Scientists are studying elite athlete’s brains to determine if it can be rewired to become a better athlete. Turns out it can, but do with thinks it’s cheating?

Would it be cheating for a tennis player to wear a portable electrode as she practiced her serve? She would, after all, just be hastening the same changes that come with ordinary practice. Today’s controversies over doping in sports focus mainly on muscles. But tomorrow we may have to decide how much athletes should be allowed to take advantage of neuroscience.

On a couple of occasions I’ve been accused of being a bit too lackadaisical with my approach to things. I like to marinate and let things come to me and take their natural course. It seems it could be the Buddhist in me. Or I could be a perfect fit for the Los Angeles Lakers. My philosophy has always been that I work best when I’m as relaxed as possible. I hate getting wound up and stressed out; I make mistakes and rush things. And, it seems, the Lakers agree.

Let’s take the game tomorrow night. A lot of people think it’s a big game. … The purpose is to give yourself an opportunity to get your best performance. It’s not about winning. There’s a difference. You want your best performance. You want your teammates’ best performance. And if you provide your best performance chances are you will win. But in order to have your best performance, you have to be relaxed.

I can’t decide if I think Ben Crane’s mental approach to the game of golf is on a whole new level or if I want to tell him to “quit thinking and hit damn the ball”. I think it’s no coincidence that he is one of the PGA Tour’s slowest players.

“Now the left brain really should be retired, and then the right brain you should just relax and try to execute through there,’” Crane explained. “So then it should be very quiet through my brain, just going through my alignment checks, my waggle progression — hopefully that’s not too long — and then the imprint, which is just rehearsing as if I had done it perfectly.”

Belichick doesn’t just work his players hard. He works them smart.

As I’ve read about Bill Belichick, I’ve become more impressed with what he’s accomplished and how he goes about to accomplish it (quick link to his influence on the Baltimore Ravens draft strategy). Much of his preparation in practice is based on situational work.

“He just does his homework, and puts players in those uncomfortable situations in July and August, so in October, November, December, when the games mean the most, it’s not the first time they’ve been in them and it’s second nature.”

I think this type of practice (among a dozen other methods) is what sets the Patriots apart from most NFL teams. I will say though that it takes time to implement this sort of thing and part of the reason why many of the Belichick coach disciples have flamed out so quickly.

Living in Denver, it’s been interesting watching Josh McDaniels take over the Broncos. I thought he came on too strong at first and I think learned his lesson with the Cutler thing and has balanced his “Belichick Influences” quite well (hence the 5-0 start).

ESPN mentioned the following in one of their Weekend Dime columns a while back:

Danny Ainge, meanwhile, is said to be a longtime Iverson fan, with AI apparently possessing the Michael Jordan brain type and with the Celts’ personnel boss known to be a big believer in brain-typing.”

Reading this, I didn’t quite know what was meant by brain-typing, so I did some sleuthing to learn more. Fascinating stuff. Here are a few links and blurbs that stuck out at me.

Larry Bird and Michael Jordan are BEIR brain types.

Their inborn design is described by one of Brain Typing’s 16 acronyms: BEIR. “B” represents a genetic predisposition for the Back of the brain where deep concentration and intensity reside as opposed to the front’s active and energetic state, which minimizes contemplation. “E” stands for Empirical—relying on sight and observation instead of concepts and theory. “I” signifies the Inanimate world which is more interested in logic, systems, and things than relating to people, pursuing harmony, or trusting feelings. Lastly, “R” equates to the Right brain, the hemisphere adept at peripheral vision and smooth, adaptable motor movements in contrast to the left hemisphere that specializes in tunnel vision and more mechanical, preplanned motor movements. Athletes born with the BEIR Brain Type can develop superior hand-eye coordination and athletic skills. This design is debatably the superior athlete in most sports.

Pretty interesting stuff. Jon Niednagel started this phenomenon and is famous for his prediction the Peyton Manning would be an NFL star and Ryan Leaf would perform poorly. For a bit more on Niednagel, here’s a transcript from a 2002 episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines. It touches on Ainge’s belief in Niednagel’s craft.

DANNY AINGE, PHOENIX SUNS HEAD COACH – You can take Red Auerbach, Jerry West, Phil Jackson –I’d take Jon Niednagel.

Reading this article on Michael Jordan’s retirement speech and if there really is a way for him to come back to basketball at age 50, I found the part on purposeful hallucination to be the most interesting.

Michael Jordan knows purposeful hallucinations. His Hall of Fame induction speech tells us as much. Jordan might be alone among humans in having essentially zero claim to being an underdog. He had, it seemed, purposefully hallucinated a world in which he had not won everything on the earth, a world in which he actually had meaningful rivals and a world in which he still had a ton to prove. That night he skewered, teased, showed up or taunted just about anyone who ever doubted him.

There isn’t much out there on purposeful hallucination, but I think it’s a more sophisticated term for visualization. Regardless, I’d like to hear more about purposeful hallucination…seems very interesting.

Also mentioned is a New York Times piece on Jury Robic, an ultra-endurance athlete, who is one of the athletes that shows muscles DON’T only perform for a set amount of time.

Maybe we will see MJ at 50 in the NBA. I, for one, would not mind.

Fascinating stuff with the success rate of a penalty kick in correlation with how quickly you take the kick after the ref’s whistle. Makes a lot of sense when you think about the reasoning.

Sports psychologist Geir Jordet and his colleagues have found that, on average, the less time a player takes to respond to the referee’s whistle before running towards the ball to take the penalty, the more likely they are to fail to score.

The researchers say the finding is consistent with the idea that choking is a form of “self-regulatory breakdown”. In other words, an intense threat to our reputation can cause so much distress that we do whatever we can to end the situation as quickly as possible, even if taking this action is harmful to our performance.

Roger Federer is one of the few athletes I’m routinely amazed by. I’ve been watching him throughout the US Open and have been wondering about his training regimen. I found this article about him conserving his focus for select moments during a match. I’ve lifted some blurbs that are great demonstrations for how he mentally plays the game.

he chooses to focus selectively, and focuses intensely once he does.

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Clearly, Federer was not too stressed about losing the first set, which demonstrates that he has gotten to a special mental state: acceptance of what has happened combined with confidence about what will happen.

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It’s not about the other guy, it’s about what you know you will summon from yourself at times of need.  I suppose winning as much as those two guys have builds something more than confidence, something like faith.

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he uses his mind to make sure he’s ready to concentrate at those crucial moments he is so good at identifying, and once there, doing what comes to him.  That’s what I think he meant when he said, after Isner, “it’s all in the mind and it’s all in the moment.”

Jonah Lehrer summarizes a couple links about athletes choking. Good quotes and articles to read if you’re into that sort of thing. This David Foster Wallace blurb touches on the deliberate practice versus natural talent debate.

It’s not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals,” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even – and for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially – under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

Lifted from Kottke, this little blurb about Jack Nicklaus and dreamful attraction is quite interesting.

Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn’t holding the club the way I’ve actually been holding it lately. [...] So when I came to the course yesterday morning I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a 68 yesterday and a 65 today.