Word: mentally
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...child, I measured my mental development (and I was the sort of child, I confess, who found his own mental development fascinating) by the complexity of the jigsaw puzzles I was able to complete. As I learned to do puzzles with smaller, more numerous pieces, graduating from simple farmyard scenes to detailed panoramas of city skylines, I felt better and better about myself. The adults in my life seemed to feel better about me too. But then something unexpected happened. One afternoon when I was 10 or so, I finished a 1,000-piece puzzle of the Milky...
...even being aware that it's occurring. After years of practice, hitting a baseball or shooting a basket becomes almost second nature to a professional athlete. So it's easy to think the skill resides in muscle memory. But even those rote actions involve a tremendous amount of mental processing; they are just happening too fast for the athlete to realize they are going on. "It's not the conscious kind of processing, the kind where you're thinking about how to control your body," says Jeff Simons, a sports psychologist at California State University, East Bay. "Our conscious brain...
...interior monologue that psychologists call self-talk. This is the endless conversation that we all have with ourselves, processing events as they pass before our eyes. The average person speaks to himself at a rate of 300 to 1,000 words a minute. According to Trevor Moawad, director of mental conditioning for IMG Academies, a leading sports-training facility, that means that for a tennis player competing in a typical 2-hr. match, only about 40 min. are spent on the court contesting points, leaving an hour and 20 min. between points with little to do but talk to oneself...
Relaxation techniques like deep breathing are also good for helping athletes quiet the mental chatter long enough for their bodies to perform. "You have to help them realize that 'I have to get out of my own way,'" says Simons. "Relaxing can help them imagine competing, getting in their own groove, feeling it, tasting it, reminding them of that feeling of flow...
...when an informant who was cooperating with officers entered the suspect's hotel room. In an opinion later overturned by the Supreme Court, he upheld a man's death sentence?even though his lawyers had failed to present evidence that he was abused as a child and had limited mental capacity?saying the defendant was demanding that his defense attorneys be more resourceful than the Constitution requires...