If I have a mission in life, beyond my family, it is to get everybody on the planet to understand the difference between the two types of memory in the human brain, and why that difference is so important to every aspect of human endeavor.

So far, I have been a complete and utter failure at my mission.

It's not that people disagree with me. Nobody disagrees with me because, well, face it, I'm right about this. It's more like those movies where a kid discovers there's an alien in the backyard, and goes in to tell mom, and says "Hey mom there's an alien in the backyard!" and mom, who is on the phone and not really paying attention says, "That's nice, dear" and goes back to talking on the phone.

Part of the problem is that here is no standard nomenclature for these two types of memory. Every endeavor is affected by this issue, but every endeavor gives it a different name, so you can't really see that the problem Matt Olson is having with his batting slump is the exact same problem as, say, a guy trying to convince people with an essay that there's an alien in his backyard.

Neuroscientists call it "nondeclarative and declarative memory", behavioral economists call it "System 1 and System 2", psychologists call it "the subconscious and the conscious", philosophers call it "passions and reason", but nobody seems to realize that when baseball players talk about "zoning in" and "pressing", that's the same thing, too. They're all talking about the architecture of the brain.

Matt Olson was in a slump. He hit a walkoff homer in the first game of the season, but had done not much of anything since. So yesterday, he decided to grow a mustache, to see if that could change his luck.

And ha ha ha, what do you know, he hit two home runs in his first game with the mustache, and the A's won the game 6-4. Ha ha ha, now he has to keep it, because ha ha ha, the mustache worked and made him hit those homers. Ha ha ha.

Why are you laughing? Because we know correlation is not causation, and we know the mustache did not really make him hit those homers?

Stop laughing. I'm going to argue, seriously, that the mustache did make him hit those home runs.

The System 1/nondeclarative/subconscious/passion/zoning system of the brain is primarily built for two things: pattern recognition and muscle memory. This is different from the System 2/declarative/conscious/reason/pressing system of the brain, which is built to slowly and consciously work through problems that are too difficult to solve with pattern recognition and muscle memory alone.

Hitting a baseball is not too difficult to problem to solve with pattern recognition and muscle memory alone. In fact, just the opposite: a baseball comes at you too fast for you to be able to use any sort of rational process to figure out what to do. You have mere fractions of a second to recognize a pitch, and then swing (or not swing) at it. If you try to insert rational thought into the problem of trying to hit a baseball while it's on its way towards you, you're going to react too late to hit the ball.

By the time a player reaches the Major Leagues, he has trained his pattern recognition and muscle memory brain cells to an extremely fine degree. Those brain cells know exactly what to do.

The problem here is that those brain cells are subconscious. You cannot directly and deliberately control them. They function automatically. They learn automatically. If you want to manipulate those brain cells, you can't just decide to change them. You have to trick them into changing, with practice and repetition.

It's a very very very common mistake, however, to try to decide to change them. A small run of failures, and a player can start consciously second-guessing what they're doing. They start trying to do something their brain is not trained for, like a home run hitter trying just to hit a single, or a singles hitter trying to hit a home run, or a pull hitter trying to go the other way, or a slap hitter trying to hit the ball in the air, or a guy who is normally patient at the plate waiting for a good pitch decides to start trying to hit everything.

It's so common, that baseball players have a word for it: pressing. "I'm pressing," they say.

"Pressing" is trying to insert a System 2/declarative/conscious function into a normally fully System 1/nondeclarative/subconscious process. You've been failing a bit, so you try to consciously figure out why you've been failing. This can often make things worse instead of better.

If you start pressing, if you start inserting conscious thought into what should be a subconscious process, it's a really good idea to give your conscious thought a distraction. You want a distraction that gives your System 2/declarative/conscious brain process something to think about that is completely unrelated to the subconscious process, If your conscious system is working on something unrelated to the subconscious process, then the System 1/nondeclarative/subconscious process can just go back to doing what it does best, without the unnecessary and unhelpful meddling from the conscious mind.

If Matt Olson goes to the plate thinking "I'm in a slump, I really need to get a hit here, how do I get a hit?", then the System 1/nondeclarative/subconscious brain system isn't free to do the thing it's been trained to do best, to just "see ball, hit ball"

And so, a mustache.

If Matt Olson goes to the plate, and his conscious thought process is, "I'm at the plate wearing a mustache, I've never worn a mustache at the plate before", that may be on the surface a ridiculous thing to thinking about there, but it also may be just what he needs. His upper lip is not involved in the swing mechanism. If his conscious mind is busy interfering with his upper lip mechanics, then it's not interfering with the processes of pitch recognition and swing mechanics.

And boom, two home runs in one game. GIVE 'EM THE STACHE, THE STACHE, THE STACHE!