How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view—both in academia and in the popular press—that thinking about what you are doing as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions, many believe, leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Experts, accordingly, don’t need to try to do what they have been trained to do; they proceed automatically. But is this true? After presenting an overview of some of the contemporary and historical ma ... More

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view—both in academia and in the popular press—that thinking about what you are doing as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions, many believe, leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Experts, accordingly, don’t need to try to do what they have been trained to do; they proceed automatically. But is this true? After presenting an overview of some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea that highly accomplished actions are automatic and effortless, this work develops a theory of expert action that emphasizes the role of consciousness in high-level performance. Part of this task involves dispelling various mythical accounts of experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their actions, and it uncovers possible flaws in some of the philosophical and psychological research on expertise that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one’s movements impedes well-practiced skills. Beyond this, the work explores various real-life examples of optimal performance—culled from sports, the performing arts, chess, nursing, medicine, the military, and elsewhere—and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to create a picture of expertise according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective.