Staying in the Zone

Taking Control of Your RAS to Stay In the Zone

In addition to controlling your consciousness level and concentration (see Concentration for Racers), and therefore your ability to be in a Zone state when racing, your Reticular Activating System also serves as a self preservation alarm system, which draws your Intellectual attention to anything unexpected and/or to anything that you consider threatening (like the guy who just spun in front of you). While this self-preservation system is handy for keeping you alive, it can also work against you when racing because it can:

• Cause sensory processing overload that increases stress and reduces your ability to feel what is going on.
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• Limit your ability to see/evaluate other options than the focal point (target fixation).
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• Unnecessarily draw your attention to insignificant pattern match variations (hyper sensitivity).
  Note: Controlling this was one of the most important lessons I learned in racing.

Fortunately, the RAS has a handy feature for racers; it has a signal filtering capability that can be programmed through conscious effort and/or through habituation (repeated exposure to a stimulus). You must take advantage of this filtering feature to ensure that you can stay in the Zone when you are driving. That is, you must program your RAS so that it will only draw your Intellectual attention to important things. You must also train your RAS so that when it does encounter something unexpected, it only draws the mental resources needed to deal with the situation.

NOTE: I believe that the Zone is not just one mental state, or one level of consciousness, or one holy-grail destination. Instead, I think of the Zone as a continuum; as I do with consciousness and attention. I know that I have been driving in what I would describe as a high-level Zone, with all background tasks functioning automatically and correctly, while my Intellect attends to other tasks. However, I have also experienced what I would call a very deep, or low-level Zone, where everything is happening automatically – subconsciously – and my intellect just remains quiet, marveling at ‘the driver’, and enjoying the ride.

Antidotes to the Zone

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the rhythm of driving past the timing/action points in your pattern recognition template combined with “habituation” of the expected/important sensations (visual, vestibular, auditory, etc.) that you experience when driving around the track can produce a mental state that is conducive to getting into the Zone. The antidotes to the Zone are anything unexpected that happens, anything expected that does not happen, or anything beyond your experience such as:

• Encountering a sudden change in traction (dirt, oil, etc. on the track)
• Letting off the throttle and finding out that it’s hung open
• Pressing on the brake pedal and finding out that you’re not slowing down as much as you expect
• Braking later than you have before for a particular turn
• Entering a turn faster than you have before
• Sliding/drifting the tires more (or at a higher speed) than you have before
• Being closer to other drivers than you are used to

When anything similar to the above happens, your RAS perceives it as a threat and therefore draws your attention to the situation, which causes you to start moving out of the Zone as focused concentration quickly takes over so you can evaluate the situation (threat). After evaluating the situation, a course of action is selected based on how threatening the situation is. The response to the situation can fall anywhere within the following continuum:

• If the situation is not particularly threatening (making a close but safe pass, or having the car slide a little at a place where it usually does not slide) your focused concentration will probably simply make a mental note of the situation (perhaps update your mental track model) and allow you to return to holistic concentration and the Zone.
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• If the situation is a bit more threatening (getting into a fast turn too hot, or sliding the car at significantly higher speeds than you ever have before), you may shift out of the Zone and switch largely, or fully, into focused concentration.

Unfortunately, your RAS “stressing out” and causing you to jump out of the Zone and into focused concentration is most likely, exactly what you do not need when you are in trouble; you need to be calm, relaxed, and sensitive; you need to be able to use all of your senses simultaneously so that you can get yourself out of trouble.

• If the situation is dire (like you hit oil in the middle of a high speed turn, your throttle hangs open, or your brakes fail), so you are facing a VERY threatening situation, then something paradoxical may happen. Your RAS may just short-circuit your intellect out of the equation; giving full control to your Intuition (which is a more direct conduit to your survival instincts) so that you can try to recover from the situation, or at least try to minimize the damage. This is a very odd feeling, it’s sort of like being along for a slow motion (or stop motion) ride as you watch some other part of you controlling the car.

This RAS triggered interaction between Intellectual and holistic concentration may be the reason a big mistake (like having a big crash, or really scaring the crap out of yourself) can cause a setback in your learning process by making it hard to get back into the Zone. This can happen because your Intellect may figure “Oh great, I went into the Zone, let Intuition have some control, and he goes and puts us in danger… I guess I have to do everything myself”. The funny thing is, Intellect may well have caused the problem in the first place by interfering when Intuition needed full control. Actually it may well have been Intuition that jumped in and tried to save the day. However, Intellect is really pretty much the tyrannical ruler of your brain and will ignore or distort the facts to be right.

If you have an experience like this, you must rebuild your Intellect’s trust in your Intuition by determining precisely what caused the problem, and by coming up with a believable and workable method for avoiding the same problem again. If your logic-driven Intellect is able to understand what happened, then it may acknowledge that the issue was not (or at least not all) Intuition’s fault. Only after the blame game is done, and the feud is settled, will you be able to get in the right frame of mind for getting back into the Zone.

Programming Your RAS

Because the RAS relays signals that are both coming into and going out of the brain, you can program it with incoming signals (experience) or outgoing signals (imagery) as follows:

Programming with Incoming Signals

When driving intuitively, your RAS continually checks the sensory information from every lap against your stored pattern-recognition template to verify that both the sensations coming in match the template, and that the pattern recognition template is still applicable. For example, if the amount of available traction changes (your tires go off, or it starts to rain) then the template you had previously been using would no longer be appropriate. If your RAS and Intuition determine that the pattern recognition template is no longer appropriate, then either a previously created variation of the template is used, or a modified version of the template is created that reflects the new circumstances. However, if a significant mismatch occurs, your RAS may draw Intellect into the mix as well.

Therefore, to reprogram your RAS with incoming signals, all you have to do is make a slight change to the way you do things and repeat it consistently. That is, purposely cause a slight deviation between the sensations your RAS is experiencing and your pattern-recognition template. To cause this deviation you could:

• Go a little quicker through a turn to cause the tires to drift or slide a little more than usual
• Brake just a little bit later for a turn
• Make a small adjustment to your line through a turn
• Any other small incremental change you want to make to your driving

NOTE: DO NOT try and reprogram your RAS by making a big change in your driving, or you run the risk of causing sensory overload and/or “target fixation” and the resulting nastiness.

When you first introduce a slight change to your driving, your RAS will draw a little attention to the deviation from ‘normal’. However with repeated exposures to the deviation, your RAS will draw less attention to it until eventually your Intellect and RAS will agree that the variation is “normal”. When this happens, your pattern recognition template is updated. That is, the previous pattern remains, but the new deviation is added to it (as a range of acceptable deviation), so whether your RAS receives sensations that match the original or expanded pattern, it still considers it a successful pattern match.

You can repeat this process with many different types of deviations to create a very broad and flexible pattern recognition template. This flexible template will allow you to experience a pattern match most of the time when you are driving, which means you can stay in the Zone most of the time.

There are, however, a few problems with this training method:

• It takes a lot of experience=track time=$$$ to create a flexible enough pattern recognition template that you can consistently stay in the Zone.
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• You may have trouble being consistent enough with your modifications to make the change effectively. For example, if you are modifying your line, but you don’t consistently drive on the line you are trying to program, then your RAS and Intellect may determine that you are just driving inconsistently, so your ‘changes’ won’t be added to your pattern recognition template as quickly (or perhaps at all). Instead, your RAS will keep drawing attention to the deviation.
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• When making ‘on-the-fly’ changes, you always run the risk of making too big a change at one time, which can cause target fixation and perhaps a loss of control/crash.

Programming with Outgoing Signals

Because your brain can not tell the difference between an actual experience and a vividly imagined experience, you can use imagery (see Imagery Training for Racers) to perform the following types of programming for your RAS:

• Defining what is and is not important and/or threatening
• Taking a random experience and adding it to your pattern-recognition template
• Preparing yourself to modify your pattern recognition template

Defining what is important and/or threatening

Because your RAS automatically draws your attention to any PERCEIVED threat, you can reprogram your RAS by redefining what is threatening. For example, an expert driver can get fairly sideways in a very high speed turn without having their RAS draw all their attention to the slide. They can do this because they do not perceive sliding at high speed as threatening; their Intuition and Instincts automatically adjust for the slide, so their RAS lets them stay in the Zone.

This is a very interesting video about autonomous race cars and human drivers. The presenter starts talking about ‘human’
drivers at about 4:30 in, and the bit directly related to the paragraph above runs from about 8:20 – 9:20.

For a novice driver in the same situation, their RAS will probably draw all their Intellectual resources to the “threatening” slide, which forces their Intuition out of the Zone. When this happens, they tighten up and stop receiving information about traction, which slows down or blocks the instinctive slide correction ability they need to keep them from losing control.

Programming your RAS is simply a matter of consciously telling your RAS what you consider important and/or threatening. For example, you can be reading a book in an airport, ignoring all the hubbub and intercom announcements, until they announce that your flight is boarding, suddenly your attention is automatically shifted from your book to the announcement. This happens because you have previously decided that this information is important to you, so when your RAS recognizes the information it draws your attention to it. I know it sounds simplistic, but that’s how it works; your RAS does your bidding if you program it to do so… if not, you do its bidding.

The difficult part is knowing what you should consider important and/or threatening when racing. One way of learning what to consider threatening is to model fast drivers. That is, if a fast driver (with a similar car) is drifting flat-out through a particular turn that you always lift for, you are probably misinterpreting your sensory input from that turn as threatening (which causes you to slow down) when in fact you could be going through the turn faster.

NOTE: In the above example you wouldn’t try and immediately go flat-out the next time you drive through that turn (for the reasons stated earlier about target fixation). First, you would intellectually understand that going flat-out should not be a threat, and then you would start working towards making that a reality for yourself by making reasonable, incremental changes to your driving.

In addition to modeling fast drivers, you can also determine what should and should not be threatening by simply paying attention to what you are doing (and the results you produce) when you drive. This is one of those tasks that Intellect is free to do when you are driving intuitively; in the Zone. I believe that if you have a basic understanding of the tasks and objectives of racing, then your experience contains hidden within it the lessons you need to learn to improve. The challenge is recognizing, extracting, and implementing the lessons.

Adding a random experience

This method is useful when you have an unexpected experience that you want to add to your pattern recognition template. For example, you are trying to make a pass in a race, and you get into a turn “too hot”, but (after jumping out of the zone and scaring yourself) you make it through OK. You now know that it’s possible to go through the turn faster than you have been. However , even though you ‘know’ something, that does not necessarily mean that you can ‘do’ it; you still may not be able to make yourself go faster. Even if you force yourself to do it, you probably won’t be able to stay in the Zone while doing it, so that’s a risky move. However, using imagery training, you can replay the initial experience enough times that your RAS and Intellect will come to recognize it as normal. Then you will have programmed your RAS and Intellect to let you intuitively drive through the turn at the new, faster, pace, while still staying in the Zone.

Preparing to modify your pattern recognition template

Because racing is dangerous, it is very hard to make any significant changes when you are driving. That is, unless you are an expert driver (with a great deal of track time/experience), you will not have a diverse enough pattern recognition template to allow you to change the way you drive while you are driving. Instead, you will probably have to come off the track, evaluate your performance, and then decide what to change.

Unfortunately, even though you may have come off the track and “intellectually” determined the changes to your driving that you can make to go faster, there is no guarantee that you will actually be able to implement those changes. If you just think about what to change, then it is likely that as soon as you go back on the track, your RAS and Intellect will automatically go back to doing exactly what they had been doing before, because they know it works, and most importantly, they know it’s safe. Therefore, the best way to change the way you drive is to actually drive the way you want to using imagery training before you go back on the track.

Using imagery to change your driving works because, as I’ve said before, your RAS and brain cannot tell the difference between what you vividly imagine and what you actually experience. Therefore, to make a change, you simply need to guess what it will feel like (with all the appropriate senses) to drive the way you want to, and then use imagery to program yourself with those sensations. The next time you go back on the track, making the changes you rehearsed will be much easier, because your RAS and brain will already be familiar with them, so they will not fear/resist the change as much.

You may be wondering, “What if my imagery ‘guess’ is not exactly right”? That should not be a problem because you should be making incremental changes to your driving (which I highly recommend), so even being slightly wrong about your “guess” should not cause a big enough mismatch to create “target fixation”. After you have driven using your ‘guess’, you can then complete the change/improvement in your driving by using the actual experience you gained on the track to fine-tune or overwrite your guess.