In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions in the space of seven breaths.
– Lord Takanobu

If discrimination is long, it will spoil.
– Lord Naoshige

In the Wuxia novel inspired drama series, The Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre, a curious thing happens in a sword fight between Mongolian Princess Zhao Min’s henchman, A-Da and Zhang Wuji, the protagonist, on the premises of the Wudang Sect.

Since Zhao Min and her motley cohort were at Wudang’s gates, it was a matter of pugilistic honour that they were beaten back with Wudang’s skills. Alas, the grandmaster of Wudang, Zhang Sanfeng was somewhat incapacitated and could not afford the strain of a rigorous battle. Wuji, who was at the time not a Wudang member, steps forward as the deus ex machina but does not know Wudang’s Taiji Swordplay.

This leads the grandmaster of Wudang to impart the skill to Wuji in short order. The grandmaster proceeds to model the swordplay to Wuji who observes intently. After the demonstration, the following dialogue takes place between the master and disciple.

“Wuji, did you see it clearly?”
“Yes.”
“Still remember it?”
“Forgotten a portion of it.”
“It’s tough for you to learn on the spot. How about now?”
“Forgotten half of it!”
“How about now?”
“I’ve clean forgotten everything.”
“That’s fast and good”.

As the master finished making this rather puzzling comment, Wuji proceeded to confound all present and put paid to the challenge.

This phenomenon of unconscious or subconscious peak performance has been studied by cognitive scientists. In sum, there are two main systems in our brains, which are referred to as top-down and bottom-up. The neocortex, which forms the top layers of the brain is in charge of conscious, deliberate and effortful processes such as planning a composition and reflecting on how well it has been written. The basal ganglia, which is found at the bottom of the brain, is responsible for subconscious, automatic and effortless responses such as knowing the spelling of ‘ball’ (unless you are new to the English language) and what the second half of the phrase, “bread and …” is.

With sufficient, repeated practice, any task which required deliberate and laborious effort in the beginning could become relatively, subconscious, effortless and automatic. At this stage, being conscious of the what and why, would impair performance. In other words, if one has done something over and over again, or otherwise has a process imprinted in his mind, he would do well to not think of the process consciously while he is executing it, much the same way as Wuji did not, at Mount Wudang.

To the extent possible students should aim to delegate most mental processes, especially those relating to technique, to the bottom-up system or what may be known as ‘gut feel’ and intuition. This would free up attention, a scarce resource to be used for the most deserving of tasks, on matters of tactics, such as deciding how best to phrase an answer in a comprehension exercise.

If a student somehow knows the right answer to most of the paper automatically, he will be sufficiently relaxed to be able to devote outsized amounts of conscious attention to the really challenging (because of the novelty of a question type for instance) parts of a paper, to gain an edge in his overall performance.

Imagine a student who has to read this and answer the accompanying question.

Most of the people in our group halted at the opening to the ravine. Some took out their cameras to capture the magnificent beauty of the place. Steve stretched out on a flat rock at the edge of the river, drying himself in the sunlight, not wanting to risk his bad leg by going on. Oscar took some leaves from the ground, making a bed, on which he took a nap. I decided to continue looking for the petroglyph, along with Bill, three soldiers and a video crew. The petroglyph was engraved on limestone and should be easy to spot, I thought.
– Adapted from, The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston

Which word in the passage has the same meaning as ‘image’?

A student who has experience would know the answer to this vocabulary in context question automatically even though he might never have encountered the word, “petroglyph” before. He may not even consciously know why the answer is “petroglyph” and not “capture” or “beauty”. This is an example of a bottom-up process.

A student without experience might wonder if he should focus on the co-text “cameras”, the context of each sentence or the word class of “petroglyph”. He will be consciously deciding between techniques. This is deliberate, time consuming and effortful, an example of a top-down process.

If during an exam, a student starts to think about if he is executing a technique the right way or if he is using the right technique, his performance will be adversely affected. Instead, he should learn to trust bottom-up processes in his mind to throw up the right answers and forget or try to not actively recall, the techniques he learnt. So long as he has put in the hours over the entire year, at the moment of the exam, his subconscious mind would kick into high gear and assist him greatly.

An exam is in some respects not unlike a sword fight. To the well-trained, the subconscious mind would always be the perfect deus ex machina.

The Brain Dojo