they had to
walk slightly to the left to get to a target
that was straight ahead. That was like the change in
the VR. The VR made it look like they had

(01:21:35):
to walk left to go straight. And then they were
tested outside of VR and they were told to crawl
to a target, and it turned out when they crawled,
they also crawled to the left because they learned about
this particular way the world looked the optic flow pattern
as they were moving, and so the world looks this
way when I moved this way, and therefore I need

(01:21:57):
to move this way to get where I'm going. But
if they were asked, when they were asked to throw
a ball to a target, they didn't throw to the
left because it had nothing to do with the relationship
that they learned about during practice. It wasn't they didn't
learn a general rule like go left to go straight.
It was when I'm engaging in these specific behaviors, because

(01:22:19):
that's going to change how the world looks, so gosh. Yeah,
so it's about trying. That's the becoming a tune to
the right variable is the way to get performance to
occur in different contexts, because that relationship will transfer even

(01:22:41):
if the movement won't.

Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
Yeah, well, I mean, I love that. I mean, and
that's actually the key thing. This is one of the
reasons why maintaining the fidelity of the environment, i e.
You know, having the the relevant factors at play and
equating somehow. You can't always do the entire thing, but

(01:23:06):
you know you're equating the We talk often about slight
taking a slice of the game and then exploring within
that slice. It might be that the slices is a
smaller pitch, it might be smaller numbers, it might be
lots of different things, but we can still maintain the fidelity.
The minute you remove that, you then impoverished it, and
then somebody is then learning about some form of movement

(01:23:27):
that won't equate. Interestingly, though, I'm interested because I'm interested
in coaching coaches and I'm interested in how coaches learn,
and I think there's a whole area to be explored
around the ecological approach to coach learning and coach education
as opposed to the very traditional linear instructional approach that's taken.

(01:23:50):
But interestingly, when it comes to attunement, I one hundred
percent believe that if I can work in a particular
way where I come extremely attuned to the experiences of
the athletes, that's when real magic happens. And and I've

(01:24:12):
got no evidence. I've got no proof of this, but
I feel that I've experienced flow as a coach two
or three times, and it's when I've been completely immersed
and attuned to what they're doing. Very often the most
challenging coaching sessions, but I'm totally immersed and time stands
still and I'm like, oh, the session's over.

Speaker 4 (01:24:31):
What?

Speaker 7 (01:24:31):
Hey?

Speaker 4 (01:24:32):
What?

Speaker 1 (01:24:32):
Because we're so kind of in sync and I'm putting
in place in constraints and manipulations and engagement and all
that sort of stuff. And the interesting thing about that
was when I changed from thinking that it was all
about my instruction and all about my praise and my
this and my that, towards actually being a lot quieter

(01:24:53):
and much more about using all of my senses like superpowers,
and listening and genuinely sensing and picking up from what's happening,
the little things that are going on, the interactions between
the players that enables me then to become really immersed
in their world. It feels to me like that's well, a,

(01:25:14):
I am pretty addicted to that, so I'm pretty all in.
But also I'm searching for that level of engagement, and
I feel that it works best certainly for me and
I hope for them when we work that way.

Speaker 5 (01:25:31):
It just makes me think of pedagogy. You know, we're professors.
We're both professors. This is the thing I mean, And
it's the same idea. The times that I have felt
that I was doing the best job as a professor
were always the times where I stopped thinking about me,
I stopped thinking about my you know, my goal.

Speaker 2 (01:25:49):
For the day.

Speaker 5 (01:25:49):
It was always about you know, the ones where I
really was communing with my students the most right where
we started to feel like one system instead of me
standing apart and like trying to stuff not all in
their brains, like we're trying to come to a thing together.
Those are always the best days. Those are always the
ones who it feels the best. So, I mean, it
just reminds me of pedagogy in the same way. It's

(01:26:10):
interesting to see it in this completely different arena.

Speaker 4 (01:26:12):
It's the same thing, and I think part of the
job of a coach. I think a good coach has
got to try to find a way to take these
complex relationships between how you move and what the world

(01:26:35):
looks like, like these optic flow relationships I was describing
in the VR.

Speaker 8 (01:26:41):
And put that into words right, or maybe not words,
but make it understandable to an athlete to try to take, Okay,
here's what.

Speaker 4 (01:26:54):
And that might be the way to coach. I think
is not about what the right movement is, but what
things will feel like or look like when you did
it right.

Speaker 5 (01:27:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:27:07):
Yeah, like I know, you'll know you did it right
when it feels like because it feels like this, like
you know, I don't know. It probably feels the same
with the field hockey stick. But if I hit the
puck just right, it feels like it's not there. It
feels like you'll know you hit it right when it
feels this way. You'll know you did it right. When
it's and yeah, and when you when it looks you

(01:27:29):
shoot the ball as soon as that you know, when
that there's this, you know, put that that a particular
pattern that you can if you can when it looks
like this is happening, you know, so you make an
analogy and some some of the you need, you need
a That's the challenge in coaching, Like if you tried

(01:27:54):
to teach someone This is not I'm borrowing this from
a colleague of mine in Knese theology, but he was
talking about the skill of hula hooping. Right. Imagine like
imagine trying to teach someone like step by step, movement
by movement, how to right, Okay, you move your oh boy,

(01:28:17):
But if you just say something like, well what you
do is you throw it around yourself with your hip
and you go, oh, well, of course that's how you
do it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:27):
You have like you just get it's not about a
moment by movement prescription, but about the outcome and about like, oh,
well it will feel like it'll feel like a dance
if you do it right, or if you'll feel like
a I don't know, that's sort of a thing.

Speaker 5 (01:28:45):
Yeah, I was just going to say that. I think
that to bring it back to what we were talking
about at a tument that that's that's that kind of
that kind of coaching or that kind of teaching where
you say, well, this is what it feels like when
you get it right. It helps them become attuned to
that information ingredient by by having them know when when

(01:29:05):
the outcome was right, right, when it was right it
was like this, okay, well I know what that felt like,
I know what went into that, I know how I
moved in those circumstances.

Speaker 4 (01:29:13):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:29:13):
So you it helps them become attuned to that gredient
if you if you let them know where that gradient
where to look for it, you know where to put
their attention.

Speaker 1 (01:29:23):
There you get. So that's what I think the skill
is for me is using constraints to direct attention mm
hm so, or not direct it, but to sort of
make some aspects of the search base more attractive than
others in order to encourage more exploration in that world.

(01:29:43):
And that's the fundamental difference is that some people, I
think are thinking about using constraints to force movement upon people,
whereas it's not to do that. It's it's to just
direct attention in certain places, and then action emerges because
what you've done is you've changed the problem parameters. The

(01:30:04):
other thing I really love about the ecological approaches, and
I've written about this before, is what I think it
really opens up and I love is so much agency.
The athlete has agency because your job as a coach
is not to sort of coerce them or to be
some kind of puppeteer to sort of make them do
certain things, which is what I used to try and
do with structure and order and repetition. And I just

(01:30:28):
want you to basically be like dancers. Right, we're gonna
do choreography and you're just gonna do this dance perfectly,
and if we do it perfectly, we'll win. Until we
didn't and then it's like, wha, well, we're gonna do
we the choreography wasn't good enough, Let's do it better.
And then you're just so freed up when you don't
think like that anymore, when you're not working from that assumption,
and you're actually saying this, let's see how we can
coordinate together to solve a problem. Here's one, is another one,

(01:30:52):
here's another problem for you to solve, and actually watching
groups young people, older people, self organized but work together
to find solutions to problems that you're presenting and seeing
how immersed they can become in that experience. You know,
and that's a game. I call that a game. Here's
a game, or is a problem? Solve them? Let's see

(01:31:14):
how we can solve it together. Now, if I stop you,
if I if I limit you in this way by
saying that the space is now really narrow, how do
we solve the problem then? But the beauty of that
is it's the agency is with them, it's their problem solutions.
And then I just listen to them and hear what
they say and then use that information to then put
in new ideas and new constraints. It's joyous for me,

(01:31:37):
it's a joyous experience. I nearly gave up because I
was so miserable, like forcing people into doing these things,
and finding the ecological approach has just been now just
so freeing, and I genuinely believe it's it's more enjoyable
for them. And this is where my ethical thing comes
into it, because from my perspective, I felt deeply troubled

(01:31:59):
about working the way I did traditionally, felt like it
was it didn't map onto my own value set. But
equally it's so much difficulty and challenge and conflict. But
all it was was people saying, I'd like to be
a bit freer, please, coach, I'd like you not to
force me into this box, please, And so coming away
from that and actually being freed by saying, you know

(01:32:21):
what what we're going to do is we're going to
work together to solve some problems. My job is to
try and create some problems because I've got a bit
of a knowledge about this game, and things will be
very relevant. Certain things will be relevant lessings, and let's
explore together. And if you're really really struggling, then I
can start to maybe show you some things. But until
that point, you guys, have a good crack at this
and see how we get on. It's a just better

(01:32:42):
experience all around for everybody, or at least it is
for me, because.

Speaker 5 (01:32:46):
It turns out you're supposed to play in playing.

Speaker 4 (01:32:48):
This brings me back to the American developmental model in
ice hockey. And one of the fundamental things, one of
the fundamental changes that they made several years ago was
instead of making you know, so an ice hockey rink
and hundreds of feet long, and if you have children
playing on it, it takes them, especially they're not great skaters.

(01:33:09):
It takes them a matter of minutes to get all
the way down like that and then it goes all
the way back to the other end. So they said, no, no, no,
we're gonna have kids games go across the ice. Now, yeah,
now we don't have Now there's less there's there's just
less skating for no reason. The kids are going to
touch the puck more often that we can get more

(01:33:29):
kids on the ice because now we have three mini
rinks instead of one big. I was just like, that's back, Yes,
that's what we need to be doing. Now you get like,
there's yeah, it's it's different than an actual ice hockey game,
and yeah, but so what right it? Yeah, there's so.

(01:33:50):
But what you're getting are you're providing constraints, but the
constraints are about yielding outcomes rather than movements. It's it's
really well done. That was one of the things that
made me realize that they were onto something.

Speaker 5 (01:34:02):
And hey, it turns out that variability is not noise,
so it's okay if the game's not exactly the same.

Speaker 4 (01:34:08):
Yeah, they they.

Speaker 1 (01:34:13):
They You wouldn't believe how much difficulty and criticism they
received from adults about that decision. You know, this is
not the game and all that sort of stuff. So
what one thing I would would just want you to
maybe go away from the conversation today with is to
say that researchers like yourselves, and the fact that you've

(01:34:34):
put together this book and the fact that you know
you keep sort of nudging away at the frontiers of
ecological psychology have influenced policymakers like the team at the
at USA Hockey who created the ADM and indirectly, whether
it's directly or indirectly, influenced that thinking, which has then

(01:34:55):
meant that ice hockey is now one of the most
popular sports in the US, and young people have a
really good experience and becoming more skillful and all of
these sorts of things. So we all owe you a
debt of gratitude for the work you're doing because it's
helping I think those of us who are at the
prole face, and also those of us making policy that

(01:35:16):
have the justification for these changes, which are better for
children around really and hopefully means that our continued efforts
to make sport and physical activity relevant for young people
who have a range of other possibilities in front of them.
This stuff, I think really helps us to make those
kinds of arguments. So I, for one would like to

(01:35:36):
thank you for the work you've done.

Speaker 5 (01:35:37):
Oh, we stand on the shoulders of giants like that.
We came into this from all of these you know,
we're reporting on other people's work too, So.

Speaker 4 (01:35:44):
But thank you, thank you, And I will also yeah,
I thank you as well. And one of the things
that it's validating because you know, we do our science
and we do it in our labs, and I for
one often wonder what does it matter? Yeah, what does
it matter? Is anybody reading this and if they are,

(01:36:07):
what are they taking from it? Is it actually doing anything?
And if I'll take your word for it, that it
is and be heartened by that. So thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
So yeah. So one thing I just wanted to say
is I really like the fact that used the word lawful,
and I just very quickly wanted before we wrap this up,
like there's a particular reason you chose that word, And
I'd love to know just so that people know why
you chose this word lawful, because I think it's a
really important aspect as to sort of the whole one

(01:36:42):
of the whole rationales behind the book. So, Julia, would
you explain that just so that we can go away
with that idea in our minds.

Speaker 5 (01:36:49):
Yeah. Absolutely, And this is an idea Jeff and I
have talked about a lot, which is the idea that
psychology has always occupied a sort of strange space in science,
where where we sort of, for whatever reason, assume that
the science that's going to govern people and it's going
to be somehow different from the science that governs the

(01:37:10):
movement of planets or balls rolling down a frictionless plane,
and it's just doesn't make any sense. Of course, our movements,
of course, our perceptions, of course everything else would be
just as lawfully based as any of those other sciences
would be, and it's just up to us to uncover
what those lawful relationships are, and that if we make

(01:37:31):
it arbitrary, it doesn't work.

Speaker 4 (01:37:33):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:37:33):
You're talking about the pragmatics of applying this all to
sport and discovering that it works better. That's going to
be true for everything, right, I think about it. In
human factors research, it's the same thing. You do things
in one way, it doesn't work, but you do things
in a way that acknowledges the lawfulness of our experience,
and suddenly it does work. So, I mean, I think

(01:37:56):
this is for us. The reason why we chose the
word lawful is to draw attention to the fact that
these are just as lawfully based as any other science,
and that when you treat it that way, it works better.

Speaker 1 (01:38:08):
Yeah. I mean that's so powerful for me because I
think that's where a lot of the when we have
a lot of conversations and debates with Titians who are
more steeped in a more traditional approach, we talk past
each other all the time, and it's so frustrating, and
I think partly that's because they're coming from a different
set of kind of laws in their own minds. And

(01:38:30):
you often think in the book, you make reference to
the fact that you know, the sort of traditional ideas
behind Newtonian physics and geometry don't quite work, so you
almost need the ecological version of those things.

Speaker 5 (01:38:46):
I mean, yes, exactly. The laws are going to be ecological,
they're not going to be the laws of physics, but
they're still going to be laws. I mean, they're regular
and dependable. Anyway, just send them our way, we'll take
them and we'll talking to you.

Speaker 4 (01:39:00):
Think about the thing about laws is that they're independent
of context. Yes, you know, and so you change the context,
the law doesn't change, change other things might.

Speaker 1 (01:39:13):
Yeah, it's the first time i'd heard that articulation, and
it was really important. And I know, I know you say,
by the way, you're standing on the shoulders of judge,
but I thought it was a really important argument. And
you set that up at the start, which is to say,
you know, I've had people say to me, you know,
like the at large approach is complete, completely nonsense. Why well, thermodynamics,

(01:39:33):
I'm like, what what? And now I realize why. What
they're saying was actually, well, you've got these things here,
they just don't matter. But ah, yeah, but you're looking
at it the wrong way.

Speaker 5 (01:39:41):
Yeah, the wrong way. That's right, because if you try
and treat people like we're ball rolling down at first
on this plane, it's not going to work. There's still
going to be laws, though, they're just going to be
ones that are ecologically based.

Speaker 1 (01:39:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, listen, I really I'm conscious I've taken
up a lot of your We've been going for an
hour and forty five minutes, which is a coold but
I sorry, Jeff, go ahead.

Speaker 4 (01:40:07):
No no. For me, it was a lot like your
experience when you said you're in the flow with your athletes.
This is great. I really enjoyed myself. This is a
wonderful time. So thank you, Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (01:40:18):
I feel like it's partly been a therapy session for
me because of all times just like that. But I
appreciate you staying patient with some of the stories and
the kind of work, the things that I'm still struggling
with a little bit.

Speaker 5 (01:40:33):
For us, it's just as interesting to hear this stuff
being made into real things in the real world. So
that's just as interesting for us.

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
Well, I'm continuing with the study. But so firstly, forth, first,
and foremost, you've been really generously time and I really
appreciate you coming on. By all accounts, the world of
sport is reaching out and they want to speak to you.
So it's really really cool. Pretty certain Jeff that the
Hockey World. But obviously you're a very good or BacT
I've noticed that, you know, you kind of like you

(01:41:04):
riff off each other really well. Jeff even admitted in
the video with with Bren that he likes you go
in first, Julia, and then he then thinks it through
and then comes through afterwards. I've noticed that.

Speaker 4 (01:41:20):
We have developed a really good partnership. We we've found
that we worked well together. We we Yeah, so we're
we're glad that other people notice that.

Speaker 5 (01:41:31):
Yes, very much. It's been a lot of years now,
like almost a decade that we've been working together on projects,
and so we've got sort of shorthand in a rhythm
that I think really works for us. Is my is
my work?

Speaker 4 (01:41:44):
Brother?

Speaker 1 (01:41:45):
Yes, there we go. I love that you were tuned.

Speaker 4 (01:41:50):
So the.

Speaker 1 (01:41:53):
You mentioned before we started recording that there's a second
book in the in the works? Is there I hear?
Is this something that sports practition? Is it going to
be excited by?

Speaker 5 (01:42:02):
I mean, we're writing a sensation in perception or textbook, right,
so we're sensing and perceiving. We're gonna for undergraduate SMP classes.
So maybe not as excited as they would be about
our other book, but I certainly there will be things
in there for all and you've uh no, I mean
Freds and I think a little bit, but we've been

(01:42:22):
going with a baby elephant this time that exactly the same.

Speaker 4 (01:42:33):
But the project after that is the second edition of
our ecological book, so there will be a second edition
of that in a few years by the time that
gets all the way through.

Speaker 5 (01:42:45):
Yeah, and actually that one might be of more interest too,
because we're planning on adding a social chapter, so that
should probably include some of the things that you're interested in.
Those interpersonal dynamics will be in that chapter as well,
so there might be.

Speaker 1 (01:42:59):
Somecent Well, I hope I might be able to entice
you back if you're not not too bruised by the
first experience when that does come out, because I'd love
to be able to, you know, kind of introduce it
to this wider audience. I'm fairly certain there's well, there'll
be a book club amongst my learning group in due
course where we start to discuss the book in more detail.

(01:43:23):
But listen, I really appreciate you coming on. I really
appreciate you just doing what you're doing. And this is
a really this is like the book that I've always
kind of wanted and needed and it's gonna Yeah, there's
going to be a lot of Fred talk in this
podcast over the next few few episodes.

Speaker 4 (01:43:43):
Thank you so much, Stuart.

Speaker 5 (01:43:45):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:43:49):
Thanks for listening to the Talent Equation podcast. If you
like the show, then please consider supporting it by leaving
a review on your favorite podcast player, telling your friends
about it, or even becoming a hero and show your
appreciation by becoming a patron. Just head over to the
Talentequation dot co dot uk and click on the becoming
a Patron button at the top of the page.

All Episodes

"We Don't Need to Copy the World in Our Head to Interact With It" - a conversation with Julia Blau and Jeffrey Wagman

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Dateline NBC

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"We Don't Need to Copy the World in Our Head to Interact With It" - a conversation with Julia Blau and Jeffrey Wagman