What Athletes See

The Atlantic:

Consider two very different basketball players. The Los Angeles Clippers star DeAndre Jordan, one of the strongest, quickest players in the NBA,  nevertheless made only 39 percent of his free throws last year. Then there’s his teammate, Jamal Crawford—not as fast or as strong as Jordan, but he makes 90 percent of the shots he takes from the foul line, a rate that’s among the best in the league.

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Some evidence indicates that the quiet-eye technique stimulates the dorsal area of the brain, which regulates focused, goal-directed attention. It may also suppress activity the ventral region, which oversees stimulus-driven attention—the kind that keeps track of a scattered, fluid set of variables. There’s probably more to it, though: Mark Wilson, a psychology professor at Exeter who studies quiet eye, points out that training in the technique tends to change a range of physiological measures, including heart rate and patterns of muscle movement.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic