Elite athletes get their
heads in the game
By Nick Bascom
Superstar athletes are revered for their physical prowess, not for what goes on between their ears. And most postgame interviews do little to challenge the notion that
athletes have more brawn than brains.
But brainpower has a vital role in elite
sports performance, recent research
shows.
“Brawn plays a part, but there’s a
whole lot more to it than that,” says John
Milton, a neuroscientist at the Claremont Colleges in California.
Whether on the court, field or course,
the body depends on the brain for direction. But the brain is a busy taskmaster,
with duties beyond guiding motion,
making it difficult to focus on that
particular job. Like chess masters and
virtuoso musicians, superior athletes
are better than novices at turning on
just the parts of the brain relevant to
the desired task, Milton’s work reveals.
“In professionals, the overall brain
activation is much lower, but certain
connections are enhanced,” he says. In
other words, experts employ only the
finely tuned neural regions that help
enhance performance, without getting
bogged down by extraneous information.
Elite athletes’ ability to focus the brain
might even explain their struggle to
eloquently describe performance after
the game. Like a starship captain diverting power from life support to bolster
shields in a battle, professional athletes
temporarily shut down the memory-forming regions of the brain so as to
maximize activity in centers that guide
movement.
“That’s why they usually thank God or
their moms,” says cognitive psychologist
Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago.
“They don’t know what they did, so they
don’t know what else to say.”
It’s not stupidity; it’s selectivity. And in
the last few years scientists have been able
to visually capture this concentrated, pur-
poseful neural concert that takes place in
the expert athlete’s brain. But even these
vibrant brain scans reveal only part of the
success story. Other recent studies dem-
onstrate how athletes’ brains seamlessly
interact with the muscular system to per-
fect and deploy movements — and how
the athletic brain anticipates actions
in advance and updates planned
responses as needed.
By examining how such brain processes lead to excellence in sports, as
well as what goes wrong when athletes
blow it in the big game, scientists think
they can enhance training techniques and
improve performance under pressure.
In the zone
Using functional MRI scans to monitor
blood flow in the brain, Milton and his
colleagues have identified the regions
essential for expert-level motor skill:
the superior parietal and premotor
areas. These regions, two of the brain’s
motor centers, primarily move the body
toward a visually perceived goal and
direct complex motion. In brain scans
of professional golfers planning a shot,
these areas showed heightened activity, Milton and colleagues reported in
2007 in NeuroImage. In contrast, the
study found that the brains of beginner
golfers preparing a swing showed much
more dispersed activity — especially
pervasive in the basal ganglia and limbic
system, regions of the brain that control
emotions and make people consciously
aware of their movements.
STEVE MC/BIGSTOCK
www.sciencenews.org
