It is all in the mind – Part II
In Part I David Munge spoke to America’s Cup sailor Freddy Carr and Professor Vincent Walsh, head of Applied Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, about the dramatic ways that mental and physical demands on today’s Cup athletes have changed. This month Walsh focuses on mental performance and methods that may improve how your grey matter operates
The science Seahorse: You have lectured and written about ‘Is sport the brain’s biggest challenge?’ Prof Vincent Walsh: The view is often expressed that sports performance is either unintelligent or merely motor skill learn- ing, but really what we’re trying to do in all competitive sports is read other people’s minds, a very difficult thing to do while operating at a high level of skill. When a classical pianist does that we
think it’s really intelligent, but somehow not in sport. In the moment, under high pressure. The other thing about sport is you are trying to do this when your opponents are trying to stop you or you’re trying to stop them. It’s very difficult to think of anything outside the military that imposes all these constraints at the same time. So you might think that writing a
scientific article is a big challenge for the brain but no one is actually trying to stop
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you doing that. You don’t have to do it at a particular time. Or have thousands watching over your shoulder. It’s that con- fluence of high skill, high level of cognitive ability, high level of consequences and pre- cision of timing that really puts a big ask on all of our brain systems simultaneously. While we can think about other things
that people might think are a big challenge for the brain, like memory, well, actually your phone and Google have outstripped you there. But if we look at how robots move they’re certainly moving much better than they were a few years ago. In fact, movement, skilled movement with inten- tion, is a much bigger challenge than some of the things we think of as cognitively skilled. So it’s a bit of a knockback at the idea that sport isn’t for smart people. SH: In one of your reviews you described the performance of elite athletes as an opportunity for cognitive neuroscience to break through the barrier between lab research and application in the real world? VW: Sailors are particularly interesting because it’s a highly technical sport and they tend to be highly educated people. But there’s nothing that sailors need to do that anybody else doesn’t. What happens in lots of high-pressure sports is people are look- ing for an ‘answer’ to specific problems yet always it comes back to preparation. So again if we compare a sailor to a
musician, prepared for all the eventualities in a concerto, a sailor should have prepared for and practised all the sections, all the things, all the scenarios that can turn up in a race, particularly under stress. It is then only by being really ruthless with them- selves that people identify the conditions
under which they make bad decisions. Some people respond to physical fatigue
better than others. Some respond to mental stress better than others, some to emo- tional stress better than others, and some communicate better than others. By ruth- lessly identifying one’s weaknesses, and not always trying to work on them but just sharing them with your partner(s) in the boat, accepting what those weaknesses are might be a good place to start. But the work is never done. It’s as if
sometimes people expect psychological answers to be, as I said, an ‘answer’. But, just like your fitness, you have to turn up at the gym or the boat every day and you have to give thought to what your process is and the kinds of things you’ve prepared for and what you actually want to prepare for. SH: Following the last America’s Cup in 2017, Team New Zealand skipper Glenn Ashby told us how ‘we spent enough time working on how we communicated, plus we also spent a lot of time working on how we could keep the helmsman’s head out of the boat more than any other team. Very early on we knew that to get the best out of these boats the decision making will be so fast there will be occasions when no com- munication is possible – it had to be a split- second call by [helmsman] Pete Burling.’ Could virtual reality be of use in that area? VW: Virtual reality makes perfect sense if you can really make it work – look to Formula 1 for how that might be advanced. How, for example, an AC75 helm and crew can better prepare is by, and I’m sure they already do this… practis- ing every possible situation while getting into the habit of always looking forwards.
JESUS RENEDO
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