“Sports Mythbusters” is a column by Sammie Yen about common stereotypes in and around sports culture.
When you think of an outstanding athletic performance, who or what do you think of?
Perhaps the image that crosses your mind is when Padres third baseman Manny Machado launched a seemingly impossible rocket of a throw across the diamond for an out.
Or maybe you reminisce of that time Damian Lillard sunk a buzzerbeater from light-years away (really, the Portland Trail Blazers logo) to advance his team to the 2019 Western Conference Semifinals.
Maybe you remember when New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. made arguably the best catch in football history against the Cowboys in 2014.
These exceptional athletes undergo intensive physical training to reach capabilities that exceed those of the average human. However, what we see in these moments – extraordinary athletic ability – is not the full picture.
What do people overlook in elite athletes the most? The intelligence factor.
Athletes must absorb key information while filtering out unimportant stimuli. An elite pitcher may focus only on the location of a catcher’s mitt and the strength of the wind, while a nonathlete may take note of more irrelevant information on the baseball diamond.
This athletic advantage is called “changing the breadth of visual attention,” or the ability to focus on relevant information to an action while ignoring distractions. Being able to narrow one’s breadth of visual attention is essential for athletes in crunch time. When an elite basketball player has to make free throws to win the game, they are able to tamp down external background noise — like a jeering crowd. This is an enhanced ability that any human can benefit from in order to better understand one’s sensory environment.
Athletes also have little time to make complicated decisions. These decisions, both conscious and unconscious, are more than just products of an automatic muscle memory; a player’s actions are dynamic strategies that vary by the challenge, according to New York Times science journalist Carl Zimmer.
As no two offensive or defensive plays are identical, athletes constantly engage with new obstacles. During these new challenges, an athlete’s brain will set commands to fulfill a particular goal or goals. If these ambitions aren’t successfully executed, the brain will adjust its original plan to avoid errors.
Experts have also found elite athletes to be better at processing information and predicting results. A study done in Italy gathered professional basketball players and nonathletes together to watch footage of free throw shooting. The video would pause right after the ball left the shooter’s hands, and both groups would predict whether or not the shot would go in. The pros guessed with around 75% accuracy, while nonathletes guessed with around 40% accuracy.
Furthermore, the researchers observed the professional players had relatively high activity in the area of the brain connected to hand and arm muscles as they watched each video. This suggests they were mentally taking the shot themselves, using previous experience to determine the outcome. Comparatively, the nonathletes had much less brain activity in those regions.
If you’re somehow still doubting the role of the brain in sports, think of someone like LeBron James, a dominant force in the NBA. At 6-foot-9 and 250 pounds, he is more than physically capable to be a basketball player.
But this video’s first few seconds shows James throwing a no-look assist. His pass demonstrates more than just physical ability. He runs a fastbreak play in mere seconds, but there is so much happening in his brain in those moments. He needed to predict what his teammates would do and how his opponent would react, all the while computing and processing the output of his actions.
It’s remarkable when you take the time to think about it, especially compared to the motor processing of something as low-pressure as, say, reading a digital sports column.
To put it plainly, sports is the perfect intersection between physical and mental aptitude. Not only that, but it carries the same type of complexity that we see in other hobbies, like listening to music or visiting museums. We’re drawn to the intricacy of a soccer match just as we’re innately drawn to an incredible piece of art or musical composition. In a way, athletes are orchestrators, architects and artists on an unconventional stage.
While we don’t necessarily think of sports as the most intellectual pursuits, we should give more credit to elite athletes. You can’t have excellence without intelligence.
“Sports Mythbusters” runs every other Friday.