A ground breaking study of why we choke under pressure and what we can do to ensure we perform at our best.

In the tradition of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, popular psychologist Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, reveals the astonishing new science of why we choke under pressure. She explains what happens in the body and mind when everything clicks and the perfect golf swing, tricky mathematical problem, or high-pressure business pitch suddenly become easy.

With surprising insights on every page, Beilock examines how: attention and working memory guide human performance; how experience and practice, innate factors, and brain development interact to create our abilities;how these interconnected elements react to stress - explaining counterintuitive realities, like why the cleverest students do worst on standardized tests; why we may learn foreign languages best when we're not paying attention; why early childhood athletic training can backfire; and how our emotions can make us both smarter and dumber.the mind and body are in even closer communication than was ever thought - and breaks new ground on top of 30 years of integrative health investigations.