Monthly Archives: June 2011
Working memory and the brain’s limits
The impact of working memory on sport performance doesn’t get talked about too often, but its importance can’t be underestimated. Working memory is different from both long and short term memory, it is the ability to hold and juggle things in your head, and the ability shift attention between them as you solve a problem or deal with a situation. Working memory is what allows us to drive a car while we simultaneously monitor our speed, pay attention to the road ahead, talk to the person in the passenger seat, check our rearview mirror every few seconds, etc. Similarly, it’s also what allows a basketball player to dribble the ball, pay …
Tags: Athletic Intelligence, Research, sports and neuroscience, working memory
We talkin’ about practice: Allen Iverson and visualization
Following up on the last post about the power of visualization and the way that purely mental practice can improve physical skills, a fascinating little story about Allen Iverson that might change the way you think about his approach to the game, and his infamous attitude toward practice. From Larry Platt’s Only the Strong Survive, about Iverson’s use of visualization techniques that he learned from his high school football coach: Kozlowski was a staunch believer in psychocybernetics. He’d preach the value of visualization long before such mental gymnastics were in vogue. He had Allen read the book Psycho-Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who maintained that, even after reconstructive nose …
Tags: cognitive training, Deliberate Practice, imagination, visualization
The power of imagination
From Norman Doidge’s, The Brain That Changes Itself, research about the power of imagination, and how training that occurs purely within the confines of a person’s own skull has been demonstrated to be nearly as effective as actual, physical practice (long quote, but trust me, you want to read it): Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played. Then members of one group, the “mental practice” group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence …
US Navy to fund brain training research
From a recent press release, the US Office of Naval Research has partnered with a brain training company, Lumos Labs, to study the neuroplastic changes caused by their online cognitive training software: Lumosity, the leader in brain health and performance, today announced it has been selected for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the Office of Naval Research, which is responsible for the coordination, execution and promotion of science and technology programs for United States Navy and Marine Corps. The grant is to be dedicated to the development and testing of a mobile application that increases intelligence and cognitive performance – specifically working memory, attention and decision making – …
Soccer and Spatial Reasoning
We’re going to go back to David Winner’s book about Dutch Total Football, Brilliant Orange one more time; it’s just too good. There are so many valuable insights about the nature of expertise and athletic intelligence, specifically with respect to Spatial Reasoning, the ability to visualize and manipulate patterns in space over time. One of the book’s main arguments is that soccer is fundamentally about manipulating space on the pitch to create or exploit openings, and that the Total Football style of the 1970′s Dutch teams revolutionized the way this was done. Former Manchester United manager Dave Sexton explains: With their pressing and rotation, the Dutch created space where there wasn’t …
Tags: Athletic Intelligence, soccer, spatial reasoning, The Athletic Brain
More on soccer decision-making and expertise
Friday’s post focused on decision-making and anticipation in soccer, and specifically on how the quick and precise evaluation and elimination of options sets great soccer players apart from good athletes who don’t see the game quite as well. While research is nice, it’s always valuable to hear corroboration of those ideas from the mouths of players and coaches who know the game on a truly deep level. Some of the best writing on athletic genius and the unique ways that experts see the game can be found in David Winner’s fantastic book, Brilliant Orange: The neurotic genius of Dutch football. Winner conducted in-depth interviews with former Dutch players, as well as …
Tags: Expertise, High-Speed Decision Making, soccer, The Athletic Brain
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