Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

How Tim Hardaway Sr. Learned To Be A Better Sports Dad

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:28:00 +0000

This guest post comes to us from Dr. Andrea Corn, youth sports psychologist and Ethan Skolnick, a sportswriter for the Palm Beach Post covering the Miami Heat:

How does an athletic parent motivate their child? Frequently, with the same tactics that worked with them when they were young. In Raising Your Game: Over 100 Accomplished Athletes Help You Guide Your Girls and Boys Through Sports, Tim Hardaway Sr., acknowledges that, as a child, he took constructive criticism well. He turned others' doubts into the motivation, “to show you I could do it,” he says. His toughness in the face of adversity helped him survive and even thrive in a rough neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.
While developing into an outstanding basketball player, he also developed thick skin. Those attributes propelled him through a long, successful NBA career, which recently earned him selection as a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame.

As his son, Tim Jr., became an emerging high school basketball standout, Tim Sr. took the same approach that others had taken with him. He ordered, complained, criticized and didn’t relent when his son seemed to falter. His son, however, didn’t have his dad's disposition. They argued frequently, and the stress affected the entire household.

One day the Warriors and Heat star decided to sit away from his family, far up in the bleachers for one of Tim Jr’s high school games. He saw the game and the ghost of his own behavior literally from a different perspective. Hardaway’s son lost, but the Hardaway family gained something: Tim Sr. chose a different approach. He apologized on the car ride home and promised more praise. That action proved to be as healthy for him as it was for his son.

More than a band aid that day, dad’s change of heart and the realization of their unique and independent temperaments proved to be more powerful than he first realized. Hardaway’s transformation and the space he gave his son brought them closer together.

This year at the NCAA Tournament, Tim Sr. wore Michigan maize and blue, and watched his son score 12 points en route to a loss in the Final Four to Louisville. But especially when the box score didn't offer much support, Hardaway Sr's change -- to building up rather than breaking down his son -- allowed his son to continue to know that somewhere inside lives a winner.

Hardaway Jr will enter the NBA draft this year. And he'll do it with a rebuilt relationship with his father.

Using Training Data For Long Term Player Development

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Wed, 15 May 2013 01:50:00 +0000

Imagine if you were given the task to find the next John Terry, Andy Murray or Katie Taylor. You know that they’re out there somewhere kicking a ball, returning a serve or winning a bout among thousands of other kids their age. While some look like future champions at age 7, it’s unknown what they’ll be like at 17.

Finding a group with some genetic gifts and then developing them through years of physical and mental growth demands access to new tools with one secret ingredient, data. Just ask Ben Smith and Marco Cardinale.

In a recent interview with the Big Data Insight Group, Ben Smith, Head of Development Performance Systems for Chelsea Football Club, commented, “The professionalisation of sport has been dramatic over recent years and it’s only going to continue. There’s a huge amount of money and drive within the industry today; the rewards are massive for those getting things right and they’re substantial for getting it wrong – data analytics helps us ensure we do the former and avoid the latter.”
In this talent identification and development process, breaking down the data on hundreds of prospective youth players falls into two categories, quantitative and qualitative. The quant side measures and tracks objective data points from devices worn by the player or observed metrics like timed drills and strength workouts. Just as important, the qualitative data tracks the subjective opinions and observations of the player and coaches related to the perceived progress of their daily training.

Collecting gigabytes of data is only step one. Without a way to summarize and visualize the data in a format that is easy for coaches and players to understand, the effort is wasted. “Numbers are really, really dry and people from a coaching background, even the modern coaches, are not often data driven,” according to Smith. “If you can present the numbers in a way that means they quickly understand its direct relevance to the things they’re trying to achieve then they will appreciate the significance of what it’s telling them.”

While managing athlete development data for one sport is difficult, coordinating progress across multiple sports introduces an even greater challenge. That job falls to Dr. Marco Cardinale, Head of Sports Science and Research of the British Olympic Association. He recently described to the MIT-Sloan Management Review some of the complexity and hurdles Team Great Britain has to overcome to keep each sport’s program moving forward.

“The biggest problem we have in sport is the difficulty in collecting data,” said Cardinale. “The real analytics we are interested in is the ability to understand what athletes do on a daily basis to be able to affect their training programs, and that’s where the difficulties occur. It’s very sport specific.”

Like the Chelsea staff, Cardinale understands the need for athletes and coaches to track the ebb and flow of daily training. “In my view, the coach and the athlete are the main unit able to deliver success,” he commented. “I think the biggest edge will be if they understand themselves better. In too many sports, athletes train either too much or not too much, and it’s because they have to gauge what they do on a daily basis against their feelings or what the coach sees. I think if they have more data about themselves, they can have an edge because they can be smarter in the way they train.”

Improving performance with data analytics is not a quick-fix solution. Identifying patterns and trends related to training requires multiple data points over an extended period and a commitment to its long-term use. As Cardinale concludes, “It’s a long journey, which means a club or an institution really need to invest in a project for at least a good three to four years. The power of data resides in good longitudinal information rather than snapshots.”

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How Football Players React To Sound On The Field

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:59:00 +0000

For as much as we hear about the importance of vision on the football field, there are quite a few phrases emphasizing the sounds of the game, such as “he heard footsteps coming”, “listen for the audible at the line”, “play until you hear the whistle” and even the backhanded compliment to the ears, “he has eyes in the back of his head.”

Listening is a skill to be exploited for better anticipation, reactions and decision-making. Now, neuroscience researchers have filled in some missing details of how we actually use the sounds around us to instantly direct our muscles to take action.

To appreciate the benefit of listening during a game, NFL Films mic'd up the Seahawks' QB Russell Wilson in week 17 last season. As you watch (and listen) to the video below, focus your ears on the verbal communications and noisy environment on the sidelines, in the huddle and at the line of scrimmage. A player's auditory processing must be just as active as his visual sense.

So, how do our brains take in all of those sound waves, separate the signal from the noise and then instantly make decisions on how our muscles should react? Neuroscientists have been working on the missing link in the middle. “We know that sound is coming into the ear; and we know what's coming out in the end -- a decision," said Anthony Zador, biology professor and program chair at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.

From past research, we know that sounds we hear travel through our ears to the auditory cortex part of our brain. Here they are translated into electrical impulses known as representations. From there, no one was sure how these representations mix with other input, knowledge and goals already in our brain to become specific reactive movements.

Last year, Zador and Dr. Petr Znamenskiy trained lab rats to listen to a sound and then make a decision to turn and run right if they heard a high pitch sound but to go left for a low pitch sound. By observing the neuron pattern of the rats, they discovered that the sequence from hearing to muscle movement takes a different path than expected.

"It turns out the information passes through a particular subset of neurons in the auditory cortex whose axons wind up in another part of the brain, called the striatum," said Zador. They found that only a few of the neurons send information to the striatum, known primarily for planning movement.

“The neurons registering 'high' and 'low' are represented by a specialized subset of neurons in their local area, which we might liken to members of Congress or the Electoral College,” commented Zador. “These in turn transmit the votes of the larger population to the place -- in this case the auditory striatum -- in which decisions are made and actions are taken."

Their research just appeared in the journal Nature.

Here’s Zador describing the overall process of turning hearing into action:

As much as players study film, there are opportunities to introduce the sounds of the game into their training. Both understanding verbal communications and sensing environmental sounds contribute to on-field success. It starts by closing the eyes and listening to the game.

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To Know Where You're Going, You Have To Know Where You've Been

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Tue, 07 May 2013 02:51:00 +0000

What happened out there? You thought you were ready. You thought your training went well last week. You thought your pre-competition routine was the same as always. Now you’re wondering why you hit the wall early and just had an off day.

Consistently performing at a high level depends on creating the right combination and pattern of training that yields the best outcome. Even a small change to that ideal routine can result in a poor performance. Finding that wrong turn requires retracing your steps through your recent training sessions.

Unfortunately, many athletes lack a system to capture not only the quantitative data but also the qualitative information about their mood, motivation and daily activities that may have affected their results. In all of the noise of today’s high-tech monitoring devices, the simplicity of a training diary often gets overlooked.

So, what exactly is a training diary? It can range from a paper notebook with an athlete’s thoughts about the day’s practice to a sophisticated, online app. For either version, the key ingredient is consistent and accurate data. Without an athlete or coach entering data, the diary is like staring at a map with no roads.

Recently, human performance researchers at Dublin City University (DCU) studied the effectiveness of using training diaries for young Gaelic footballers as a way to assess their overall training load. Without proper management of their time and activities, young athletes can suffer burnout from overtraining.

Siobhán O’Connor, a researcher and graduate student at DCU, and Professor Noel McCaffrey gathered 162 players from U14, U18 and adult teams to measure not only the response of players to using a diary, either paper-based or online, but also to validate that what the players self-reported was an accurate reflection of their actual training.

Previous research has shown that athletes prefer easy and efficient data entry for a diary to succeed. O’Connor designed a format that, on average, took the players just under 4 minutes per day to fill out. Initially, the paper and online versions received about the same participation rate but when e-mail or text reminders were sent out for the online version, the players use of the online version increased substantially.

Filling diaries with the right information is just as important as timeliness. As they say in the computer world, “garbage input produces garbage output.” To check this, a subset of the players also wore accelerometers and/or SenseCams to objectively capture data about the training sessions. When this data was compared with what the players actually recorded in their diaries, there was a 95% agreement, confirming that the players could accurately self-report their own data.

O’Connor is encouraged by the results, “This study will benefit Gaelic Footballers throughout Ireland and beyond by enabling them to quantify their training load in a quick and easy manner.”

Although training diaries were initially designed with amateur or semi-professional sports enthusiasts in mind, online diaries combined with communication portals are being utilized more and more by professional organizations and elite athletes.

Of course, the payoff for athletes to entering this information is being able to quickly review the data and ensure consistent performance improvement. That’s where online diaries shine, especially those that can analyze the data and identify cause and effect patterns. Being able to understand how your daily habits contribute to your results makes it all worthwhile.

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The Neuroscience Of Pitch Recognition

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:11:00 +0000

When asked to describe Greg Maddux, the retired 4-time Cy Young award-winning pitcher, Wade Boggs, a Hall of Fame hitter with a .328 lifetime batting average, once said, “It seems like he's inside your mind with you. When he knows you're not going to swing, he throws a straight one. He sees into the future. It's like he has a crystal ball hidden inside his glove.”

So, what did Maddux know that other pitchers don’t? Neuro-engineers from Columbia University decided to actually look inside some hitters' brains to try to find out.

Maddux, who seems to be a lock for the 2014 Hall of Fame class, earned a reputation for knowing batters so well that he could think one step ahead of them. "When you think it's a ball, it's a strike,” confessed former Yankees manager Joe Torre. “When you swing at what you think is a strike, it's in the dirt. He was a remarkable pitcher." This lack of pitch recognition skill by hitters is what all good pitchers try to exploit. While hours of batting practice try to teach this through repetition, there have been surprisingly few attempts at finding out what’s really happening under the batting helmet.

Jason Sherwin, Jordan Muraskin and Paul Sajda, biomedical engineers at Columbia’sLaboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing, specialize in motion perception and high speed decision making but are also baseball fans. Last year, they reported that they had been able to pinpoint the timing of pitch recognition within the brain. Fitted with electroencephalography (EEG) skull caps, test volunteers watched 12 sets of 50 different video pitches that were either a fastball, a curve or a slider. They were asked to immediately identify the pitch they just saw, before the pitch arrived over the plate, by pressing a certain computer key.

Comparing correct answers with the EEG data, the researchers were able to determine the exact millisecond when recognition happened in the brain, or when the hitter locks onto a pitch knowing what’s on the way. Fastballs were the fastest to be recognized with curve balls taking the longest. However, sliders had the highest average prediction accuracy at 91% while fastballs were only guessed correctly 72% of the time.

Mapping the response times with the trajectory of the ball, the recognition typically happened in the middle third, between 32 and 40 feet, of the ball’s path to the plate.

Their study appeared last year in Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience.

After discovering when pitch recognition happens in the brain, the team then wanted to see where it occurred. By combining the timing clues from EEG with the location-specific data of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they could see a more complete model of decision making. This time they used college baseball players and showed them a combination of 468 fastballs, curves and sliders, while wearing EEG caps and lying inside an fMRI machine.

Figure 1

Cross-referencing the pitch’s trajectory, the “light bulb” recognition moment and the fMRI map of the player’s brain, they not only confirmed their earlier research of a pitch-guessing neural network but also a fascinating twist. For correct guesses, the brain logically lit up in its visual and motor cortex areas.

However, for the incorrect guesses, activity moved to the prefrontal cortex of the brain, known to be used for conflict resolution and higher level decision making. As can be seen in Figure 1, red areas indicate regions that have higher activations during correct pitch guesses, while blue areas indicate regions with higher activations for incorrect choices.

So, when the visual information isn’t enough for an automatic recognition, it appears that the problem gets escalated to add in other known facts or previous experiences.

This new research was presented at last month’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

So, what good would this baseball neuroscience be against today’s great pitchers? The authors ask us to imagine a new era of baseball training, where step one is to capture a baseline of each player’s neural recognition ability. Realizing when a hitter is able to make a correct prediction of a pitch and seeing first-hand their brain’s reaction time will identify specific training opportunities. Step two is to use a pitch simulation tool to see hundreds of pitches, measuring performance improvement in accuracy and speed.

“Knowing the neural circuits involved in the rapid decision-making that occurs in baseball opens up the possibility for players to train themselves using their own neural signatures,” concluded Sajda.

Tony Gwynn, another Hall of Famer known for studying video of opposing pitchers, would have appreciated this technology twenty years ago when facing Maddux. “He’s like a meticulous surgeon out there...he puts the ball where he wants to," remembered Gwynn. "You see a pitch inside and wonder, 'Is it the fastball or the cutter?' That's where he's got you.”

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Why The Best Soccer Players Are Real Head Turners

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

In soccer, like many sports, the goal scorers get the headlines. Yet, they will secretly admit that the final pass played to them is very often their key to unlock the defense. Without the vision of a teammate to pick them out of a crowd, their finishing skill is almost useless.

As players progress through the ranks of high school, college and beyond, not only do their opponents get quicker with their feet but also with their eyes and brains. Their time with the ball gets shorter forcing them to either make the correct pass or avoid the oncoming defender. The luxury of time to survey the field for targets after they receive the ball is now gone. The available options need to be gathered and assessed constantly so that when the ball arrives at their feet, the homework is already done.

So, what do top players do differently that makes their decisions consistently fast and correct? Geir Jordet, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, specializes in perceptual expertise in soccer. At last month’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, he presented new research on what he describes as “the hidden foundation of field vision.”
From previous studies, Jordet knew the importance of visual search strategies in soccer decision making. However, the typical methods used to test a player’s perception seemed artificial. Whether it be putting athletes in simulated field situations in a lab or merely relying on a computer joy stick movement, Jordet knew he needed to make the tests more realistic.

“These (lab-based) tasks do not simulate the functional links between perception and natural movements, which may be essential to capture, if the goal is to reveal knowledge about real-game visual perception,” he wrote.

So, he went back to just being a fan and admiring the sport’s best players. Using SkySport’s Player Cam broadcasts (now discontinued) of English Premier League games, he and his research team could watch isolations of a single player in one screen, while seeing the entire game context on another screen (see image below).

“Such video footage makes it possible to examine how players engage in visual exploratory behaviors by moving their bodies and heads to better perceive events taking place behind their backs,” said Jordet.

From 64 different games, they watched the habits of 118 of the world’s best players to detect the clues they leave on the field during 1,279 actual game situations. Jordet’s hypothesis was that those players who engaged in the most active search of their surroundings before they received the ball would produce the highest percentage of successful passes once they received possession. He defined an active search as the player turning their gaze and head away from the ball to prepare themselves by trying to pick-up as much information about the positions and movement of teammates and opponents.

Dividing the total exploratory events (turning the head) by the seconds of each scenario yields an average exploration frequency. Not surprisingly, the two EPL players, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, with the highest frequency rates of .62 searches per second are two of the most successful midfielders currently playing in the league.

In this video clip, watch (and try to count) the number of times Lampard moves his head while waiting for the ball:

When the player received an incoming pass, it was noted if he was able to complete the next pass successfully, especially if it was a forward pass in the direction of his opponent’s goal. A better search should yield better information which should improve the completion percentage of the next pass.

Sure enough, Jordet found a direct correlation between higher exploration frequency and pass completion rates. Players with exploration frequency below .2 only completed 54% of their passes while those with more than .41 explorations per second had pass completion rates of 73% or higher.

As the research team notes, counting head turns still doesn’t tell us anything about what the player actually saw during those quick glimpses. It seems they are able to put pieces of the puzzle together with each glance, allowing their brain to assemble the big picture.

“The findings can have major implications for both what scouts look for in players and for how coaches work to improve players’ receiving and passing skills,” concluded Jordet.

In Gerrard's case, this search habit pays off in creating scoring chances, especially in the final attacking third of the field. The always useful website, EPL Index, just updated their analysis of the top EPL players this season, in these two categories. As expected, Gerrard appeared in the top five of each ranking (see charts).

As Xavi, Barcelona’s midfield maestro, explains, “Think quickly, look for spaces. That's what I do: look for spaces. All day. I'm always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven't played don't always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. I think, the defender's here, play it there. I see the space and pass. That's what I do.”

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Make Rick Reilly Donate $20K To Nothing But Nets

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:18:00 +0000

As you may have noticed when visiting 80% Mental, there has always been a box over to the right of the main page connecting you to the Nothing But Nets program. Of all the many worthwhile causes out there, the simplicity of buying a insecticide-treated bed net for a child or family to keep them safe from malaria-carrying mosquitos always made sense to me.

With April 25th being World Malaria Day, could you please check out Rick Reilly's challenge below? He is matching all bed net donations through Thursday, up to 20,000. The bed nets are $10 each to purchase, deliver and set-up for a thankful family.

I really appreciate everyone who visits this site. Let's make Rick pry open his checkbook!

Thanks!
Dan

United Nations Foundation

Dear Dan,

I want to make sure every child in sub-Saharan Africa is sleeping safely at night under a life-saving, anti-malarial bed net. But I can't do it without you, Dan.

That's why I told you last week that I am going to match every dollar you donate to the United Nations Foundation's Nothing But Nets campaign by April 25th, World Malaria Day.

Our goal is to hang 20,000 more insecticide-treated bed nets in homes in Africa. And we're off to a great start! So many caring friends like you have stepped forward, donating 1,889 bed nets so far, which I've matched for a total of 3,778 nets.

That means 3,778 families and thousands of children will now be protected from this deadly disease.

So what are you waiting for? I urge you to make a generous gift to Nothing But Nets right now and send as many nets as you can. The more you give, the more I give, and the more lives we save!

I helped launch Nothing But Nets in 2006. I was sitting in a hotel room and I flipped on the television. I was stunned to hear that 3,000 children died every day from malaria, simply because they don't sleep under a bed net at night. How could it be, I wondered, that so many children were dying from such an easily preventable disease?

Then I had a thought—who better to provide families with insecticide-treated bed nets than sports fans? Sports fans love nets!

I wrote a column in Sports Illustrated asking each of my readers to donate $10 to Nothing But Nets. That first month, friends like you donated more than $1 million. Since then, we have raised more than $40 million, providing families across Africa more than 7 million nets to protect them from malaria.

We've made great progress. In areas where you’ve helped Nothing But Nets put bed nets in most homes, we've reduced transmission rates of malaria by up to 90%!

So let's finish the job and cover Africa. I will match your gift to Nothing But Nets, so every dollar you give today will make even more of a difference.

As a loyal supporter of Nothing But Nets, you know what a simple, long-lasting bed net can do. You know that it can keep a child safe, and allow them not only to survive, but to grow up healthy and strong—like every kid should.

It's so simple. Malaria kills. Nets save lives.

So will you help me provide 20,000 new nets by World Malaria Day, April 25th? Remember, it costs just $10 to put an anti-malaria net above a child's bed. But, because I am going to match your gift dollar for dollar, every $10 you give today will provide two life-saving nets.

Together, we can create a world in which no child or his mother or father ever has to fear this devastating disease.

Yours truly,

Rick Reilly
Columnist, ESPN.com

P.S. Dan, every long-lasting bed net you send can save a child's life. The more nets we send, the more families and entire communities we can protect from malaria. Together, we can cover Africa. So please send as many nets as you can today, and I'll send an equal number. Then we both get to be life-savers!

Thank you.

Why Steve Nash Makes More Free Throws Than Dwight Howard

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 01:59:00 +0000

Every time Steve Nash goes to the foul line, he shoots five or six free throws. Sure, there’s the two that really count, but the NBA’s all-time free throw percentage leader always takes several imaginary shots before getting the ball. He says it helps him not only visualize the ball going through the net but also gets his brain and body prepped for the upcoming motor skill. After almost 3,400 regular season attempts, his 90.4% success rate seems to work, even if Dwight Howard isn’t interested.

Actually, this “dry run” motor imagery is a well-used technique across several sports. Golfers always take the imaginary swing or putt before stepping up to the ball. Batters take their nervous hacks before the pitch. Football placekickers, the ultimate “hero or goat” athletes, focus on their warm-up kick before their team breaks the huddle. While mental imagery and visualization are common for athletes, there is growing evidence that including the actual physical motions, also known as dynamic imagery, creates the best results. In a recent study, Aymeric Guillot, neuroscience professor at the University of Lyon, tested elite high jumpers to see if this action-oriented imagery would help them not only clear the bar but use better form. They performed a series of 10 jumps at 90% of their personal best. They were randomly asked to perform either a motionless mental imagery session or to use their whole body as much as they could to rehearse the jump, without actually executing it.

Guillot’s team found that basic mental imagery without motion did improve the success of the jumps and the form quality by 35%. However, those jumpers that included active, dynamic motor imagery increased their success rate and form by 45%.

"Our study on high jumpers suggests that dynamic imagery may provide a training edge to professional and amateur athletes,” commented Guillot. “This technique may also be of use to people in other disciplines where 'dry run' rehearsals are routinely used."

The research appears in the latest issue of “Behavioral and Brain Functions”.

According to basketball coach and sport science Ph.D. candidate Brian McCormick, players need to use a pre-performance routine to prepare their brain:

“A pre-performance routine accomplishes three main physical goals:
1. Stabilizes the motor pattern2. Adds consistency3. Establishes a rhythmWhen Nash attempts his practice shot, he uses the Imaging step. Rather than pure visualization, where a player may imagine a previous made shot, Nash adds the kinesthetic element. He imagines the ball going through the basket, but he also feels the shot.”

McCormick credits Nash’s pre-shot process, kept identical for every attempt:

“When Nash takes a pre-practice shot without the ball, he is accessing the motor pattern and moving it to the working memory. He stabilizes the motor pattern, so he can retrieve the pattern more quickly and effectively than someone who shoots cold. His routine also rhythmically prepares the movement. Most motor skills have a rhythm to them, and Nash feels the rhythm of his shot during the practice shot rather than shooting the real free throw cold.”

Given Nash's well-documented success, who better than the man himself to describe his mindset before each free throw? All players and coaches (wanting to be smarter than Dwight Howard) should watch this video:

Of course, Dwight could keep ignoring Nash's advice, giving us classic highlights like this:

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Thinking Faster Wins Olympic Medals For Brazil Volleyball

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 18:25:00 +0000

Think of Brazil, then think of a sport. Most of us would respond with soccer, or “futebol” in Portuguese, thanks to their five World Cup victories and national obsession with the sport.

However, over the last 12 years, Brazilian volleyball has dominated the world. The men’s national team is currently ranked first in the world and has won a gold and two silver medals in the last three Olympics. The women’s team has back to back Olympic gold medals, beating the U.S. in Beijing and London, and is currently ranked second in the world.

So, when University of Illinois psychology professor Arthur Kramer and his research team wanted to find out more about how elite athletes take in and process visual information, it wasn't surprising that he and his team visited the starting place for all aspiring Brazilian netters, the Center for the Development of Volleyball (CDV – Saquarema), in Rio de Janeiro.

Arthur Kramer

Heloisa Alves

There he and graduate student Heloisa Alves found 87 of the best men and women players, both adults and juniors, including some of those Olympic medalists, to test their visual and cognitive abilities. The adult players were in their early 20’s with an average of 10 years of volleyball training. With an average age of 16, the junior players had received about 5 years of formal training. For comparison, 67 non-athletes with similar ages and general education were used as a control group.

There are two competing schools of thought for studying the cognitive differences between athletes and non-athletes; the expert performance approach and the component skills approach. Research using the expert performance method tries to look at mental tasks using sport-specific domains. For example, to see if an elite volleyball player has better peripheral vision than an amateur, they might be asked to view a volleyball court with moving players while being tested on their reaction time to changes. Sport scientists feel this is a more relevant test of differences gained by years of training.

The component skills approach removes the sports context from the experiment and tries for a more general comparison of perceptual and cognitive tasks. This helps to find out if the athlete’s advantage is at a core, fundamental level, not influenced by a sports environment.

Kramer’s team, using a computer based set of tests, chose the component skills method with three main cognitive categories included; executive control, memory and visuo-spatial. First, in this context, executive control means being able to keep two different tasks and instructions in mind and switching back and forth between them, similar to being able to switch between an offensive and defensive mindset during a volleyball match. Also, the players were tested on being able to quickly stop a task when new information popped up. On the court, think of having a play or counterattack in mind, then having to instantly change that plan based on the other team’s actions.

Next, short term memory was tested by first showing a group of shapes, followed by just one shape. The test group had to quickly decide if that single shape was in the original group. Finally, their spatial awareness was put to the test by seeing a series of different, frequently changing scenes and being asked to quickly detect and track the changes.

As expected, the results showed that the elite players, both adult and juniors, were better than the control group on all but one of the tests. Their ability to switch between tasks, store objects in memory and track moving objects were significantly better than the non-athletes. While past research had shown signs of this superiority, Kramer’s experiment was important because it expanded the results to a larger test pool, including men and women and different age group/training levels.

In fact, the women athletes performed just as well as the men athletes, which is interesting since non-athlete men easily outperformed non-athlete women.

“We found that athletes were generally able to inhibit behavior, to stop quickly when they had to, which is very important in sport and in daily life, “ Kramer said. “They were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than nonathletes.”

The study appears in Frontiers of Movement Science and Sport Psychology.

Of course, the gold medal question is if athletes are better because of their training or because of some innate advantage they’ve had since birth? The Brazilian volleyball program hopes to answer this over time by taking baseline tests of kids in school before they are exposed to the years of structured training.

Kramer’s educated bet is on a combination. “Our understanding is imperfect because we don’t know whether these abilities in the athletes were ‘born’ or ‘made,’ ” he said. “Perhaps people gravitate to these sports because they’re good at both. Or perhaps it’s the training that enhances their cognitive abilities as well as their physical ones. My intuition is that it’s a little bit of both.”

With the 2016 Olympics on home court in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilians are gearing up for what could be their best Games ever and a three-peat for the women.

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Making Decisions While Avoiding The Sack

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:16:00 +0000

Just ask the primary decision makers across different sports. Quarterbacks, point guards, or midfielders would agree that making the right choices during a game would be a whole lot easier if it weren’t for the constant distractions.

Whether it be a blitzing linebacker or a 1v1 defender, staying focused on the next decision seems like an sequential process; something that can’t be dealt with until the current distraction is neutralized. However, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have learned that our multitasking brains continue to mull impending decisions in the background while our conscious brain handles the noise in front of us.

Picture a quarterback walking to the line of scrimmage with the play he called in the huddle. Based on the defense he sees in front of him, he is processing his receiver options, searching for a correct decision. After the snap of the ball, that thought process is interrupted by two linebackers bursting through the line. First, deal with the distraction and avoid the sack. Second, reengage the prior decision tree to find the open receiver. To our QB, this seems like a serial event, but David Creswell, assistant professor of psychology at CMU, showed that it’s actually a parallel process in our brains.

Using neuroimaging tools, his team watched the brains of 27 adults while they were gathering information to make a decision. They noted that the visual and prefrontal cortices, areas of the brain known for decision making, were active when the volunteers were learning new information and considering options. Just before they were asked to make a decision, they were distracted with having to memorize sequences of numbers, which involves other areas of the brain.

What they found was that even during the distraction, the participants’ visual and prefrontal cortices remained active, still working unconsciously on the decision task. In fact, the group that endured the distractions did just as well at making the right decision as a control group that was not distracted.

In this video, Creswell and co-author James Bursely explain their experiment:

"This research begins to chip away at the mystery of our unconscious brains and decision-making," said Creswell. "It shows that brain regions important for decision-making remain active even while our brains may be simultaneously engaged in unrelated tasks. What's most intriguing about this finding is that participants did not have any awareness that their brains were still working on the decision problem while they were engaged in an unrelated task."

The study was just published in the journal "Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience."

Now, the use of background processing by the brain should not be confused with intuition, made popular by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink. More formally known as our adaptive unconscious, Gladwell focused on our perceived ability to make snap judgements without really understanding how we arrived at our conclusion.

When under fire during a game, athletes may well be making very quick decisions without the luxury of time to analyze all the information. Experience and practice helps build those automatic responses. Those players with a richer database of solutions should see more accurate knee jerk responses when needed.

Most likely, what helps elite athletes come through in a clutch is a combination of real-time, background processing and a honed intuition gained from experience.

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What Could A Coach Do With A Brain Activity Map?

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:36:00 +0000

Imagine an NCAA basketball coach trying to create a game plan for their first March Madness game with absolutely no video footage of their upcoming opponent. Sure, he has their roster with player names, height/weight and positions. He also has a set of specific stats that show the performance of each player and the team during the season. Yet, there is no opportunity to see the team play as a unit, how they move the ball, or their communication. The resulting game strategy would be full of educated guesses and assumptions based on just the macro picture of the roster and the micro world of data and statistics.

Welcome to the world of today’s neuroscientists. To study the brain, they have the 30,000 foot view from tools like functional MRI scans and the microscopic world of neurons and biochemistry. Everything in the middle, the constant communications between 100 billion neurons, is unable to be observed, leading to theories and best guesses at how we make decisions, free throws and no-look passes.
Much like a library of game video or, better yet, a live stream of the action, researchers need a way to observe and measure our brain’s massive amount of electrical activity and connectivity. "We don't actually understand (how circuits of neurons) generate all these interesting behaviors we have, like speech and language and thoughts and memory," said John Donoghue, neuroscientist at Brown University, in a recent CNN interview.

Enter the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project. While there are many ongoing brain mapping research projects currently underway, President Obama alluded to a much more ambitious initiative in his State of the Union address last month. Since then, details have begun to emerge for a 10-year, $3 billion project to do for brain research what the Human Genome Project did for biology and genetics. An article published last week in Science hints at the “big rock” goals for BAM as defined by a cross functional team of 11 scientists, including not only neuroscientists but also experts in genetics, nanotechnology, and bioengineering.

Here's a quick (and energetic) intro to BAM:

“We need something large scale to try to build tools for the future,” Rafael Yuste, a neurobiologist at Columbia University, told MIT Technology Review. “We view ourselves as tool builders. I think we could provide to the scientific community the methods that could be used for the next stage in neuroscience.”

To be sure, a project of this size and cost is not being done to help a point guard know when to pass or shoot. Trying to solve brain disorders like Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia are much higher on the priority list.

Then again, think of the possibilities in just basketball:

- What is happening in a player’s head when he struggles at the foul line? We have theories of “choking” but to actually know the electrical patterns of skill versus stress could suggest new ways to deal with it.
- How is “court vision” represented in the brain and how can we identify and/or train it?
- Practice and repetition seem to teach a new play or skills to a team, but how can we accelerate the rate of learning?

Time will tell if this latest research initiative provides any of the benefits it promises. It certainly could fill in the gaps of how we understand athletes as living, thinking people. It might even help us fill out our March Madness brackets.

Be sure to check out Axon’s Athletic Brain Trainer apps for iPad.

Young Sports Stars Score With A Growth Mindset

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:26:00 +0000

Amazing young athletes have been going viral lately. Did you see the video of the 11-year-old star of the Downey Christian high school varsity basketball team, who recently performed at halftime of an Orlando Magic game? How about the 9-year-old girl running around and over the boys in her youth football league, who was invited to sit next to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell at last month’s Super Bowl? Then there’s the 10th grader who is currently starting for the Erie Otters, a major junior hockey team with an average age of 19, whose agent is Hall of Famer Bobby Orr and who NHL star Sidney Crosby compares to himself.

These young YouTube sensations, Julian Newman, Sam Gordon and Connor McDavid, have all been dealing with the crush of recent media attention thanks to their incredible athletic skills. Certainly, there are more like them across the country waiting to be discovered, but the stories of these three give us a chance to look behind the highlights for similarities and clues of early athletic achievement. According to two new studies, it is all about their mind-set.

To most kids, making their high school varsity basketball team when they’re only in 6th grade and 4’ 5” tall would sound impossible. Many young girls (and their parents) wouldn’t think of playing in a boys football league assuming they could never compete. And a 16 year old hockey player is often told that the odds of him ever playing in college or the pros is a long shot unless you were born with just the right set of skills.

Carol Dweck, Stanford University psychology professor, calls this a fixed mind-set, believing that the skills you were born with define the upper limits of your success in life. Conversely, those students with a growth mind-set are driven by their desire to learn new things and look at failure as just part of the process. A fixed mind-set dwells on performance goals; only trying new tasks that they believe fall within their innate gifts. A growth mind-set thrives on learning goals and can’t wait to take on the next challenge even it means a struggle.

: Click to enlarge graphic

In most cases, researchers believe we can thank our parents for giving us our current mind-set. Two new studies have confirmed that how parents praise their children can have a lasting effect on how their kids face new challenges.

Dweck and a team from Stanford, Temple and the University of Chicago videotaped mothers with their toddlers at ages 1, 2 and 3 as they accomplished everyday play activities. Some moms used what the researchers call “person praise”, saying things like “you’re so smart” and “you’re good at hockey.” Other moms used “process praise” with phrases like, “you figured it out” or “you learned how to make that shot.”

Five years later, the team revisited the kids and asked them if they would like to tackle some tough learning problems like math or complicated skill movements. As expected, those kids who had been praised with fixed “you’re smart” phrases were afraid to try new challenges in fear they would fail, ruining their reputation for being “smart.” On the other hand, process-praised children took on the new tasks knowing their only failure would be to not try.

“What we found was that the greater proportion of process praise, the more likely the child was to have a mindset five years later that welcomed challenges and that represented traits as malleable, not a label you were stuck with,” Dweck said. “'You're great, you're amazing' – that is not helpful. Because later on, when they don't get it right or don't do it perfectly, they'll think they aren't so great or amazing."

Their research was just published in the journal, Child Development.

Praising the wrong way seems intuitive to most parents. In a similar experiment, Dutch researchers asked 357 adults to write down the encouragement that they would give to six different children, three with high self-esteem and three with low self esteem, for completing an activity. Sample descriptions of the hypothetical kids were either, "Lisa usually likes the kind of person she is” or "Sarah is often unhappy with herself.”

The adults used person praise twice as often as process praise for the low-esteem children. "Adults may feel that praising children for their inherent qualities helps combat low self-esteem, but it might convey to children that they are valued as a person only when they succeed," lead author Eddie Brummelman of Utrecht University said. "When children subsequently fail, they may infer they are unworthy."

The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Eduardo Briceño, Co-Founder and CEO of Mindset Works, a company that helps schools and teachers adopt the growth mind-set, explains Dweck’s research in this recent TED talk:

Connor McDavid clearly has a growth mind-set. Sherry Bassin, general manager of the Otters, described McDavid’s attitude in a recent USA Today article, “First guy on the ice for practice, last guy off. He just loves it. He's like those doctors who can't leave the hospital for 18 hours. He is honing his skills like a top surgeon."

As for Julian and Sam, if they see walls in front of them, they have learned to either dribble or sprint around them.

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Vision Research Gives Clues How Receivers Survive NFL Combine Drills

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:18:00 +0000

One of the most challenging and entertaining workout drills at this weekend’s NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis is the Gauntlet Drill for wide receivers and tight ends. Whether or not it relates to real NFL success is debated but it does provide a true test of hand-eye coordination and the ability to change focus while on the move.
Obviously, being able to instantly pick up the flight of a thrown football is key for receivers but also is important for defensive backs who need to turn their heads at the last moment to find a pass. Now, vision researchers at Tübingen University in Germany have shown that humans actually use extremely small eye movements, called microsaccades, to achieve what’s more commonly known as peripheral vision.

In this NFL video, uber-analyst Mike Mayock provides a great overview of the Gauntlet Drill. Receivers run straight down a yard line while receiving a series of passes from alternating sides. The key is to change your focus quickly on the fly.

Here's Florida State's Rodney Smith completing the drill at the 2013 Combine.

As a player takes in the field with his vision, it appears to him as a smooth scan of the environment. In reality, humans make quick, darting glances, called saccades, at different targets. Its like our eyes see a movie shot at 3 frames a second while our brain perceives a scene at 30 frames per second.

In between these longer saccades are millisecond movements, microsaccades, that are believed to help the brain fill in missing information from the scene and prepare the eyes for an upcoming shift in focus.

"Microsaccades are sort of enigmatic," said Ziad Hafed, the leader of the Physiology of Active Vision Group. “They are movements of the eye which occur at exactly the moment when we are trying to look at something steadily -- i.e., when we are trying to prevent our eyes from moving.”

In the video link below (click to play), from his lab, you can see the microsaccades when the blue focus point changes from blue to red, while the test volunteer tries to keep their eyes fixed on the crosshair.

In describing how our vision and brain work together, Hafed used a soccer analogy. "Imagine that you are the coach of a (soccer) team," Hafed said. "You would normally ask your defenders to spread out across the field in order to provide good coverage during match play. However, in preparation for an upcoming corner kick by your opposing team, you would reorganize your defenders, assigning two of them to become temporary goalkeepers and protect the goal. What I found was evidence for a similar strategy in the visual brain before microsaccades.”

Late last year, Hafed’s research group found that microsaccades actually assist with peripheral vision or the perceived ability to look at two different things at once. He asked test volunteers to focus on a small cursor on a computer screen while he measured their eye movements with a camera pointed at their retinas. Then, he added another target off to the right or left of the cursor and measured the microsaccades that occurred immediately before the shift of focus, much like the driver’s vision test we take where we are asked if we see a blinking light on our right or left side of our vision field.

By analyzing the timing of the microsaccades with the correct answers of the volunteers, Hafed realized there was a purpose for these tiny eye movements to prep the brain for the next shift of focus.

The study appears in the latest issue of Neuron.

Back to our football catching drill, when the receivers turn their head while running, their first focus may be on the quarterback but then the in-flight ball appears in the periphery and their next saccade is towards the ball. Athletic eyes that have been well trained by practice and vision drills will outperform those with less agile vision. While fast 40-yard dash times and soft hands are important to a receiver, their visual system performance should not be overlooked.

Check out the Axon Sports iPad app that players are training with at the Combine this year.

Joe Mauer's Quick Swing Starts In His Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:47:00 +0000

When describing his former teammate Joe Mauer’s hitting discipline, five-time MLB All-Star Jim Thome told ESPN, “Joe's the only teammate I've ever had who never gets fooled. And when I say 'never,' that's what I mean. Absolutely never." The fact that Mauer had more walks than strikeouts in 2012, while leading the league in on-base percentage, is not surprising to his Minnesota Twins’ manager Ron Gardenhire. "He takes (pitches) because he can," Gardenhire said. "Other guys aren't good enough."

Combine this knack of knowing when to swing with one of the sweetest strokes in baseball and the result is a three-time batting champion, a first for a catcher. Being able to unleash his trademark “quick swing” on just the right pitch has made Mauer into the model of brain-body coordination.

Now, Harvard bioengineer Maurice Smith has some new clues on how our brains are able to combine learned motor skills with all of the incoming cues from the external world.

When we map out an action, like a baseball swing, in our brain, we use two different types of representations, intrinsic and extrinsic. “An intrinsic representation is one that’s body-based and procedural. It relates to the complex series of muscle and joint movements your body has to make to complete a task,” Smith said in a Harvard press release. For baseball players, they practice that swing and its collective parts over and over so that it becomes automatic.

The key, of course, is being able to not just swing a bat but use it to hit a ball travelling at 90 mph. This requires an ability to interpret the ball’s flight and intercept its path with contact. “Your brain must represent that action plan extrinsically, as it is an activity based in the world,” notes Smith.

Those two representations seem to be two different processes, first evaluate the situation and absorb the outside inputs (the approaching ball), then execute the well-rehearsed motor sequence to swing the bat. However, Smith’s Neuromotor Control Lab at Harvard learned last year that the two representations may actually be intertwined.

“The predominant idea had been that in memory we maintain separate intrinsic and extrinsic representations of action and translate between the two when necessary,” said Smith. “But our work shows that memory representations are combinatorial rather than separate.”

Neurons store all of these different representations in a process known as gain-field encoding, which was thought to be just a common language interpreter between intrinsic and extrinsic. Not so fast, according to Smith.

In a unique experiment that tested volunteers ability to reach for a target with a cursor, the team was able to confirm that indeed the brain combines both types of representations internally. In baseball, that means the extrinsic model of the arriving pitch is stored alongside the intrinsic motor skill of swinging the bat.

“We found that this gain-field encoding, which leads to a combinatorial representation of space, is not simply an intermediary in the transformation between representations, but is in fact the encoding on which motor memories are based,” said Smith. “This suggests that the neurons which display gain-field encoding are the same ones that store the motor memories associated with the actions we learn.”

Their research is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Obviously, at Joe Mauer’s level, those motor memories have evolved to a world class level. Perhaps his cross-training in other sports contributed to his advanced status. He was, after all, the only high school athlete to ever be named the USA Today National Player of the Year in both baseball and football, not to mention averaging 20 points a game for his basketball team.

Check out Axon's new baseball Athletic Brain Trainer app for iPad.

Would You Rather Be A Guitar Hero Or A Golf Legend?

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 03:57:00 +0000

Despite being a well-respected cognitive psychology professor at New York University, Gary Marcus had a secret ambition; to shred amazing riffs that would make Eric Clapton envious. The fact that he had been gently told as a child he had no sense of rhythm or tone did not discourage his dream. With a one year sabbatical from NYU available, he turned himself into a lab experiment of how to teach a middle-aged dog new “licks”.

At about the same time, Dan McLaughlin was growing restless with his career as a commercial photographer in Portland. However, life as a professional golfer seemed to be the dream destination if only he could find the right path to get there.

On opposite ends of the country, two guys pursuing different goals but with the same underlying principle; devote a large chunk of dedicated time breaking down and learning complicated skills with the help of experienced coaches.

They had both heard of a theory out there by Florida State psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson that claimed the best performers in a variety of fields had accumulated around 10,000 hours of specific, deliberate practice before they became world-class. Some took more hours, some less, but on average it provided a rough target to shoot for before expecting magic with a Stratocaster or a five iron.
While Marcus’ window of full-time learning was limited to one year, McLaughlin estimated he could reach 10,000 hours of structured golf practice in six years or around 2016. These timeframes seemed to match their respective goals; McLaughlin’s ultimate measure of success would be to actually earn a player’s card on the PGA Tour, while Marcus just wanted to launch a side passion, maybe start a band.

Given his scientific background, Professor Marcus was able to combine his knowledge of learning theory with his quest. In fact, he documented the entire adventure in his 2012 book, Guitar Zero, which offers a mix of cognitive science, music theory and guitar stories. McLaughlin tracks his progress at his web site, The Dan Plan, (and soon in an upcoming book), where he provides daily updates including the countdown to 10,000 hours (only 6,220 to go!) See their video overviews below.

I recently caught up with both men to compare their methods and their progress:

Gary, are you familiar with Dan McLaughlin’s quest to teach himself golf in 10,000 hours?
Gary Marcus: “I've been meaning to read more about his story; I think he's been more dedicated about logging the specifics of his practice than I have been. But the number of 10,000 hours itself is pretty crude; there are well-documented cases of people becoming chess masters in barely more than 3,000 hours, and others take 25,000. Some depends on genes, but it also depends on how you practice.”

Dan, what about you; did you know of Gary’s journey to be a guitar god?
Dan McLaughlin: “I am familiar with Gary's book although have not personally read it. The writer that I am working with for The Dan Plan's book read Guitar Zero as part of his research and has told me some aspects of his story. A similarity could be seen in his full-on approach to learning, and perhaps the biggest difference is the time frame.”

How related is learning the guitar with, say, learning to golf?
Gary: “There are some obvious differences (e.g. great weight on muscle development in golf), but both are complex skills that require extensive neural rewiring. Guitar has its own kind of athleticism, and arguably places greater demands on memory, but in both cases precision is paramount, and one must integrate a great deal of perceptual input in order to perform appropriate motor actions. In both cases, self-discipline is paramount, and some kind of coaching is critical for anyone wishing to be a top performer. Of course, the outfits are better in rock and roll...”

Has your learning progress in golf been pretty linear with gradual improvement every month, or does it go in bursts with plateaus where you stay the same for awhile?
Dan: “Learning, from what I have experienced, comes in chunks. This is why putting in time is so crucial, because you never know when the next big learning bump will occur. Sometimes days will pass where it seems like nothing is being achieved then that will be followed by a period of great momentum. In the big picture it may be possible to see that learning evens out over time, but when you are in the thick of it the biggest moves always come in bursts.”

Have you had periods where you've gone backwards in your progress? How do you handle that emotionally?
Dan: “Every time you stretch out your neck to improve the first step is in reverse. I have yet to make a large change in my swing and immediately see a positive outcome. Rather, when you are in transition, it at first creates errors which are then followed by a slow improvement in consistency and eventually the new move is grooved and the positive results are reaped. Emotionally, you have to allow for building periods where you know that you will be moving in reverse for a while before you get back to your level and break through to the next.”

Gary: “Learning to cope with failure and to channel into improved performance is an art that any human being ought to develop, no matter what they are learning. Some of that is about setting proper goals, and appreciating progress.”

Both music and golf have “rules” or foundational elements that need to be learned. How do our brains wire themselves to follow these principles?
Gary: “Music is a special case in that there is a lot of formal knowledge (about music theory) that can be taught, both demand a lot of unconscious knowledge, too. I'm not a golfer, but I wonder whether there are (aside from the formal rules of the game) mathematical principles in golf that are analogous to the principles of harmony and voice leading. Then again, lots of people make beautiful music without any formal understanding of those rules. (And as in any creative endeavor, the best artists have a good sense of when it is effective to break the rules.)”

In Guitar Zero, you explain that learning a new skill is often spread across multiple areas of the brain. Yet sometimes we hear that specific brain regions are responsible for specific tasks. Can you help us understand the difference?
Gary: “I think of the brain as being made up of many subcomponents, whereas I think of most things that we know as depending on choosing that right combination of those components for a particular job. Individual bits of brain tissue often do pretty precise things, but do those same things in the service of many different computations. So-called “muscle memory” is really in the brain, distributed across areas such as somatosensory cortex and the basal ganglia; you don't learn anything unless you've rewired the brain.”

Can there be a transference of guitar skill to a related task like playing a violin?
Gary: “For sure, though I am told that the bow is a whole other dimension. But lots of things about rhythm and pitch and motion and perception transfer reasonably well. Look at people like Prince, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, etc who play loads of instruments well.”

Do you think a person’s genes play a role in being a talented performer? Are some people just "born with it"?
Dan: “If your genetics are somewhere in the norm of the bell curve I do not think that genes play a role in being a great golfer. There are certain limiting factors such as bone structure limiting range of motion or fused joints, but outside of the extremes we are all capable of being great at this sport. If there was a genetic advantage then there would be a prototype golfer and from what I see golf champions come in all shapes and sizes.”

Gary: You have to have the genes to be Jimi Hendrix, but all you have to do enjoy yourself is to be sufficiently dedicated, and to allow yourself to enjoy the journey, rather than fixating on the destination.

Gary and Dan, thanks so much for your time and we hope to see you on stage and on the leaderboard!

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Spatial Awareness On The Football Field

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:03:00 +0000

It’s too bad the Atlanta Falcons won’t be in this year’s Super Bowl. We will miss out on seeing one of the most acrobatic young receivers, Julio Jones, as well as a future, first-ballot Hall of Fame tight end, Tony Gonzalez. During their run through the playoffs, each made highlight reel catches (see below) that demonstrated their world-class sense of proprioception, defined as our unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation.

The best example of this is executing the “toe-tap” reception, where a receiver, at full speed, is able to turn his head to catch the ball then get both feet to land in-bounds, often only the tips of his toes. The entire process only takes a split second, certainly not enough time for conscious thought and planning. Its an unconscious reaction skill that comes from years of honing our spatial awareness. According to cognitive researchers, three types of brain cells give us this internal GPS, head direction cells, place cells and grid cells.

Jeffrey Taube, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth, has been studying our sense of direction and location. “Knowing what direction you are facing, where you are, and how to navigate are really fundamental to your survival,” said Taube.

In his research, he has found there are head direction cells, located in the thalamus, that act as a compass needle tracking the direction our head is currently facing. At the same time, in the hippocampus, place cells determine and track our location relative to landmarks in the environment, say the football field sideline or the end zone. These two sets of cells communicate with each other to guide our movement.

“They put that information together to give you an overall sense of ‘here,’ location wise and direction wise,” Taube explained. “That is the first ingredient for being able to ask the question, ‘How am I going to get to point B if I am at point A?’ It is the starting point on the cognitive map.”

Neil Burgess adds one more set of cells to the equation, grid cells. As a neuroscientist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, he studies how these cells and their electrical activity helps us navigate through our world. While a place cell helps us know where we are right now, grid cells provide a map of the whole environment, similar to the longitude and latitude of real maps, only in triangular patterns.

In his recent TED talk, he explains experiments conducted in his lab on a rat’s ability to navigate its space.

So, years of practice catching balls at hundreds of locations across a football field could be establishing this set of grid cells in the brain. This mental topography combines with the direction we’re facing, head direction cells, and our current location on the field, place cells, to instruct what our bodies should do at the moment of the catch.

Of course, sometimes this system breaks down and we lose our sense of direction. Just ask Kent State linebacker Andre Parker. In a game last fall (see below), he ran down field and picked up a muffed punt, then proceeded to run it back the wrong way towards his own end zone. After 58 yards, players on the other team, surprisingly, chased him down and tackled him. Somewhere along the way, his head direction cells, place cells and grid cells all misfired. Don’t worry Andre, I do that in the mall all the time.
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From The Talent Code To The Secret Race - A Conversation With Daniel Coyle

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:05:00 +0000

It has been a busy month for Daniel Coyle. When you co-write the definitive book that tells the inside story of how a 7-time Tour de France champion cheated his way to the top step of the Champs-Élysées podium, your life becomes a little hectic. Coyle helped Tyler Hamilton, long-time teammate of Lance Armstrong, document the incredible details of the United States Postal Service racing team during Armstrong’s seemingly invincible years in their book, "The Secret Race".

From CNN to Charlie Rose to the Today show, Hamilton and Coyle have helped audiences understand the background and motivation that led to the ultimate confessional last week; Lance the Sinner telling all to Mother Oprah.

The side benefit for Coyle to all of this media exposure is the realization of viewers that he writes about topics other than cycling and doping. Well known in the coaching and education communities for his New York Times bestseller, "The Talent Code", and its follow-up "The Little Book of Talent", he is the voice of the growing belief that you are not necessarily just the genetic product of your parents' athletic or artistic skills. Practice does matter and practice can provide a path to improvement, if not complete mastery.

Despite his whirlwind month, Dan was kind enough to discuss this new paradigm in sports training and the process of becoming great. I hope you enjoy the highlights of our conversation.
First, what was your biggest takeaway from the sad but intriguing story of Lance Armstrong’s journey?

Daniel Coyle: “For one of my previous books, I spent two years in Girona, Spain, the home of the USPS team, during a Tour de France season. While you knew when Armstrong was in town, there was always this secretiveness to his existence. He was known as Batman for the way people would catch occasional glimpses of him in public.”
“Cycling is a demanding sport, but its less about motor skills and deals more with creating a rider’s engine or his power production plant. The rider with the most energy and power would most often win the race. Doping and other performance enhancing drugs were the next step towards producing more power. For me and many others, doping took the pure joy out of the sport and reduced it to a lab of biochemistry experiments.”

Tell us a little about your writing career to date and your dual-topics of talent development and the cycling life?

DC: “When I was young, I wanted to be a doctor and was on the path to medical school. However, my favorite day of the week was when Sports Illustrated would show up in my parents’ mailbox. I became lost in the stories of sports achievement and wanted to be able to write those stories someday.”
“Later, I found out I didn’t really have the fire in the belly for medicine and was able to land a job as an intern at Outside magazine. Back in those pre-Internet days, the writers would fax their stories in and I would type them, word for word, into the publishing system. It gave me a chance to read a lot of great writing and taught me about story telling.”
“I was attracted to writing about great performers, whether it be athletes, business leaders or entertainers to find out how they got better at their craft.”

From your first book in 1995 about coaching baseball in the Chicago projects to your latest book, have you learned first-hand how performers and artists improve their craft?

DC: “That’s the really interesting part. There is this great illusion of looking at performance from the outside as being easy and just a one-time journey with an end. There is no mountaintop of performance. The physics of skill do not permit coasting on a plateau.”
“I recently read a great New York Times piece about Jerry Seinfeld and his endless quest to get better as a comedian. Whether it be Seinfeld or Albert Pujols or the great writer Philip Roth, they are all doing the same daily, humble, effortful steps to improve their craft.”
“For me, I am always trying to improve. I have a collection of 3x5 index cards where I’ve written down great sentences from other writers as examples to learn from.”

The sub-title of of your 2009 book, The Talent Code, is “Greatness isn’t born, it's grown. Here’s how.” With that simple assertion, you threw yourself right in the middle of the genetics vs. practice debate of how expertise is achieved. In the last three years, have you seen any new research or evidence that changes your opinion that training can trump innate skills?

DC: “No, if anything we’ve seen more research and support for this concept of structured, deliberate practice being able to improve performance. There is also a new language and vocabulary for talking about training that is beginning to understand the important role of the brain in learning. The talent hotbeds that I describe in the book have already learned this concept.”
“There is a great new book, How Children Succeed, that emphasizes the role of emotional fortitude in great learners. Character, grit, perseverance and self-control are critical to the learning curve.”

What is the role of brain research and technology in this world of performance training?

DC: “We’ve learned that brains are not static, they are in a constant process of change throughout our lives. I like to use the analogy of re-shingling a roof. Performers need to be always updating and reinforcing their core foundation and adding new layers of knowledge.”
“Technology tools can help to a point but we need to ask to what extent can they accurately represent the real world of sports. Can a 2D or even 3D virtual world teach pattern recognition and spatial awareness as well as the real thing? If we can validate the results of these new tools, it will offer a brave new world that will make training more efficient.”
“The key to all of the new cognitive research coming out will be to help coaches translate it and accept it. The coaching culture is resistant to change and is often a one-way conversation with the athlete. The high-performance training centers have learned this hard lesson and have adapted to this reality.”

Thanks, Dan, we're looking forward to the next step on your writing journey.
Here is a terrific little video of what you will learn in Coyle's "Little Book of Talent".

Why Ray Allen Keeps Practicing

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:07:00 +0000

On his way to becoming an Olympic gold medalist, a 10-time NBA All-Star and the NBA’s all-time leader in 3-point baskets made, Ray Allen picked up a certain shooting practice routine. Not when he was a rookie, or at the University of Connecticut or in high school, but when he was eight years old. He had to make five right-handed layups then five left-handed layups before he could leave the gym. If he ran out of time or was forced off the court by others, “I cried,” he told the Boston Globe. “It messed up my day.”

Over the years, given his success, he might be forgiven if he gave the routine a day off, relying on thousands of previous shots to keep the motor skill alive in his brain and his muscles. But researchers at the University of Colorado may have now discovered why Allen’s insistence to practice beyond perfection continues to yield a return on his investment of time.

Earlier this year, before Allen departed for Miami, Brian Babineau, team photographer for Boston’s Celtics and Bruins, set out to capture Allen’s obsession with his pre-game ritual in a more meaningful way then folklore or photos. He filmed an entire shootaround trying to capture Allen’s extreme focus on his craft.

“I wanted to show the seriousness of his pre game shooting ritual, his amazing focus and I wanted to imagine what it was like to be in his mind while he was doing it,” Babineau told ESPN. “Once he starts his shooting sets, you can see he’s in the zone, where everything is black and white. Once he finishes a set, there is a short moment of reality until he starts his next set with the same focus and determination. This goes on for his entire routine, at all the same shooting spots on the court, for every game … and he’s been doing this for years.”

While no one has kept track, it would be a safe bet that Allen has surpassed the infamous 10,000 hours of structured practice to reach world class status. Indeed, he has become the best at what he does and he’s not buying the notion that he was born with “God-given” skills to play basketball. He described that idea as “an insult.” “God could care less whether I can shoot a jump shot.”

So, what’s the point of this endless devotion to practice? Are there additional benefits that we can’t see on the surface? A group of neuromechanic researchers at the Integrative Physiology lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder recently found that we can make subtle improvements in efficiency in our motor skill actions even after we’ve mastered the muscular movements of the task.

They asked a group of volunteers to learn to manipulate a mechanical arm so that it would move a cursor on a screen to a target area. Learning this novel task involved vision, arm movements and repeated feedback to succeed. After 200 trials to learn the basics, a force field was added to push back on the mechanical arm enough to force a quick adjustment and update to the skill that had just been figured out. Even after the volunteers had learned to move the cursor, they kept repeating the skill over 500 times.

During this entire learning process, the test subjects’ muscular activity was measured through electrodes on six arm muscles while their breathing was tracked through a mouthpiece. Surprisingly, during the experiment, the metabolic rates of the volunteers continued to decline even after their muscular activity had leveled off. In other words, the brain-body cost to performing the task became more efficient over time, even after the muscles showed that the task had been mastered.

“We suspect that the decrease in metabolic cost may involve more efficient brain activity,” Alaa Ahmed, assistant professor at CU, said. “The brain could be modulating subtle features of arm muscle activity, recruiting other muscles or reducing its own activity to make the movements more efficiently.”

Their research appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Shooting three point shots throughout a heated, loud, draining NBA game is certainly a tough test of a player's brain-body efficiency. If Ray Allen can save just a fraction of metabolic energy through the fine tuning of his skill set, it may be just the edge he needs.

“The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems as if the task has been learned,” said Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.”

Practice works. Just ask Ray Allen.

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The Semantic Spaces Of An Athlete's Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 22:45:00 +0000

Playing different sports is rather redundant. Think about the motor skills and objects of, say, hockey versus soccer. Players on two teams try to keep control of the puck/ball and put it past the opposing keeper into the goal. Tennis, badminton and volleyball share the concept of hitting an object over a net at an opponent. Football and rugby both need to advance a ball across a goal line. There are similar objects such as a ball, a goal and the field of play and movements like jumping and running.

An athlete’s brain needs to learn these shared concepts early on to be able to navigate the tactics and motor skills required for different sports. Now, neuroscientists may have discovered how our brains organize this overlapping information so we don’t need to relearn the basics of each new sport.

Think about when you started driving. While you may have been taught in one particular car, you learned the more general concepts of driving and how to identify the common objects found in dozens of vehicles. Within seconds of sitting in a different car, you can recognize the steering wheel, ignition switch, pedals, lights, not to mention the basic mechanical functions of making it move.

Neuroscience has traditionally explained this ability to recognize objects by localizing it only to the visual cortex, a specific area of the brain. Now, neuroresearcher Alex Huth of the University of California – Berkeley and his team have discovered that these different categories of objects are actually represented over a larger overlapping space in the brain in the somatosensory and frontal cortices covering almost 20% of the brain.

From the same visual system modeling lab that brought us a mind-reading computer last year, Huth used a similar technique of watching the brains of five researcher volunteers while they watched two hours of movie trailers. Using fMRI scanning, the roughly 30,000 locations, also known as voxels, in the cortex were recorded while seeing over 1,700 different categories of objects and actions from the clips.

By matching the electrical pattern in the subjects’ brains with the scenes they were watching, a “semantic space” map was created showing which areas of the brain were active when seeing certain objects or actions. As seen in the image above, categories that light up the same pattern in the brain are colored the same. For example, focus on the middle of this image and you’ll see a green section that identifies human actors, including athletes. Each small leaf on each branch represents one of the 1,700 different object or action types, which is not an exhaustive list of things in our world but a good cross section.

“Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain,” said Huth.

Indeed, that online brain viewer is a fascinating tool. By choosing an object such as “athlete” or an action such as “kicking” on one side of the viewer, you can see the corresponding layout of brain topology that is used to visualize it.

“Using the semantic space as a visualization tool, we immediately saw that categories are represented in these incredibly intricate maps that cover much more of the brain than we expected,” Huth said.

The research is published in the journal Neuron.

By studying the semantic map, we can see the shared properties of athletic endeavours. The athlete cluster includes “ballplayer”, “skater” and “climber.” Interestingly, a cluster called “move self”, (including actions such as reach, jump and grab), uses a separate brain network then a more general grouping called “move” (including actions of pull, drop and reach). From a skill practice perspective, the idea of a concept neighborhood makes sense as other research has shown the transferability of movements and logic from one sport to another.

In case you were wondering, vehicles do have their own semantic group including everything from a moped to a pickup to a locomotive.

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How Cristiano Ronaldo Sees The Ball

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:11:00 +0000

Last year, the Spanish newspaper Marca revealed the nicknames that Real Madrid players have given each other inside the Santiago Bernabéu locker room. While some names poked fun at a player’s appearance (“Nemo” for Mesut Özil’s bulging eyes), superstar Cristiano Ronaldo was simply known as “la máquina”, Spanish for “the machine.” With his humanoid robot physique and his superior speed and quickness, Ronaldo seems to be programmed for goal scoring.

Indeed, sponsor Castrol has developed a self-proclaimed documentary, “Ronaldo – Tested To The Limit”, to attempt to explain the Portuguese player’s body strength, mental ability, technique and skill. The most interesting of the four segments, mental ability, helps us realize that without the command center of the brain, the machine-like body parts are useless.

While physical attributes such as strength, speed, agility and power are necessary for athletic greatness, sport skill begins with evaluating the playing environment, taking in cues and making decisions through sensory input and perception. Vision supplies 80-90% of the information athletes use to plan their motor skill movement.

Surrounded by sports scientists and testing equipment at a Madrid soundstage, Ronaldo was asked to perform two experiments that showcase his visual perception skills of gaze control and spatial awareness.

First, his challenge was to keep the ball away from an opponent for at least 5 seconds in a 1v1 drill. While his opponent was a former Division One player, Andy Ansah, there was no doubt Ronaldo would succeed in keeping possession. The insight came from both players wearing eye tracker equipment that can later show the gaze or saccadic movements of their eyes. Elite athletes have more sophisticated patterns of cues that they watch for and focus on to beat their opponents versus novice players that gaze at many focal points.

Professor Joan Vickers at the University of Calgary is best known for her pioneering work in athlete eye tracking and working with coaches and players to develop strategies and logic of what they should be looking at during competition. For example, hockey or soccer goalies should focus on the shooter’s hips or body angle rather than the puck or ball.

Through the eye tracking video, Ronaldo’s opponent, Ansah, looked mostly at the ball and the feet but his eyes darted in a less defined pattern. Ronaldo, on the other hand, clearly had a strategy of watching Ansah’s hips and space around Ansah that he could exploit. His command of the ball at his feet allowed him to only occasionally check its position. This superior spatial awareness allows great players to watch their opponent and react to the slightest hints of their next movement.thlete eye tracking and working with coaches and players to develop strategies and logic of what they should be looking at during competition. For example, hockey or soccer goalies should focus on the shooter’s hips or body angle rather than the puck or ball.

Another aspect of visual perception in many sports is to track a moving object. An outfielder racing to catch a fly ball, a tennis player returning a 100 mph serve, or a soccer striker taking a one-time shot of a well-crossed ball all require a sophisticated, yet mostly subconscious, skill to intercept the object’s path and act on it.

To show that most of this task is calculated in the brain rather than simply with the eyes, Ronaldo was asked to do something he is paid very well to do, finish off a crossed ball into the goal. However, to make it more interesting, during the ball’s flight to Ronaldo, the lights were turned off inside the arena forcing the player to calculate the final flight trajectory of the ball and make contact with it in the dark.

Just as a baseball hitter only gets about ¼ of a second to decide to swing at a 90 mph pitch (and can rarely “see” the ball all the way across the plate), an athlete often relies on his brain to complete the 3D scenario and rapidly predict the path of the flying object.

As seen in the video, the first two crosses are “easily” finished off by Ronaldo when he is allowed to see about half the ball’s flight towards him. The real expertise is shown when the room goes dark immediately after Ansah kicks the ball. The only cues available to Ronaldo are angles and movement of Ansah’s hips and legs to predict where the ball will end up. Not only did he meet the ball but added a bit of Portuguese style by using his shoulder to finish the goal.

There has been some debate over the years on how exactly humans track moving objects. Several studies and theories have looked at the movement of baseball outfielders as they follow a fly ball off the bat. The late Seville Chapman, a physicist at Stanford, developed the Optical Acceleration Cancellation (OAC) theory that argues a fielder must keep moving to keep the rising ball at a certain angle to him. If he moves forward too much, the ball will rise too fast and land behind him. If he mistakenly moves backward, the ball’s angular flight will drop below 45 degrees and land in front of him. By keeping a constant angle to the ball through its flight, the fielder will end up where the ball does.

Subconsciously, Ronaldo may be using the OAC theory to start moving towards the ball based on its early trajectory, then computes the rest of the flight in the dark. The advanced skill of predicting the path of the ball instantly after the kick puts Ronaldo into a world class category.

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Practice Really Does Change An Athlete's Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:44:00 +0000

As kids, once we have mastered the complex motor skill of riding a bicycle, we’re told that its a lifelong skill that we’ll never forget. Getting all of the moving parts of human and machine in sync with each other becomes a collective memory that can be called on from age 6 to 60.

Which is surprising, knowing that names, numbers and recent locations of car keys can be so easily forgotten. What makes motor skills stick in our brains, ready to be called on at anytime? According to two teams of cognitive science researchers, we can thank a property called neuroplasticity which actually changes the structure of our brain as we learn.

Much like bike riding, mastering ice skating requires some advanced balance and coordination to stay upright. Knowing when and how much to lean to one side or the other while arms and legs are swinging is the type of parallel processing computation that human brains can handle well.Tucked underneath the larger cerebral hemispheres in the brain, the cerebellum is known to play an active role in controlling movement by taking in messages from the spinal cord, combined with signals from other parts of the brain, and coordinating the precision and timing of complex motor skills. Damage to the cerebellum causes a lack of coordination, much like being under the influence causes someone to stagger and lose their balance.

Neuro researcher Im Joo Rhyu, from the Korea University College of Medicine, knew from prior studies that intensive motor skill training, such as juggling or basketball, resulted in physical changes in the brain as measured by functional magnetic resolution imaging (fMRI). Now, he wanted to find out if the ability of the brain to adapt itself over time, known as neuroplasticiy, was sport-specific. Given that the cerebellum has a right and a left hemisphere, would the physical growth in neural connections be symmetric on both sides?

His research team chose the perfect sport to investigate, speed skating. Being able to chase opponents around a tight oval at high speeds on ice is a showcase for the cerebellum’s functions. The key difference is that skaters always turn counterclockwise or left around the track. Years and years of practice to perfect movement in one direction may show a growth pattern in the brain different from other sports, Rhyu hyphothesized.

So, he compared the fMRI brain scans of 16 male, professional, short-track speed skaters with the scans of 18 male, non-skaters who didn’t even exercise. As predicted, in the experienced skaters, the right hemisphere of their cerebellums were larger than the left side. Since the skaters only turn to the left, they spend much more time balanced on their right foot with short steps on their left. Standing on your right foot activates the right side of the cerebellum. In addition, learning a motor skill that requires constant visual monitoring and adjustments is also thought to occur mainly in the cerebellum’s right half.

The study appears, appropriately, in the December 2012 issue of The Cerebellum.

Size is not all that changes in the cerebellum after repeated training. The increased network of neuron connections between brain cells also increases to the point of being noticeable on a different type of brain scan, known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Using this technology, a research team examined experts in a different sport, karate.

“Most research on how the brain controls movement has been based on examining how diseases can impair motor skills,” said Dr Ed Roberts, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, who led the study. “We took a different approach, by looking at what enables experts to perform better than novices in tests of physical skill.

They compared the punch strength of twelve karate fighters who had achieved black belt status and had an average of almost 14 years of experience with 12 control subjects who exercised regularly but had no karate training. Karate punching is not simply a feat of raw muscular strength. It is combination of speed and the coordination of wrist, shoulder and torso movement.

As expected, they found that the punch strength of the black belts was substantially greater than the novices. But the DTI scan also showed something else very interesting. The white matter of their cerebellums, which is made up of the tangled network of neuron connections carrying signals from one cell to another, was structurally different than in the beginner’s brains.

The results of the study are published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

“The karate black belts were able to repeatedly coordinate their punching action with a level of coordination that novices can’t produce,” said Roberts. “We think that ability might be related to fine tuning of neural connections in the cerebellum, allowing them to synchronise their arm and trunk movements very accurately.”

It is reassuring for athletes to know that all of those hours devoted to training their skills are actually reshaping and rebuilding their brain architecture. And for us bike riders, we can understand how the skinned knees and bruised elbows we endured when the training wheels came off were worth the effort to program a skill that will last a lifetime.

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Coaches Should Reward The Effort More Than The Skill

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 14:47:00 +0000

As parents and coaches of youth athletes, we walk a fine line in our communications with our emerging superstars about their abilities. What may sound like a great pat on the back, (“that was amazing how you just knew to make that pass – you’ve really got a knack for this sport”), may actually limit their future development and motivation, according to two development psychologists.

It all goes back to the fundamental debate in talent development of any kind. Are we born with certain skills and expertise or do we develop it with years of structured practice? Researchers have argued along the entire spectrum of this question while practitioners have settled somewhere in the middle. Even if kids start with some genetic advantages, they still need plenty of practice time to achieve greatness.

Committing to those years of training requires the right mindset and belief that those hours on the field or court will actually help. The best teachers have learned this in the classroom by convincing students that they are in control of their development rather than being labeled “smart” or “not smart.”

Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, saw this first hand years ago when visiting classrooms in Japan. In a recent NPR Morning Edition segment, he told the story of observing a fourth grade math class and one student’s breakthrough. The teacher asked one student who had been struggling to draw a three-dimensional cube to go to the chalkboard, in front of the whole class, and give it a try.

After a few minutes of failure in front of his peers, Stigler waited for the poor student to break down. ”I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,” Stigler remembered, “because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ”

However, with his classmates encouragement, he finally got it right and was rewarded with applause and a real sense of accomplishment when he returned to his seat.

Now, as a researcher in learning theory, Stigler draws comparisons between this style of learning and what is seen in most American classrooms. “I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,” Stigler said. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

Our youth sports culture is similar to the classroom. Kids who are divided into “A” or “B” teams at an early age are taught that their development path is set; the skills they have now are the same skills they will have in the future. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle as the “A” teams get better coaching, play in the better leagues against better competition and the talent gap widens.

Often, parents can also, unknowingly, contribute to this cycle. As in school, when a child is told that his or her success is due to his brain not his effort, the perception begins that when they do eventually struggle with a math test or a tougher opponent, there is little they can do to improve.

Jin Li, a psychology professor at Brown University, has also been studying cultural differences in learning and teaching. One of her research projects recorded conversations between parents and children to hear the language used. There were subtle differences between American and Asian parents when complimenting their kids. While the Americans praised with phrases like, “you’re so smart”, Asian parents focused on the struggle, “you’ve worked so hard on learning that and now you did it.”

“So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that’s what leads to success,” Li said in the same NPR interview.

Every young athlete will face challenges as they move up the ladder from youth clubs to high school to college. Instilling them with the belief that they can improve through hard work will keep them motivated to get to the other side of the wall. Their support team of parents and coaches can help this process by rewarding the learning process.

“Think about that [kind of behavior] spread over a lifetime,” Stigler concluded. “That’s a big difference.”

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High School Athletes Think Differently

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 02:43:00 +0000

It seems so easy sitting in the stands. Watching their high school athlete, parents are perplexed when bad decisions are made on the field, not to mention at home and school.

What seems so logical to coaches and fans, especially over the age of 30, is often lost on the adolescent brains of prep players. Do they just not care? Will it take even more practice and drills to get it right? Could it be teenagers are just wired differently? According to a social cognition expert, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Traditional child development theory takes us from birth to the beginning of the awkward years that are triggered by the physical changes of puberty. While research on teenagers has documented their increased risk-taking behavior, the complicated reasons why adolescents think differently are still being discovered.

"The idea that the brain is somehow fixed in early childhood, which was an idea that was very strongly believed up until fairly recently, is completely wrong,” claims Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, in a recent interview at Edge.org. “There's no evidence that the brain is somehow set and can't change after early childhood. In fact, it goes through this very large development throughout adolescence and right into the 20s and 30s.”

Blakemore’s lab at UCL has been studying what they call the “social brain” or how we learn to understand and interact with other people. What better place for improved connections with those around you than on the playing field? As a team battling against an opponent, players become connected and feed off of not only the tactical play of others but the emotional ups and downs of the game.

As an example, take a look at the photo above of Michael Owen, back in his Liverpool days, immediately after missing a wide open goal. Instantly, Owen (lying on the ground), his teammates and just about every fan dressed in red react with an eerily similar expression. Of course, the fans in yellow, supporting the visiting team, have a completely separate reaction. Blakemore used this example in a recent TED talk titled, “The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain.” This connectedness shows our ability to instantly read the emotions of others and how our social brains react to a situation. ”The picture shows us how instinctive and automatic social responses are,” explains Blakemore. “Within a split second, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and faces.”

Specifically for teenagers, this social brain development can be seen in the physiological changes their brains go through during this period. Blakemore points to an ongoing study at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda where they have been performing fMRI brain scans on children, adolescents and adults over ten years. The same people return once a year for a new scan, resulting in over 8,000 scans from 2,000 people.

One of the surprising findings is that our brain’s gray matter, consisting of neuronal cell bodies, neuropil, glial cells and capillaries, grows rapidly through our childhood but then shrinks dramatically in our teen years right into our twenties. At the same time, our white matter, made up of the actual axon fiber connections between brain cells, has an offsetting increase. The white color comes from myelin, the insulating wrap around these fibers.

Through experiments in her own lab, Blakemore has identified specific brain regions that adults and teenagers use when they are thinking about other people, in other words, being social. What is surprising is that teens use more of their prefrontal cortex than adults, who use temporal regions on the sides of their brain. So, why the difference? “That's something that we're looking at now,” responded Blakemore in the Edge interview. “One possibility is that they're using different cognitive strategies to do these tasks. They're doing the tasks, even though they're doing them as well, they're doing them in a different way. It's possible that at different ages you use different brain circuitry to perform the same task because you're using a different kind of cognitive strategy. You might, for example, when you think about social situations as an adult, you might be doing this automatically by just triggering automatically some kind of social script, whereas maybe in adolescence you're more reliant on your own experiences of these situations.”

The bottom line for coaches and parents; teenagers truly do think differently. They process social interactions with teammates and opponents on a different level than adults. There is no magic coaching philosophy or method guaranteed to succeed. However, the realization and acceptance that the teen athletic brain is evolving and growing is a start.

This article first appeared at AxonSports.com. Join Axon Sports on Twitter and Facebook.

Rookie Quarterbacks Need To Chunk

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:32:00 +0000

Last year, in a highly anticipated episode of Jon Gruden’s Quarterback Camp, the former NFL coach warned highly touted rookie prospect Cam Newton about one of the major adjustments facing him when he gets to the NFL. “You know, some of this verbiage in the NFL, I don’t know how it was at Auburn, but it’s — it’s long. You’ve got the shifts, the plays, the protections, the snap count, the alert, the check-with-me’s,” Gruden said. “I mean, flip right, double-X, Jet, 36 counter, naked waggle, X-7, X-quarter.”

He went on to ask the Auburn quarterback if he’d ever heard a play call like that in college, to which Newton responded, “Our method is ‘simplistic equals fast.’ It’s so simple as far as, you look to the sideline, you see 36 on the board. And that’s a play. And we’re off.” Gruden did not seem impressed, “Let me make this point, though,” the Super Bowl winning coach continued. “The number one challenge you’re gonna have right away is the verbiage. And just getting comfortable with what we’re calling formations, what we’re calling routes. The alerts. The language. Speaking the language. You’re gonna move to France, and you’re gonna have to speak French, pretty quick.”

What’s difficult about this learning process is that it’s not just learning what the terms mean but then translating those terms into a complicated series of motor skills by each player. The “36 counter” portion of Gruden’s gruesome play call takes years of practice by itself, let alone the rest of the play modifiers.
In the cognitive science world, breaking down a complicated motor task into manageable pieces is known as “chunking.” Think of your favorite band in concert. They seem to fly through 15-20 songs without mistakes or stops to look at sheet music. However, what you don’t see is the hours of practice breaking down new songs into segments, fixing parts that don’t work, memorizing each verse and each chord until the entire song is fixed in their memory. "You can think about a chunk as a rhythm," said Nicholas Wymbs, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "On one level, the brain is going to try to divide up, or parse, long sequences of movement," he said. "This parsing process functions to group or cluster movements in the most efficient way possible."

Wymbs is the lead author of a new study recently published in the journal Neuron. While at first the brain needs to simplify the task sequence by breaking into parts, eventually a different cognitive process searches for the most efficient way to process the request by stringing the sub-tasks together. "The motor system in the brain wants to output movement in the most computationally, low-cost way as possible," Wymbs said. "With this integrative process, it's going to try to bind as many individual motor movements into a fluid, uniform movement as it possibly can."

In their experiment, they asked volunteers to lie in an MRI scanner while performing a sequence of motor tasks. On a screen above them, each person would see an image of a long sequence that they had to type out on a keypad in front of them, much like playing notes on a piano. After many trials of the sequence, they would begin to learn and adapt, which improved their performance.

"After practicing a sequence for 200 trials, they would get pretty good at it," Wymbs said. "After awhile, the note patterns become familiar. At the start of the training, it would take someone about four and a half seconds to complete each sequence of 12 button presses. By the end of the experiment, the average participant could produce the same sequence in under three seconds."

With the MRI data showing the active parts of the brain during this learning process, the researchers were able to observe this dual process of parsing and concatenation. During parsing or chunking, the cortical areas of the left hemisphere seemed to be doing the most work, while the putamen, an area of the brain linked to movement was responsible for putting the pieces back together after sufficient practice.

"These regions have been linked to the manipulation of motor information, which is something that we probably do more of when we just begin to learn the sequences as chunks," Wymbs said. "Initially, when you're doing one of these 12-element sequences, you want to pause. That would evoke more of the parsing mechanism. But then, over time, as you learn a sequence so that it becomes more automatic, and the concatenation process takes over and it wants to put all of these individual elements into a single fluid behavior."

So, what Gruden was trying to tell Newton was that learning an NFL playbook and all of the movements that underlie the terminology was simply a chunking drill. After Newton’s very successful rookie season, it seems he may have taken the coach’s advice.

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Euro 2012: A New Way To Track Team Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Peterson) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 19:34:00 +0000

Imagine if the new Adidas soccer ball that will be used in this month’s Euro 2012 tournament had a memory chip in it that could retrace its entire path through each of the scheduled thirty-one games. Not only its direction and distance traveled, but if it could also log each player’s touch leading up to every shot on goal.

Would the sum of all of those individual path segments tell the story of the game and which players contributed the most to their team’s success? Northwestern University engineering professor Luís A. Nunes Amaral has not only answered that question, but has now built a side business to enlighten coaches and fans.

While most sports have an abundance of statistical metrics to measure a player’s development, soccer’s fluid gameplay and low scores make it more difficult to evaluate a specific player’s impact and contribution. To fill the void, several game analysis service firms now offer data on each action of every player during a game, but it’s left to the consumers of this data (coaches, players and fans) to interpret what combination of stats best explains if the team is improving beyond the ultimate metric of wins and losses.

Amaral, a lifelong player and fan from Portugal, saw an opportunity to help. “In soccer there are relatively few big things that can be counted,” he said. “You can count how many goals someone scores, but if a player scores two goals in a match, that’s amazing. You can really only divide two or three goals or two or three assists among, potentially, eleven players. Most of the players will have nothing to quantify their performance at the end of the match.”

In his lab at Northwestern, Amaral and his team of researchers study complex systems and networks; everything from metabolic ecosystems, the Internet, neural networks in our brain and the propagation of HIV infection. To him, the game of soccer is no different.

“You can define a network in which the elements of the network are your players,” he commented. “Then you have connections between the players if they make passes from one to another. Also, because their goal is to score, you can include another element in this network, which is the goal.”
They dug into the stats of the previous European championship, Euro 2008, and mapped the ball movement and player statistics for each game into a computer model. They made the assumption that the basic strategy of every soccer team is to move the ball towards their opponent’s goal.

“We looked at the way in which the ball can travel and finish on a shot,” said Amaral, who also is a member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and an Early Career Scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. ”The more ways a team has for a ball to travel and finish on a shot, the better that team is. And, the more times the ball goes through a given player to finish in a shot, the better that player performed.”

By combining a player’s passing efficiency (number of successful passes divided by total passes) and the ball flow around the field, the model can draw a network diagram of the paths that most often led to a shot on goal. These well-worn paths begin to tell a story of which players are the most reliable and effective. Amaral has given a very sports-bar worthy name to this ability – flow centrality. The more often that a player is involved in the build-up of passes towards a shot, the more vital he or she is to the team’s success.

The research was published in the online science journal, PLoS ONE.

Since the study came out almost two years ago, Amaral has set-up a new company, Chimu Solutions, to not only offer soccer analysis but also to expand their algorithms and software to other lines of business to reveal “intricate team dynamics as well as individual metrics with the goal of differentiating role players from superstars.”

While goal scorers and goalkeepers most often get their names in the headlines, it’s often the supporting cast of players that determine the outcome of games. Understanding how the ball should be and how it is moving up and down the field is critical to player development and game tactics. One of the most difficult skills for free-flowing sports like hockey and soccer is the visual awareness of teammates’ locations and quick decisions to make progress towards the goal. Flow centrality may just be the answer.

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