Things to think about – Golf, lap dancers, sexual attractiveness and your mental sweet spot.

We all know – or have heard about – what it means to be in the flow, the mental state in which you are fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, fully involved in the process. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, often resulting in a transformation of one’s sense of time. And for golfers, when it happens, that’s when you swing without thinking of techniques, you just let go.

A mental state of mind, that will only happen if you are able to turn off your brain and let your training (or instinct, or unconsciousness) take over.

To do that, brain science tells us that you have to slow down the activities in the front cortex of your brain. The blue and yellow part of the brain, illustrated below. When you do that you let go of your consciousness and let the unconscious take over. I’m calling that state being in “your mental sweet spot”.

Now, let me give you some examples of what can happen, when you think or believe you are making conscious decision, when in reality it is your instinct/the unconscious that is taking over.

A group of men was asked to look at a number of photos of women and rate them on a scale from 1 to 10 in according to how attractive they found them. What they didn’t knew was that half of the photos were manipulated so that the women’s pupils were artificial dilated. And yes, these women were rated a lot higher by all the men than the photos of women whose eyes had not been manipulated.

None of the men noted anything about the women’s pupil sizes and presumably none of them knew that dilated eyes are a biological sign of female arousal – but their brain knew it!

Another survey. This one is about the attraction of lap dancers in a strip club. The key here is that lap dancers are getting money (tips) from the males that they are, let’s say, focusing their dance on.

You will think that the most attractive and sexual challenging dancers are the women that are given the most money. But not. Geoffrey Miller, the scientist behind this study, tracked how the money earned by the lap dancers changes over the their monthly menstruation cycle. As it turned out, men gave twice as much in tips when the dancer was in her fertile period as when she was in her menstruating period.

What the men didn’t know about the women’s monthly cycle is the fact that in the fertile period women are sending a surge of the hormone estrogen. A hormone that are unconsciously detected by men and is arousing men’s sexual instinct. They didn’t know, but their brain did.

Now it’s not a lot different with women. Here is the result of another study. 10 women in their fertile age was presented with 10 look alike vests which the men had been wearing before the experiment.

Now after this “test” the scientist made an DNA profile of all the participants and compared the women’s DNA profile with the men’s DNA profile and correlated the similarity/differences between the profiles.

Conclusion. First: women are “instinctively” more critical in choosing a sex partner if she is in the fertile period than if not. Second: women in the fertile period are rating men with an DNA profile that differ the most from their own, the highest. That is; if women are following their instinct they tend to choose to mate with a man with a DNA profile that differ the most from their own. Which will result in genetically stronger children. Think about it; that’s why you are not marrying a sister, brother or cousin.

Now my dear friends; it is time to think of the concept of free will and conscious choices. And most important: who is in control of your golf swing?

Any comments, questions and suggestions are welcome!