A
centipede was happy
Until
a toad in fun
Said,
‘Pray, which leg moves after which?’
This
raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She
fell exhausted in the ditch
Not
knowing how to run!
The poem underlines the
psychological ‘centipede effect’ that occurs when an otherwise unconscious
activity is disrupted by consciousness of it. When asked how he played a
certain passage of Beethoven, violinist Adolf Busch replied that
it was quite simple – and then found that he could no longer play the same passage.
George Humphrey identified the effect
as hyper-reflection and said that ‘no man skilled at a trade needs to put his
constant attention on routine work... If he does, the job is apt to be spoiled’.
Humphrey's law states that once performance of a task has become habitual,
conscious thought about the task, while performing it, impairs performance.
Habit reduces and then removes
the attention required for routine tasks. This automaticity is upset
by attention to a regular unconscious competence. For example, someone thinking
too much about how they knot their tie may find their performance of the task
impaired. Hence, we must not allow the centipede’s dilemma to derail what has
turned a habitual performance.
The centipede need not reflect on keeping feet in line,
But if it starts to ponder they get twisted all the
time!
- Pravin K. Sabnis
Goa, India.
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