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Welcome to my monthly Science Digest.
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This month we're going deep on what allows for teams to work well together, the fascinating science of altering your perspective, how focus alters our ability to take actions, and much more.

As always, these monthly digest pull from the most interesting research I've come across and are designed to keep you informed, and provide some actionable insight.

-Steve

If you haven't checked out my latest book WIN THE INSIDE GAME, it's 20% off for 4th of July! Grab a copy. If you enjoy this newsletter, you'll love the book. It takes you through my journey as a whistleblower and failed prodigy, and shows you how to develop a robust and resilient sense of self.

-Steve​

P.S. I joined Substack. If you'd like to go deep with some articles, check it out. I just released an article on Faith Kipyegon's sub-4 minute mile attempt and one on The Debate Over Easy vs. High-Intensity Training is a Waste of Time.​

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​The Science of Zooming Out and Changing Your Perspective​

What they found: We often think about communication as a simple choice: am I seeing this from my perspective, or from yours? But the reality, as laid out in this paper is that it's a far more dynamic and adaptive process. The authors argue that our brain acts like a complex system, constantly integrating a whole host of cues in real-time to guide our behavior. These cues range from subtle things like matching a partner's body sway or speech rate to high-level information like our beliefs about what they know or can see. This framework explains the apparent inconsistencies in research; we don't have a rigid "default" for being egocentric or other-centric. Instead, our response is a fluid outcome determined by the environment, our past experiences, and the specific needs of the moment all coming together at once.

Actionable Insights:

1. Performance is an Adaptive Dance, Not a Rigid Script. The paper's central theme is that intelligent behavior emerges from the dynamic interplay of countless real-time cues, not a pre-programmed plan. In high-stakes competition, the best performers aren't just executing a static strategy; they are in a constant, adaptive dance with their opponents and the environment. They remain sensitive to subtle cues—a shift in a defender's weight, a change in an opponent's breathing, and continuously integrate them to adjust their actions on the fly.
2. Your "Default" is Determined by Context. The research argues against a single egocentric ("my way") or other-centric ("their way") default, showing instead that our behavior is shaped by the convergence of cues in a specific situation. Under stress, it's easy to become rigid and locked into one perspective (often a narrow, self-focused one). This paper shows that elite performance requires the flexibility to shift based on the context. Recognizing which cues matter—from a coach, a teammate, or the competition—allows for a more adaptive response instead of getting stuck.
3. Small Cues Can Cause Big Shifts in Outcomes. The computational models in the paper demonstrate how a tiny change in a single input—like activating a belief that a partner "cannot see"—can completely flip the system's outcome from an egocentric to an other-centric response. For any performer, this highlights the immense power of small triggers or "fluctuations". A single word of encouragement, a specific belief about an opponent's weakness, or a flash of self-doubt can be the small input that radically alters the entire dynamic of performance, for better or for worse.

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​How Our Focus Impacts Our Performance ​

What they found: This paper presents a detailed overview of how tracking eye movements provides a powerful, real-time window into human cognitive processes. The authors argue that eye movements, which occur 3-4 times per second, are not random but are tightly linked to an individual's goals, memories, and expectations. They are a semi-continuous and non-intrusive measure that reveals the ongoing process of thinking, not just the final result. The research demonstrates that even for internal mental tasks like remembering or imagining, people's eyes move in patterns similar to how they would if they were actually perceiving the information in the physical world³. This reveals that humans often use the external environment as a form of external memory or a canvas for their thoughts, a process the paper terms "spatial indexing". Ultimately, the paper establishes eye-tracking as a key methodology for understanding the deep integration of perception, action, and higher-level cognition, including language and problem-solving.

Actionable Insights:

• The research shows that in complex tasks, people naturally use their eyes to reduce their mental workload. In a block-copying task, instead of memorizing the color and location of a block at once, participants made separate eye movements for each piece of information—one to check the color, and another later to re-check its correct placement. This "just-in-time" information gathering reveals a strategy to minimize the use of working memory. For performance under pressure, this implies that a crucial skill is not just having a powerful internal memory, but being efficient at using the environment as an "external hard drive". Under stress, cognitive resources are limited; an expert performer may instinctively use their gaze to "look up" necessary information from their surroundings as it's needed, keeping their mind free to focus on execution.
• Eye movements and attention are shown to be so closely coupled that they utilize overlapping neural systems. Planning to move the eyes to a location improves mental processing of that location, even if the eyes don't actually move. Furthermore, when people listened to stories describing dynamic scenes (e.g., something moving up a building), their eyes spontaneously moved in the corresponding direction, even while looking at a blank screen. This suggests that "focus" is an embodied activity. For an athlete or performer, this means that directing one's gaze is a powerful tool to direct thought and mental simulation. Under pressure, the instruction to "focus" can be made concrete: anchor your gaze on the relevant targets in the environment. This physical act can help stabilize the corresponding mental process and prevent the mind from wandering under stress.
• Pressure Reveals the "Hidden" Competition in Our Minds. Eye tracking reveals the subtle, momentary competition between different options that the brain considers before making a decision. For example, when told to "pick up the candy," a participant's eyes might briefly flick to a nearby candle, revealing a fleeting moment of cognitive competition between the two similar-sounding words. This competition is often unconscious and occurs even when the final action is quick and correct16. For performance under pressure, this is critical. Stress doesn't just cause catastrophic errors; it can slow down the process of resolving this internal competition. An increase in fixations on irrelevant objects or distractors could be a direct measure of indecision and processing difficulty caused by stress. The difference between a good and a great performance under pressure may lie in the brain's efficiency at resolving these "hidden" competitions and selecting the correct action without getting stuck on distracting alternatives.

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​How we think about the past, present, and future.​

What they found: This study investigates how our thoughts change in structure when we reflect on the past, present, or future. Using a machine-learning method to analyze "streams-of-consciousness" essays written by students during the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers measured "convergence-entropy"—a metric for how much a person's language drifts from one topic to another. They theorized that psychologically distant events (like the far future) are viewed more abstractly than closer events (like the present). The key finding is that future-oriented thoughts showed a more exploratory and abstract style of thinking.

• A Future-Oriented Mindset is Naturally More Exploratory. The research found that when participants thought about the post-pandemic future, their thoughts became more wide-ranging and less constrained, exhibiting greater "semantic drift." This suggests that our natural mode for contemplating the future is abstract and exploratory. For a performer or athlete, this means that while preparing for a future competition, forcing an overly rigid or narrow focus might be counterproductive. The mind works best when it has the freedom to explore possibilities and outcomes. This finding supports a preparation strategy that balances specific goals with the flexibility to adapt and think creatively about future challenges.
• Our Present State is the Launchpad for Our Future Outlook. The study revealed a powerful priming effect: participants who first wrote about their present situation before thinking about the future showed significantly more exploratory thinking than those who were first primed by the past8. This highlights that our immediate mindset heavily influences how we approach what's next. For a performer, this is a crucial insight into pre-performance routines. Cultivating a focused and stable present-moment awareness is not just about managing current stress; it actively primes the brain for more effective and expansive thinking about the upcoming performance.
• Rumination Under Stress is an Unsettled, Wandering Mind. Counterintuitively, the study found that individuals with higher levels of rumination—a state typically associated with getting stuck on repetitive thoughts—showed more semantic drift, not less. This reframes how we should view rumination under pressure. It's not a single, stuck thought loop, but rather a mind that is erratically and uncontrollably jumping between related topics. For a coach or performer, this means the antidote to rumination isn't just to "change the thought," but to engage in practices that reduce the overall drift and stabilize the mind, encouraging a "semantic trapping" on a single, productive focus point.

​Cooperation on Teams: Not Just in Sync, but in Rhythm​

What they found: The authors hypothesize that successful cooperation is not just about moment-to-moment synchronization, but about partners matching the overall rhythm and temporal structure of their behaviors across multiple timescales. In the experiment, pairs of participants collaborated on a task to build the tallest tower possible using only spaghetti and marshmallows, with task rules that required cooperation. The key finding was that teams who built taller towers showed greater complexity matching in their patterns of vocalization, meaning their conversational rhythms were more similar across short, medium, and long timescales. This relationship between vocal complexity matching and performance was independent of, and a better predictor than, simple behavioral synchrony (like talking at the same time).

Actionable Insights:

• Team Rhythm Trumps Simple Synchrony. The most successful teams in the tower-building task were not those who simply mirrored each other's actions in the moment. Instead, success was predicted by a deeper alignment in the multiscale "rhythm" of their vocal communication. This suggests that for high-performing teams, getting on the same "wavelength" is more important than simple mimicry. Forcing moment-to-moment synchrony may be less effective than fostering a shared operational tempo and cadence in how the team communicates and acts over the entire course of a performance. The study showed that in-the-moment vocal matching did not predict performance, but matching the underlying complexity did.
• Verbal Communication Is the Engine of Physical Synergy. A crucial finding was that complexity matching in vocalizations was strongly linked to better performance, whereas complexity matching in movements was not. The authors suggest this is because vocal interaction is the primary medium for exchanging information, establishing common ground, and forming plans, while the physical movements are the downstream result of that communication. For any team under pressure, this highlights that physical coordination doesn't just happen; it is built on a foundation of effective verbal communication. When a team's physical synergy breaks down, the root cause may be a failure to first establish a shared communicative rhythm.
• A Shared Rhythm Is a Sign of an Adaptable Team. The paper proposes that complexity matching is a hallmark of an optimized system for information exchange between partners. Based on this, the authors hypothesize that a dyad with a higher degree of complexity matching should be more flexible and able to adapt faster when faced with a sudden change in the task or goal. This provides a new lens for understanding team resilience. A team that has developed this deeper communicative rhythm isn't just efficient in its current task; it has built a more robust and flexible interpersonal system that is better equipped to handle unexpected challenges and perturbations, which is the essence of performing well under pressure.

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​How Yesterday's Performance Impacts Today's​

What They Found: By analyzing millions of online reviews from Yelp and Amazon, the researchers found that an individual's rating for a given experience is systematically biased by their immediately preceding ratings. Specifically, they found a consistent contrast effect: a current rating tends to be pushed away from a previous rating. For example, after giving a very low (1-star) review, a user's next review was likely to be higher than their personal average; after a very high (5-star) review, the next was likely to be lower. This bias was strongest for the most recent prior review and decayed over several subsequent reviews. The research demonstrates that even when we believe we are making an absolute judgment, our decisions are contaminated by the context of recent prior experiences.

Actionable Insights:

• Your Brain Automatically Contrasts Today's Performance With Yesterday's. The study's core finding is that our judgments are subject to a contrast effect from recent experiences5. For a performer, this means that after a particularly bad game (a "1-star" performance), you are cognitively biased to judge your next outing more favorably than it may objectively warrant. Conversely, after a career-best performance (a "5-star" day), you are likely to be overly critical of your next solid-but-not-perfect performance. This isn't a failure of character; it's a fundamental feature of how our brain makes relative judgments. Awareness of this bias is the first step to counteracting it and achieving more objective self-evaluation.
• The "Last Play" Has an Outsized Impact on Your Current Mindset. The contrast effect was found to be strongest from the immediately preceding event and to decay over time. This is a real-world demonstration of a powerful recency bias. For an athlete, the last play, the last shot, or the last race will have the most significant and unconscious influence on their assessment of the present moment. This highlights the critical importance of developing mental routines to "reset" or "clear the mechanism." The goal is to consciously break the chain of sequential dependency, allowing the performer to treat each new moment as a distinct event rather than as an involuntary reaction to what just happened.
• Your Brain is a Comparison Machine, Not a Recording Device. The authors state that humans are "surprisingly bad at rating the absolute magnitude of their internal cognitive states" because our judgments are "inherently contaminated by relative information". This is a profound insight for anyone striving for consistency. A performer's feeling about their current state is not an objective, absolute measure; it is a comparison to their recent past. Instead of fighting this, a savvy performer can learn to work with this cognitive tendency. By consciously managing the "context" of evaluation—for instance, by deliberately recalling a time you overcame a similar challenge—you can influence the relative comparison your brain is making, thereby shifting your perception and confidence in the present moment.

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Thanks so much for taking the time to read my random musings on the latest science and research. Expect more of the same every month.

And as a reminder, don't forget to order WIN THE INSIDE GAME! It's 20% off!

Order the book today: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org​

All the best,

​Steve​

Keep the conversation going! Did you know I recently upped my Instagram game. I've gone from 70k followers to 150k in the past 4 months because I've dedicated myself to doing a deep dive on a new performance topic every day on the platform. Check it out.​
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