Quiet cortex

Several years ago, Matthew Smith and Craig Chamberlain of the University of Northern Colorado examined the connection between the quieting of the cortex and athletic ability. They had expert and unskilled soccer players dribble a ball through a slalom course of cones. At the same time, the players had to keep an eye on a projector screen on the wall to see when a particular shape appeared. Even with the second task, the seasoned soccer players could dribble at nearly full speed; while the unskilled players did much worse than when they were undistracted. The disparity suggests that dribbling did not tax an expert player’s prefrontal cortex as heavily, leaving it free to deal with other challenges.

Training increases brain efficiently

As the brains of athletes become more efficient, they learn how to make sense of new situations sooner. For example, in cricket, a bowler can hurl a ball at 100 miles an hour, giving batsmen a mere half second to calculate its path. In 2006, Sean Muller of the University of Queensland in Australia ran an experiment to see how well cricket batsmen can anticipate a bowler's pitch. He chose three types of cricket players, ranging in skill from national champions down to university players. The players watched videos of bowlers throwing balls. After each video was over, they had to predict what kind of pitch was coming and where it would land. In some cases, the video was cut off at the point at which the bowler released the ball. In other cases, the players got to see only the first step or two that the bowler took while the ball was still in his hand.

Elite players anticipated the outcome of a pitch much better than less skilled players. They could make fairly good predictions after watching the bowlers take just a single step, and, if they got to see the pitch up to the moment of release, their accuracy improved dramatically. The first predictions of less skilled players were no better than chance, and their predictions improved only if they were able to watch the pitch until the ball was in actually in flight. This study suggest that predicting the outcome of a task seems to involve the same areas of the brain that the athlete develops in practice, which would explain why athletes tend to fare better on challenges which involve skills in which they have practiced.

In a related study, Salvatore Aglioti of Sapienza University assembled a group of people, some of whom were professional basketball players, and scanned their brains as they watched movies of other players taking free throws. Some of the movies stopped before the ball left the players’ hands; others stopped just after the release of the ball. The subjects then had to predict whether the ball went through the hoop or not. The pros in the group showed a lot of activity in those regions of the brain that control hand and arm muscles, but, in the non-athletes, those regions were relatively quiet. It appears that the basketball players were mentally reenacting the free throws in their minds, using their expertise to guess how the players in the movies would perform.

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