The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (2 page)

There is no better place to look for an answer than in a type of competition where the action is slow, deliberate, and devoid of the constraints of muscle and sinew.

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In the early 1940s, Dutch chess master and psychologist Adriaan de Groot began drilling for the core of chess expertise. De Groot would test chess players of various skill levels and attempt to dissect what made a grandmaster better than an average professional, and the average professional far superior to a club player.

The common wisdom of the time was that highly skilled chess players thought further ahead in the game than did less skilled players. This is true when skilled players are compared with complete novices. But when de Groot asked both grandmasters and merely strong players to narrate their decision making in the face of an unfamiliar game situation, he found that players of disparate skill levels mulled over the same number of pieces and proposed essentially the same array of
possible moves. Why then, he wondered, do the grandmasters end up making
better
moves?

De Groot assembled a panel of four chess players as representatives of their varying skill echelons: a grandmaster and world champion; a master; a city champion; and an average club player.

De Groot enlisted another master to come up with different chess arrangements taken from obscure games, and then did something very similar to what Starkes would do with athletes thirty years later: he flashed the chessboards in front of the players for a matter of seconds and then asked them to reconstruct the scenario on a blank board. What emerged were differences between the skill levels, particularly the two masters and the two nonmasters, “so large and unambiguous that they hardly need further support,” de Groot wrote.

In four of the trials, the grandmaster re-created an entire board after viewing it for three seconds. The master was able to accomplish the same feat twice. Neither of the lesser players was able to reproduce any boards with complete accuracy. Overall, the grandmaster and master accurately replaced more than 90 percent of the pieces in the trials, while the city champion managed around 70 percent, and the club player only about 50 percent. In five seconds, the grandmaster understood more of the game situation than the club player did in fifteen minutes. In these tests, de Groot wrote, “it is evident that experience
is
the foundation of the superior achievements of the masters.” But it would be three decades before confirmation would come that what de Groot saw was indeed an acquired skill, and not the product of innately miraculous memory.

In a seminal study published in 1973, Carnegie Mellon University psychologists William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon—a future Nobel Prize winner—repeated the de Groot experiment, and added a twist: they tested the players’ recall for chessboards that contained random arrangements of pieces that could never occur in a game. When the players were given five seconds to study the random assortments and then asked to re-create them, the recall advantages of the
masters disappeared. Suddenly, their memories were just like those of average players.

In order to explain what they saw, Chase and Simon proposed a “chunking theory” of expertise, a pivotal idea in the study of games like chess, but also in sports, that helps explain what Janet Starkes found in her work with field hockey and volleyball players.

Chess masters and elite athletes alike “chunk” information on the board or the field. In other words, rather than grappling with a large number of individual pieces, experts unconsciously group information into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on patterns that they have seen before. Whereas the average club player in de Groot’s study was scanning and attempting to remember the arrangement of twenty individual chess pieces, the grandmaster needed to remember only a few chunks of several pieces each, because the relationships between the pieces had great meaning for him.
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A grandmaster is fluent in the language of chess and has a mental database of millions of arrangements of pieces that are broken down into at least 300,000 meaningful chunks, which are in turn grouped into mental “templates,” large arrangements of pieces (or players, in the case of athletes) within which some pieces can be moved around without rendering the entire arrangement unrecognizable. Where the novice is overwhelmed by new information and randomness, the master sees familiar order and structure that allows him to home in on information that is critical for the decision at hand. “What was once accomplished by slow, conscious deductive reasoning is now arrived at by fast, unconscious perceptual processing,” Chase and Simon wrote. “It is no mistake of language for the chess master to say that he ‘sees’ the right move.”

Studies that track the eye movements of experienced performers, whether chess players, pianists, surgeons, or athletes, have found that
as experts gain experience they are quicker to sift through visual information and separate the wheat from the chaff. Experts swiftly move their attention away from irrelevant input and cut to the data that is most important to determining their next move. While novices dwell on individual pieces or players, experts focus more attention on the spaces between pieces or players that are relevant to the unifying relationship of parts in the whole.

Most important in sports, perceiving order allows elite athletes to extract critical information from the arrangement of players or from subtle changes in an opponent’s body movements in order to make unconscious predictions about what will happen next.

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Bruce Abernethy was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s and an avid cricket player when he began to expand on Janet Starkes’s occlusion methods. Abernethy started out using Super 8mm film to capture video of cricket bowlers. He would show batters the video but cut it off before the throw and have them attempt to predict where the ball was headed. Unsurprisingly, expert players were better at predicting the path of the ball than novice players.

In the decades since, Abernethy, now associate dean for research at Queensland, has become exceedingly sophisticated at using occlusion tests to illuminate the basis of perceptual expertise in sports. Abernethy has moved his studies from the video screen to the field and the court. He has equipped tennis players with goggles that go opaque just as an opponent is about to strike the ball, and he has outfitted cricket batters with contact lenses with varied levels of blurriness.

The theme of Abernethy’s findings is that elite athletes need less time and less visual information to know what will happen in the future, and, without knowing it, they zero in on critical visual information, just like expert chess players. Elite athletes chunk information about bodies and player arrangements the way that grandmasters do with rooks and bishops. “We’ve tested expert batters in cricket where
all they see is the ball, the hand and wrist, and down to the elbow, and they still do better than random chance,” Abernethy says. “It looks bizarre, but there’s significant information between the hand and arm where experts get cues for making judgments.”

Top tennis players, Abernethy found, could discern from the minuscule pre-serve shifts of an opponent’s torso whether a shot was going to their forehand or backhand, whereas average players had to wait to see the motion of the racket, costing invaluable response time. (In badminton, if Abernethy hides the racket and entire forearm, it transforms elite players back into near novices, an indication that information from the lower arm is critical in that sport.)

Pro boxers have a similar skill. A Muhammad Ali jab took a mere forty milliseconds to arrive at the face of a victim standing a foot and a half away. Without anticipation based on body movements, Ali’s opponents would have been beaten down in round one, hit flush by every punch. (Ali’s skill at disguising the trajectory of a punch, and thus confounding the opponent’s anticipation, often meant they were finished a few rounds later anyway.)

Even skills that appear to be purely instinctive—jumping to rebound a basketball after a missed shot—are grounded in learned perceptual expertise and a database of knowledge on how subtle shifts of a shooter’s body will alter the trajectory of the ball. It’s a database that can be built only through rigorous practice.
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Without that database, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board, or Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch, stripped of the information that allows him to predict the future.
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Since Pujols had no mental database of Finch’s body movements, her pitch tendencies, or
even the spin of a softball to predict what might be coming, he was always left reacting at the last moment. And Pujols’s simple reaction speed is downright quotidian.

When scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tested him, Pujols, the greatest hitter of an era, was in the sixty-sixth percentile for simple reaction time compared with a random sample of college students.

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No one is born with the anticipatory skills required of an elite athlete. When Abernethy studied the eye movement patterns of elite and novice badminton players, he saw that the novices were already looking at the correct area of the opponent’s body, they just did not have the cognitive database needed to extract information from it. “If they did,” Abernethy says, “it would be a hell of a lot easier to coach them to become an expert. You could just say, ‘Look at the arm. Or for a baseball batter the real advice wouldn’t be ‘keep your eye on the ball,’ it would be ‘watch the shoulder.’ But actually, if you tell them that, it makes good players worse.”

As an individual practices a skill, whether it be hitting, throwing, or learning to drive a car, the mental processes involved in executing the skill move from the higher conscious areas of the brain in the frontal lobe, back to more primitive areas that control automated processes, or skills that you can execute “without thinking.”

In sports, brain automation is hyperspecific to the practiced skill, so specific that brain-imaging studies of athletes who train in a particular task show that activity in the frontal lobe is turned down only when they do that exact task. When runners are put on bicycles or arm bikes (where the pedals are moved with hands instead of feet) their frontal lobe activity increases compared with when they are running, even though cycling or arm cycling wouldn’t seem to require much conscious thought. The physical activity that one trains in is very specifically automated in the brain. To return to Abernethy’s point, “thinking” about an action is
the sign of a novice in sports, or a key to transforming an expert back into an amateur. (University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock has shown that a golfer can overcome pressure-induced choking in putting—paralysis by analysis, she calls it—by singing to himself, and thus preoccupying the higher conscious areas of the brain.)

Chunking and automation travel together on the march toward expertise. It is only by recognizing body cues and patterns with the rapidity of an unconscious process that Albert Pujols can determine whether he should swing at a ball when it has barely left the pitcher’s hand. The same goes for quarterback Peyton Manning. He cannot stop in the face of blitzing linebackers and consciously sort through the defensive alignments and patterns he learned in hours and years of practicing and studying game film. He has seconds to scan the field and throw. He is a grandmaster playing speed chess, only with linebackers and safeties in place of knights and pawns. (At the same time, NFL defensive coordinators are shuffling their players in an attempt to present Manning with a chessboard that looks misleading or random.)

The result of expertise study, from de Groot to Abernethy, can be summarized in a single phrase that played like a broken record in my interviews with psychologists who research expertise: “It’s software, not hardware.” That is, the perceptual sports skills that separate experts from dilettantes are learned, or downloaded (like software), via practice. They don’t come standard as part of the human machine. That fact helped spawn the most well-known theory in modern sports expertise, and one that has no place for genes.

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It started with musicians.

For a 1993 study, three psychologists turned to the Music Academy of West Berlin, which had a global reputation for producing world-class violinists.

The academy professors helped the psychologists identify ten of the “best” violin students, those who could become international soloists; ten students who were “good” and could make a living in a symphony orchestra; and ten lesser students they categorized as “music teachers,” because that would be their likely career path.

The psychologists conducted detailed interviews with all thirty academy students, and certain similarities emerged. All of the musicians from all three groups had started taking systematic lessons at around eight years old, and all had decided to become musicians around fifteen. And, despite their skill differences, the violinists from all three groups dedicated a whopping 50.6 hours each week to their music skills, whether taking music theory classes, listening to music, or practicing and performing.

Then a major difference surfaced. The amount of time that the violinists in the top two groups spent practicing on their own: 24.3 hours each week, compared with 9.3 for the bottom group. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the musicians rated solitary practice as the most important aspect of their training, albeit a much more taxing one than activities like group practice or playing for fun. Everything in the lives of the violinists in the top two groups seemed to orbit around training and recovery from training. They slept 60 hours each week, compared with 54.6 for the bottom group. But even the hours spent practicing alone didn’t differentiate the top two groups.

So the psychologists asked the violinists to make retrospective estimates of how much they had practiced since the day they began playing. The top violinists had begun ramping up their practice hours more quickly after they first took up the instrument. By age twelve, the best violinists had a head start of about 1,000 hours on the future teachers. And even though the top two groups were spending identical amounts of time on their craft at the academy, the future international soloists had accumulated, on average, 7,410 hours of solitary practice by age eighteen, compared with 5,301 hours for the “good” group, and 3,420 hours for the future teachers. “Hence,” the psychologists wrote, “there
is complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin.” In essence, they concluded that what might have been construed as innate musical talent was actually years of accumulated practice.