Executive Function – The 4th Skill Class

Attention is a limited resource. As you play, hundreds of sensations, decisions, and distractions compete for your limited attention. Executive function is your ability to manage that.

I’ve actually written about executive function already, but at the time, I hadn’t fully decoupled it from vision. This article will fix that, and introduce executive function as the 4th primary skill class in tennis, distinct from each of ball-striking, vision, and movement.

The Attentional Blink

Remember saccadic masking? The process by which, while your eyes move from one fixation to another, you’re functionally blind? With attention, something similar happens – at times, your attention blinks, and while it’s blinked, you’re less able to process new stimuli.

This video will let you experience it. It shows you a series of shapes, and your goal is to report the shape that follows immediately after the heart. It’s difficult, because it’s designed to induce an attentional blink. Try it, then continue reading.

At times, your attention blinks.

Reward Signaling

Your brain is a goal-fulfilling machine, and during the shapes test, your first goal is to notice the heart. When you succeed, your brain rewards you (with dopamine). That success signal encourages deeper processing of the event that triggered it, and that deeper processing causes an attentional blink.

Imagine the difference between seeing a thousand random faces in the train station, verses seeing a long lost friend. Each of the thousand faces provokes no reward, and therefore demands no attention, but when you glimpse the friend, it’s entirely different. The world blinks out for a second as the brain goes into over-drive processing the experience.

Time Speeds Up

Attentional blinks typically last 200 – 500 ms. During the shapes test, the shapes are show faster than that, which is why you miss the shape after the heart. Unlike with saccadic masking, your brain doesn’t backfill fake information into the length of an attentional blink. The result is that you experience time faster the more frequently your attention blinks out.

This is the same mechanism by which time flies when you’re engaged in a task, but crawls to a slog when you’re bored – the engaging task triggers far more reward, and causes far more of the experience to be deeply processed.

Executive Function in Tennis

You can probably see the implications for tennis already. Elite executive function literally slows time down for you, while poor executive function speeds it up. Medium speed shots will feel lighting quick until you’ve mastered your attention, but then once you have, even rockets will feel manageable.

Elite executive function literally slows time down for you.

Properly managed attention supports crystal clear tracking and clear-minded decisions, while frequent attentional blinks impair both. In The Receiving Loop, I laid out exactly where your attention belongs as you play. Below, we’ll discuss how that goes wrong, and how to fix it.

Premature Reward Signaling

You’re rallying in neutral, when suddenly your opponent floats up a meatball.

“Ooh, I’m about to hit a winner.”

Not with that thought, you’re not. That constitutes your brain registering success, and firing off a reward signal, before you’ve actually struck the ball. Recall the shapes test – registering reward will cause your attention to blink. In tennis, unless you can merely notice your thoughts, but not anchor on them, your attention will blink during the process of actually hitting the ball, and you’ll miss your shot.

We won’t go over every distracting thought that occurs during tennis, but they could be anything:

• “I should go down the line here.”
• “Wow that ball is slow.”
• “I haven’t hit a dropshot in a while.”

A common form of meditation involves briefly noticing your sensations, and then letting them go. If the above thoughts are noticed in that way, they will not impede your tennis. They can exist briefly, non-verbally, and they can influence your actions in that form, but if they’re actively noticed and pulled in for further processing, your attention will blink, and you’ll probably miss.

The Executive Function Talent Spectrum

Executive function, like most human traits, is partially innate and partially improved through practice. In the same way some players are naturally athletic, while others need to hit the gym, some players are naturally great executives, while others aren’t. If you’ve read to this point and thought, “this doesn’t really seem like an issue for me,” then congratulations, your natural talent in this area is likely high enough to play competently.

This happens with each of the Big 4 skill-classes. Some players never need a ball-striking lesson and instead intuit efficient mechanics right away. Many never struggle with vision – the act of playing tennis itself is enough to train their eyes. Some players glide around the court their first time out, while others need a full gym routine to support that, and some effortlessly command their attention, while others can barely make it through a service game without getting distracted.

Some players effortlessly command their attention.

If your natural talent for executive function is low enough, we actually give you a special label: ADHD, but luckily there is a relatively low-risk PED you can take to help (though this is controversial, and I argue probably should not be allowed professionally).

The Mechanics Trap

Almost every player will struggle with mechanics-related attention management at some point. While developing your strokes, you need to focus on your stroke-related sensations. The feelings through your hand, your arm, your trunk. The sensation of contact, the flight of the ball off your strings. The deeper and more complete your post-processing of this information, the faster you can wire new habits and improve your forehand function.

Here’s the problem – that processing requires attention; it’ll induce attentional blinks, and those blinks will greatly impair your receiving process. During practice, you can often get away with this (especially dead-ball practice). The situation is familiar enough and easy enough that, despite your attention blinking, you’ll succeed. In a match, difficulty, variety, and complexity skyrocket, and those practice-tolerable attentional blinks become fatal.

Mechanics Trap Solution

During matches, you must discard the sensation of your stroke immediately after hitting. Do not actively notice it, do not further process it. The moment your racket strikes the ball, your attention switches to receiving the next ball. You must avoid the 200-500 ms delay that would occur if your brain decided to post-process your own shot.

Actually, you can switch your attention from striking to receiving even before you’ve hit the ball – after you’ve fully committed to your swing, and can no longer change it, refocus on your opponent.

Peak Tennis is Meditative

You should only be able to create a verbal narrative for a point after the fact. The act of playing competitively should be similar to meditation – you briefly notice sensations and then immediately let them go without additional thought. If a thought like “I should go down-the-line” registers as anything more than a glimmer, it’ll take over your attention system, and you’ll likely miss.

Players often describe the “flow state” as almost like blacking out. “I don’t remember a single shot,” when recalling their best matches. It’s because their attention system was so focused on the act of playing, and so disinterested in wasting resources on post-processing, that even long term memory storage was culled in favor of in-the-moment performance.