Virtual Reality and Speed in Sport

[Guest guest]

We often hear many theories and recommendations about reaction time and

agility training, especially regarding how the Ball and other balancing

devices can play a useful role in this regard, but, as I have commented often

before, we have to recognise that motor action implicates both real time and

virtual reality; feedforward and feedback, sensation, perception and

anticipation (a topic that is also discussed in " Supertraining " 2000 Ch 1).

The following article provides some fascinating insights on this issue.

<How we hit things like tennis balls when Consciousness takes half a second

to arrive

[some excerpts cited]

Libet's famous finding that a state of consciousness takes about

half a second to form - that's how long it takes the brain to complete all

the processing - poses a problem for sports enthusiasts. How does anyone ever

hit a ball? Anticipation is the answer - and anticipation is critical to the

understanding of consciousness itself.

McCrone, New Scientist October 1993

It is easy to see what makes a Gooch or a Borg a great champion as they turn

towards the oncoming ball, their faces dark with concentration. But the

McEnroes and Gowers of this world seem somehow different. While lesser

mortals grind out victories with patient shot-making, eliminating risks and

playing the percentages, the truly gifted seem to conjure with time. They

bring an unhurried genius to their game that allows them to play shots which

sometimes surprise even themselves for sheer audacity.

Or at least this is how it seems to the spectator in the stands. But is there

anything in the common belief that some players are blessed with infinite

time? That some genetic advantage allows a few lucky individuals to react as

if the rest of the world were moving in slow motion?

Dr Bruce Abernethy, a sports psychologist at the University of Queensland in

Australia, believes there must be: " You would think there would have to be

something innate in the make-up of a person like a McEnroe because a lot of

the population could practice as much as he did, yet never reach his level of

performance. But it's not easy to say what it is that makes the difference -

you would be talking about doing something like twin studies to find out.

Also, it's not likely to be any one simple answer but a mixture of many

factors, " he says.

While sports psychologists may not have a ready explanation for sporting

genius, they are beginning to turn up a few clues - and also a few surprises.

One surprise has been that raw reaction times do not appear to be the answer.

The simplest assumption would be that fluent performers have more time to

react because their nervous systems are literally quicker. Yet when elite

athletes have been tested in standard reaction time tests - such as having to

hit a switch as soon as it lights up - they are not noticeably faster than

average.

" There is surprisingly little difference between top class sportsmen and

good, fit ordinary people. In laboratory tests of reactions using unskilled

tasks, most people show much the same reaction time of about 200 milliseconds

[a fifth of a second]. So top class athletes don't appear to be tapping into

some generalised superiority, " says Dr McLeod of Oxford University's

Department of Experimental Psychology.

Even more surprising for those expecting an explanation in terms of raw speed

of thought, other research has shown that it takes nearly half a second for

our minds to become properly conscious of fast-moving events. It is known

from EEGs and other measurements of the brain's electrical activity that it

takes only about 20 milliseconds for nerve traffic to travel the distance

between the sense organs and the brain. However reaction time tests show that

it takes a minimum of 100 milliseconds before the brain can produce even the

simplest reflexive action and nearer 200 milliseconds to make the more

complex judgement involved in hitting a light switch. But research by

University of California physiologist, Dr Libet, suggests that

becoming consciously aware of an event takes even longer (see below). His

experiments show that it takes between 400 and 500 milliseconds for the brain

to complete all the filtering and recognition processes needed to produce a

settled field of awareness.

What this means is that consciousness lags behind reality by up to half a

second and so any rapid reactions shown by athletes must be achieved by

sub-conscious processing. Given that the time window in which a cricket or

tennis player must make contact with a fast-moving ball is about five

milliseconds - any sooner or later with the swing and the ball will be mishit

- the mystery becomes not that some people are so skillful, but that anyone

ever manages to strike a ball at all.

To investigate where the advantage of elite performers lies, sports

psychologists begin by making a distinction between input and output, between

perceptual and motor processes. It is assumed that the gifted either manage

to make quicker sense of what they are seeing, or else they are able to

unleash a more reliable and smoothly co-ordinated response - or, of course,

both.

As said, it is known that top flight performers are not significantly faster

than the average in their raw reaction times - scores vary by about 25

milliseconds and there is no significant clustering of the skilled at the top

of this range. But equally there is plenty of evidence that players do use

anticipation to quicken their responses and that they have a superior ability

to read the game......

The advantage of an expert eye was first demonstrated away from the sports

pitch in intellectual games like chess. Research showed that grandmaster

level players seem able to sum up a board at a glance. Given five seconds to

look at a complex position, top players were more than 90 percent accurate in

remembering the arrangement of the pieces, compared to good club players who

could manage only 50 percent accuracy. It seems that grandmasters could

" chunk " their perception of the board - breaking what they saw into a small

number of meaningful units - so increasing the apparent bandwidth of their

processing. Proof that it was the eye of experience that counted - rather

than some generalised memory ability - lay in the fact that if the position

of the chess pieces was random, not taken from a real game, the performance

of both groups fell to the same level.

Over the past decade, sports psychologists have taken games such as hockey,

basketball and soccer, testing players with slides of meaningful and random

field positions, and found the same perceptual chunking process at work. It

seems that while information may not enter the brain of top performers

significantly faster, where the novice experiences only a blur of details,

the expert sees a well-ordered set of possibilities. Such an ability to read

a game allows the expert to anticipate and so paper over the split second gap

that exists between reality and the brain's perceptual processes...........

The interesting thing about such anticipation is that players are not

conscious of the cues they are responding to. Abernethy says players go by a

gut feeling ........

Top athletes become so good at anticipation that their responses can seem

almost instantaneous, as if no reaction gap existed. However, players can be

cruelly exposed whenever a ball or opponent does something unexpected. Dr

McLeod of Oxford University carried out one of the best-known

experiments to demonstrate the " incompressibility " of the blindspot in human

reactions.

McLeod got three England batsmen, Allan Lamb, Wayne Larkins and Willey,

to face a bowling machine on a special matting pitch. Under the matting he

placed a number of dowel rods to make the ball seam unpredictably. What

McLeod found was that if the ball bounced sharply sideways closer than 200

milliseconds to the bat, then the batsmen would mis-play the ball every time.

No correction was possible.....

[Now for some more information on the role of the cerebellum, which I also

discussed in recent letters as no longer being regarded as a simply passive

producer of motor information ---- Mel Siff]

Dr Stein, a physiologist at Oxford University, says in the early stages

of learning a skill, the cortex and basal ganglia - roughly speaking, the

higher conscious part of the brain - are most active. But as the skill is

mastered, these areas drop out of the picture and control is taken over by

the cerebellum. The cerebellum used to be thought of as just a memory store

for motor routines - a blind, inanimate warehouse which produced stereotyped

responses when triggered by a command from higher consciousness. However

there is evidence to show that the cerebellum has considerable - if

sub-conscious - intelligence. The cortex may set the global goals but the

cerebellum can improvise to meet them....Whatever produces a skilled

cerebellum, the difference is easily noticed. Elite tennis and cricket

players never seem to have to remind themselves to move their feet or turn

their shoulders because these preparatory movements appear to be so fully

under automatic cerebellar control. Their bodies snap into position of their

own accord, leaving them poised to strike a clean shot. But weekend hackers

find themselves forever wrestling with their own limbs, mechanically trying

to get all the parts in the right place, then finding they are forced to make

a cramped swipe because the ball is already upon them.

Somewhat unkindly, sports psychologists describe the hacker's plight as one

of near skeletomuscular anarchy. Yet measurements of muscle and nerve

activity show this to be an apt description. Where the nervous system of a

skilled performer delivers small, accurate bursts of instructions to the

limbs, producing a smooth response, that of the unskilled fires off blasts of

often contradictory messages, creating a jerky, awkward movement as opposing

muscles end up pushing and pulling at the same time.

Putting all this evidence together, sports science still cannot say precisely

what makes a McEnroe or a Maradona, an Ali or an Agassi......

However, it seems that gifted performers are better at using anticipation to

cover for a lagging brain. By reading their opponent's game, the skilled

prime themselves to react to what they imagine will happen rather than

waiting the 200 to 500 milliseconds it takes to actually become aware of what

is happening. They create a virtual reality which allows them to act as if

consciousness was indeed instantaneous.

[Note that, although the author has concentrated his attention to ball

sports, we need to appreciate that the same effective use of " virtual

reality " and anticipation can play a vital role in all ballistic and

explosive sports, including weightlifting, martial arts and gymnastics.

Thus, in executing the snatch, the competent lifter who has a generally high

rate of success anticipates exactly when to execute crucial stages of the

lift. For example, the lifter who often loses the snatch during the

transition from a very adequate " pull " to the " drop and thrust under " is not

doing so because of lack of momentum, as some people erroneously believe, but

more because of " virtual reality " and anticipatory problems. This is a very

neglected aspect of training science and it is not being addressed to any

meaningful extent by the current overemphasis on dubious stability and

" functional training " drills. It is apparent that " gifted " athletes are a

conjuror of time, as is pointed out in this article. They buy extra time with

anticipation and avoid losing time by automating their responses. Mel Siff]

..... Experiments suggesting that conscious awareness lags behind reality by

as much as half a second have been around for several decades now. But so

difficult to stomach are the implications that many philosophers and

psychologists still dismiss the results out of hand.....

The picture emerging from Libet's work and other related research is that

sensations reach the brain within 20 milliseconds, but it takes at least 100

milliseconds for the brain to start to produce a reaction - and even this is

of the well-rehearsed, sub-conscious variety where the brain has been primed

as to the form of sensation to expect (such as a tennis serve heading towards

the backhand) and so is able to react with the minimum of sensory processing.

For novel or unexpected events, the brain has to spend up to 500 milliseconds

before it produces the high-level settled picture that we call conscious

experience....

-------------

Dr Mel C Siff

Denver, USA

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Supertraining/