Overthinking

Deliberate analysis can degrade performance in domains where deep expertise has automated the process. Thinking too hard about what you know how to do makes you do it worse.

• Expert wine tasters given words to describe the wine during tasting perform significantly worse than those who simply taste in silence.
• A basketball player who consciously thinks through each movement during a free throw shoots worse than when acting from trained muscle memory.
• Experienced drivers who narrate their actions aloud make more errors than those who drive silently — expertise is stored below the level of verbal description.