I used to blank out when someone asked me something out of the blue
If you've ever had experiences like
My mind goes blank when I'm put on the spot
I can't talk when there's pressure
I can't come back with an answer right then and there
it's easy to start thinking,
I'm just not good at thinking on my feet.
But
the ability to think on the spot
and
being able to use that ability in a setting where you're being judged or pressured
are not the same thing.
Pressure can lower thinking performance
Psychology has a field of research called choking under pressure.
It's the phenomenon where your performance drops below what you're normally capable of when the stakes feel high.
Research by Gimmig and colleagues reported that performance pressure can lower scores on tasks that call for fluid intelligence (the ability to solve new problems without relying on prior knowledge).[11]
Review studies also say that psychological pressure can affect several thinking processes at once, including attention, memory, and decision-making.[12]
So from the observation that
I couldn't find words in a high-pressure situation
you can't conclude that
my ability to think on my feet is low in itself.
If you can handle new information in real time now, that's important counter-evidence
Right now, you can do this in real time:
Look at a document you've never seen
↓
Grasp the big picture
↓
Sum it up as "three main steps"
↓
Talk in a way that fits the other person
↓
Change your explanation depending on their questions
That's hard to imagine coming from someone with no ability to improvise at all.
Instead, a different hypothesis comes up:
it wasn't that the ability was missing
but rather
the conditions under which you could use it were limited.
Experience may have taken care of the "prep before thinking" for you
Another possibility is simply that you've become skilled.
In the past, when a question came out of nowhere, you had to start with
What should I look at?
Where do I begin?
What's the important part?
Now, a checklist like this runs half-automatically:
What's the goal?
Who makes the decision?
What goes in?
What comes out?
What's the basic flow?
What are the exceptions?
In other words, you no longer need to go looking for a way of thinking after the question arrives.
Your way of thinking is already up and running.
That's why words come out on the spot.
"Suddenly I can do it" may be the feeling of crossing a threshold of accumulated practice
Skills don't always grow in a way you can feel, like
I improved by 1 today
I improved by 1 tomorrow
For a while you notice no change.
Then one day,
Huh, I can just do this
and it happens.
In this case, all of these have been piling up:
- hands-on work experience
- experience teaching others
- asking "what is this?" over and over
- asking "why?" over and over
- bouncing ideas off an AI
- checking against research
- comparing similar cases
They may all be working together at once.
So rather than saying
I suddenly woke up thanks to AI,
it's more cautious to see it this way:
long-accumulated experience got organized through repeated questioning, and recently reached the point where I can pull it out in real time.
