Everyone says that playing pool is mostly mental.

But let's call a spade a spade: Most of what passes for advice on the mental game is simply wrong.

I started playing pool seriously in middle age, after I had become a psychotherapist and writer on psychology. (My dad was a Baptist minister, and pool was not well regarded in our house when I was a kid.) Once I had gotten some sense of the mechanics of the game, I was, of course, interested in the mental dimension. To my surprise, I discovered that the available advice violated so much of what psychology knows about the mind that I could not take it seriously. I began trying to figure the mental game out for myself. Pleasures of Small Motions is the result.

Conventional wisdom on the mental game seems to be a mishmash of macho posturing, flaky metaphysics, and hodgepodge derivatives of pop psychology. At its best, the conventional wisdom reflects rough-and-ready lessons of experience. Even at its best, it isn't very good. Lessons of experience are often wrong.

In life and in pool, mere experience is useless. Experience alone is just "stuff that happened." Learning from experience requires an active process, and we have to know how to conduct it. We often conduct the process badly, in life and in pool.

Think of some of the things (outside pool) that our experience seems to teach us: The sun moves across the sky, the Earth is flat, and objects in motion tend to come to rest. Every single one of those "truths" of experience is false.

Notions people have "learned" from experience tend to be hard to dislodge, because people can point at experiences that seem to confirm the belief. After all, it certainly looks as if the sun moves across the sky.

Much conventional wisdom about the mental game of pool is about as accurate as this sun-moving-across-the-sky belief. Too many people claim to have "learned from experience" notions that are just plain false. That's a bad thing, because it limits our capacity to improve.

Underline this point: "Lessons of experience" that are actually false limit our ability to improve. They close off good thinking, and they lead us to ignore all sorts of things that could help us.

To revert to our analogy: It may seem that people were not harmed by believing that the sun moves across the sky. But this belief blocked humanity from learning many important things?making sense of the seasons, the tides, and the weather, for instance. Furthermore, it stopped people from even thinking about all sorts of possibilities inconsistent with the sun moving across the sky. Had we not figured out how the solar system actually works, space travel and satellite communications would have remained inconceivable.

Similarly, many of the "truths of experience" about the mental game of billiards preclude learning how minds really work in this game. This means that conventional wisdom seriously limits improvement. Our understanding of the mental game is like medieval peasants' understanding of the solar system.

Let me give you two examples.

First, I recently heard a very famous commentator say: "She needs to forget it's hill-hill and just play like she would on the practice table at home." You've heard advice like this a thousand times. Unfortunately, scientific research shows that people perform better under competition than at practice.

This advice is based on the common experience of people folding under competitive pressure. The cause is not competition, however, and the solution is not to forget that you are in a tense competitive situation.

In fact, learning to concentrate on the competitive situation will sharpen your game. The key is knowing how to think about competition. Teaching people to forget that they are competing will never help them learn how to think about competition.

Here's another example. The author of a book on the mental game asks a series of questions about concentration. The answer to all the questions, he says, is to concentrate on "the contact point on the object ball." Most pool instructors say the same thing. This is based on the common experience that you must have a conscious awareness of the precise point of aim to play well.

But your body has no control over the object ball; your mind can only influence what your body can control. If you're concentrating on something you can't even touch, you're probably ignoring what you can control.

Certainly you must be aware of the point of aim; but as we shall see, awareness and concentration are not the same thing. Concentrating on the object ball will cause you to fail to pay attention to most of what you should be thinking about.

False beliefs, drawn from experience, bind our minds. As long as we hold to the perspective they give us, we will never see how things really are. If, however, we step back and start over, we can gain a different perspective that holds more promise. Thus, this book begins with fundamental questions: Why are we able to play pool at all? Why do we care? How do our minds work to enable us to play, and to learn to play better? What really happens during competition?

Notice that I don't start with the question, "How do I win?" Or "How do I play my best?" Until we understand the fundamentals of how we play at all, we will only get ourselves on the wrong track by asking these questions. We can develop tricks and rules of thumb, but these just serve to blind us to our ignorance.

Pleasures of Small Motions explains why most of the "lessons of experience" seem to be true, though they are not. I don't simply say, forget about them." I show the sound principles that let you extract whatever small truth conventional wisdom contains while placing it in a broader, better-founded context. You will also find here an account of ^{1ow a well-functioning mind works in pool, as best I can understand it.}

I don't offer any gimmicks or tricks, which seem to be the stock-in-trade of many advisers on the mental game. Most gimmicks amount to sophisticated superstitions; they give you the illusion of control, without having any direct effect. At best, gimmicks just jury-rig the mind. I am not interested in helping you apply bailing wire and toothpicks to hold together bad mental processes. I am interested in explicating sound, normal processes as they apply to pool. In my fourteen years as a psychotherapist, I became convinced that gimmicks don't really work consistently, over the long haul, but developing a sound mind does. I bring this principle with me to understanding pool psychology.

The understanding I've developed, which I share with you in this book, is based on the best of recent work on neuroscience, cognitive science, and a wide variety of traditions in clinical psychology. Where work directly in sports psychology is consistent with scientific psychology and clinical wisdom, I have used it. I believe that basic science, however, and careful extrapolations from it, are the best way to understand anything. Where shibboleths and talismans of sports psychology make little scientific sense, I have left them out of this account.

Pleasures of Small Motions is the first book in what I believe will be a new wave of scientifically sound thinking about the game. I have written this book for those who want their thinking about the mental game to be derived from sound understanding of how minds work.

I am asking you to change your entire perspective: to stop believing that the sun moves across the sky and that the Earth is the center of the universe, to begin thinking of the world in a whole new way. I believe this is the path of progress. If pool is, indeed, mostly mental, why not begin to think about the mental game in ways that make good scientific sense, that start by addressing fundamental questions?

Learning from experience requires both sound hypotheses and further testing. You should never accept any idea, including mine, simply because it "makes sense." It must be tested against additional scientific knowledge and the breadth of your further experience. I hope that as you master the principles in this book and test them in your own experience, you will find them helpful. Better yet, I hope the process of learning and testing these principles stimulates other people to develop even better, more comprehensive principles.