Does AI understand meditation and the role of the quiet mind in peak performance? The short answer is “Not really”, as a recent exchange between one of my golf students (Pat. B from Las Vegas) and ChatGPT recently demonstrated.
To kick us off with a mini-series about this topic, here’s how the ‘conversation’ opened and my take on it based as always on many long years of formal meditation practice.
Pat: As you know, I am fascinated by how athletes interfere with their own performance, which has been a personal challenge of mine for a very long time – and eventually led me to you. I also went to ChatGPT to see what it would reveal on the topic with some targeted questions. The most fascinating part was the explanation of how thoughts work and the benefits of using breathing as an attentional anchor.
ChatGPT: Breath meditation does not shut down the Pre Frontal Cortex. It changes attentional hierarchy. You are training attentional flexibility. Thoughts still arise but they no longer hijack execution.
Pat: I’ve really noticed this in my own game. With my mediation practice, it’s much easier to not attach to the negative thoughts, when they do arise, which is much less frequently.
My comment: While much of the explanation given by ChatGPT is a fair summation, the biggest issue for me is one of consciousness – or rather the lack of it; just because AI can regurgitate the information that’s been programmed into it (and this is for the most part based on psychological rather than spiritual frameworks) it doesn’t mean that it has any experience or insight into what’s being asked.
Chat GPT does not breathe; it has no experience with meditation; it has not learned to QUIET the mind. Many people with a meditation practice will confirm that over time thoughts actually cease altogether when the consciousness raises from one of attention (single-pointed focus) to awareness – a state in which we are more awake simultaneously to ourselves and our breathing and the movement of the clubhead or tennis racket in space while executing the shot. It is not an either/or scenario but a movement into the higher intuitive faculty which comes as the thoughts quieten down.
This of course echoes the flow-state which we all experience in those moments when the body moves as a whole unit, naturally with grace and power. It’s also experienced as breakthrough of insight and revelation helping business leaders be more present and less reactive and find solutions to problems that confound logic and critical thinking; and it enables teams to share, understand and course correct with greater trust.
But as the quiet mind is not our current default state, it’s something all of us have to work on.
So, the second issue is the assumption that following the breath happens without the need to build up a daily practice, as if you can pull this skill from your kit bag each time you walk out to the course or onto the court. In a coaching session with a student in the Netherlands last week, we discussed the biggest mistake most people make in trying to apply breath work is that they only do this in competition or when under pressure and end up having more things to think about, thus reducing a centuries-old practice to a trite mental game tip. This is not only inefficient but counterproductive and I’ve seen many world-class athletes, business leaders and executives make this same mistake to the detriment of their performance.
