The amazing computer inside you.

By Bert van Manen

You are driving along on this two-lane road, and eighty yards in front of you is a truck, going a bit slower than you are. Coming at you in the other lane, a few hundred yards away still, is another car. Overtake the truck, or not?

There’s a scientific, precise and very BAD way to tackle this problem: You calculate your speed, the speed of the truck, the remaining distance between you and the truck, the speed of the approaching car, the remaining distance between you and the approaching car, and your car’s capacity to accelerate. You can – if you are much smarter than I am – put those in a formula that will tell you if you can overtake.

There is also an amateurish, improvised and very, very GOOD approach: You take a quick look and make a gut decision. The fact that method One takes so much time makes it useless in traffic, of course. But suppose you had all the time in the world: would the scientific results be very different from those produced by method Two? You’re reading this, aren’t you? That means you’ve gotten it right, every single time (so far!).

Yes, this column is about 3-cushion billiards. I am trying to establish the fact, that our brains are extremely capable of guessing, even in split seconds. The main reason is, that we do it with the most intelligent part of our right side brain half, where spatial awareness resides and where not the detail, but the big picture is seen: the holistic view. This section is by far the fastest part of the computer between our ears. We recognize faces with it. We catch a frisbee with it. And we can make good use of it when playing billiards, the same way we do when we are on the road.

You look at a position, and think:

-"I can’t get this ball long enough, not even with maximum english, deep into the corner”.

-"If I play three rails here, I’ll be long. If I play 5 rails, I’ll be short.”

-"Thinner? Thicker? I keep seeing a kiss.”

If in the first three seconds, this is what the little voice inside your head is telling you, it’s probably true. You should listen. You get that warning for a reason. The fact that you have not yet analyzed the situation, that this was your "first idea”, does not make your observation LESS valuable. It makes it MORE valuable. Remember, this is your supercomputer speaking, the one you trust with life-and-death decisions at 70 miles an hour. Don’t argue with that guy, he is smarter than you. Took me a few decades to figure that out.

Here’s what I have done a gazillion times in the past 30 years: play the shot anyway, HOPING I WAS WRONG about that kiss.

… BANG! Foot in mouth. Egg on face. Time and time again.

I realise that, when confronted with the exact position, Semih Sayginer MAY be able to make that ball go long enough, Marco Zanetti MAY be able to manoeuvre it so it misses the kiss by a hair. But we are not trying to become F1-drivers or Nazcar heroes here. We just want to get from A to B in safety, and up our average a bit, right?

Back to the supercomputer in the right half of our brain. It’s breathtakingly good at producing instant conclusions that are close to the truth, but it needs data, lots of data. The novice 3-cushion player has a lot in common with the 18-year old driver, who tends to be overly cautious or reckless. The billiard brain needs to be filled with tens of thousands of mini-movies, of our past caroms. Don’t worry about memory space, you’ll never be able to fill up THAT harddrive. More good news: caroms missed are almost as useful as caroms made. When looking at a picture, we are able to say: "That’s John F. Kennedy.” Which is not too difficult, and it’s roughly comparable to: "I know how to make this shot." We dive into our databank, and compare caroms made. If we have a little more time, we can even look at a picture and say: "I don’t know this person”. Now THAT is really impressive. Our amazing brain has just played all the mini-movies of all the faces we know (in seconds!), compared eyes, mouths, noses and ears, and found no match. In much the same way, we can let our brain look back at all the times we have tried to create a line when faced with a similar problem on the billiard table. All those misses from the past can help guide us through the minefields.

But here’s the bad news: our best brain section may potentially be Stephen Hawking, we are often Beavis & Butthead. "This has never ever, ever worked. Let me try it again.” Our major flaw is that we repeat mistakes. Over and over.

I don’t look down on the hard work billiard players do with their hands. Perfecting your stance and stroke, practicing standard shots for hours: that will feed your ability to repeat your hits. Make similar points more often, increase your percentages. It will get you off the floor, you will be able to walk.

But the real game is played inside your head, the body is just a tool. Poor execution of good decisions will at least get you on track, perfect execution of poor decisions will get you nowhere. If you listen to the "little voice”, if you let it teach you to NOT repeat your mistakes, but adjust, explore, invent instead: you will be able to run, jump and dance.