WHEN ROGER FEDERER serves to Rafael Nadal, he hits the ball at around 135 miles per hour from about 78 feet away. That means less than half a second for the ball to reach Nadal. (Around 400 milliseconds, to be specific—a millisecond is 1,000th of a second.) That is very quick indeed. It is about as long as it takes you to blink your eye.
The figures are very similar in other fast-reaction sports. In major league baseball the pitchers average over 90 mph from 60.5 feet away. In cricket the batsmen are less than 66 feet distant and the top bowlers can reach 100 mph. The proportions work out similarly in squash and table tennis. Well under half a second every time. It is surprising that athletes in these sports manage to see the ball at all, let alone craft their responses to its trajectory.
These numbers might appear to support the Yoga theory of sports psychology. There simply doesn’t seem enough time for deliberate thought to influence your performance in fast-reaction games. So surely the best strategy will be to rely on your automatic reactions. If you try to control your behaviour consciously, you will only interfere with the instantaneous reflexes you have built up in thousands of hours of practice.
But this is a fallacy. Even in the fastest sports, it is crucial for performers to fix on a strategy consciously and make sure they keep it firmly in mind. The points made in the last chapter continue to apply. While fast-reaction athletes mustn’t think about the details of their movements, they must still think about which skills they are aiming to deploy. If they await the oncoming ball with minds cleared of all thought, they can well end up doing the wrong thing.
Still, how can the athletes’ conscious mind-set possibly make any difference, in sports where the ball arrives in the blink of an eye? Won’t the time for thought have passed, once the moment for action arrives? To fully understand why conscious focus does matter, even in fast-reaction sports, we first need to appreciate how the athletes cope with their extreme temporal constraints. Understanding the mechanics of fast-reaction sports will deepen our understanding of where the Yoga theory works and where it goes wrong.
Over the past two or three decades, sports scientists have learned much about the special techniques athletes use to intercept fast-approaching balls. This is a fascinating topic in its own right, and this chapter will explore many of these findings.
An initial question is how the athletes manage to hit the ball in the first place. A reaction time of 400 milliseconds seems to take us beyond the limits of possibility. Once we are counting in milliseconds, our brains and bodies take time to get things done. Even the simplest response to a straightforward stimulus eats up time.
Take a sprinter’s reaction to the starter’s gun. Modern technology can tell us exactly how long after the report the runner starts pressing on the blocks. When Usain Bolt set his world record of 9.58 seconds for the 100 meters in 2009, his reaction time was 0.146 seconds. That wasn’t outstanding—some sprinters can get down to 120 milliseconds—but it was good enough for a world record that still stands at the time of writing. (Any reaction time under 100 milliseconds will get the runner disqualified, on the grounds that it’s not physically feasible to respond so fast.)
Sprinters aren’t doing anything complicated when they start. They only have to push off once they hear a bang. But, even so, Bolt’s reaction time of 146 milliseconds constitutes a good proportion of the 400 milliseconds available for Nadal to respond to Federer’s serve.
So let’s analyse the more complex business of intercepting a fast-moving ball with a bat or racket. Once the receiver has selected which shot to play, it takes about 25 milliseconds for the nerve messages to travel from the motor cortex to the arms and legs. And then it takes about another 150 milliseconds actually to swing the bat or racket and, with luck, make contact with the ball.
That’s 175 milliseconds, nearly half the time available, to make contact with the ball once the athletes have committed themselves to which shot to play. But before their shot-selection, of course, they first need to see where the ball is going.
Now the story gets puzzling. It is generally agreed by vision scientists that it takes at least half a second, from the time light rays hit our eyes, for the nerve messages to reach the higher levels of the visual cortex and form a clearly focused picture of the objects in our environment.
These numbers don’t add up. If it takes 500 milliseconds for the ball to come into clear focus, and another nearly 175 milliseconds to execute the shot, that’s a lot more than the 400 milliseconds it takes for the ball to whiz past you.
The solution to this conundrum is that the athletes don’t wait until they see the ball clearly before making their move. Instead they use initial clues and fragments of visual information to direct their movements, long before the ball has come into full focus.
The sports scientists now know a lot about the way fast-reaction athletes manage to start moving so quickly. One finding is that athletes who hit moving balls do not keep their eyes on the ball throughout its flight. Instead they follow its path for about 100–200 milliseconds after it is projected towards them, and then “saccade” their eyes—that is, shoot them forward—to an anticipated later point in the ball’s path.
In games where the ball typically bounces before it is hit, like tennis and cricket, the athlete’s eyes will jump ahead to its predicted landing point. In baseball the batter’s eyes similarly saccade to the latter part of the ball’s trajectory. The more skilled the players, the sooner their eyes will leave the ball’s initial path, and jump forward to its predicted later position.
To anybody who has played fast-reaction games, this may seem surprising, not to say incredible. The first thing youngsters are taught is to “keep your eye on the ball”. And certainly, when you are actually playing, your conscious awareness is of a ball moving continuously through the air. Ted Williams, the last man to average over .400 in a baseball season, was reputedly able to watch the stitching on the baseball as it came towards him.
In 2010 a distinguished Australian international batsman was in the audience at a Cricket Australia talk about the research into eye movements. “I don’t believe a word of it”, he expostulated, when the speaker explained about the saccading eyes. The cricketer was sure that he never took his eye off the ball when batting, and was conscious of it throughout its trajectory.
Perhaps the distinguished Australian was more surprised than he should have been. It is familiar knowledge in vision science that, when humans are surveying a scene, their eyes are constantly skipping around in order to bring different items into central focus.
For example, as you are reading these words right now, your eyes are unconsciously making a series of jerky movements to help you see different areas of the page with high resolution. Still, your conscious experience when you view the page is not of a series of jerky visual fragments. Rather your brain mechanisms build up a representation of a stable display of words, and that is what you consciously experience.
In the same way, fast-reacting athletes will start with fragmentary information gleaned from their saccading eyes, and construct an overall representation of the ball moving continuously through the air—even complete with stitches in some cases. But this construction takes time, much longer than it takes the ball to arrive, and is no use to the athletes in selecting their shot. Instead their bodies respond directly to the initial jerky information delivered by their eyes, long before consciousness can focus it into a clear picture of the ball.
Somewhat surprisingly, there is evidence that the very top athletes are distinguished from other professionals, not just by the speed with which their eyes leave the ball after release, but by continuing their eye saccades right up to the impact with the ball. One Australian study showed that two elite international cricketers watched the ball right onto the bat, whereas two journeyman professionals followed it only to the bounce.
Another study compared action photographs of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal with those of a number of lesser professionals. It turned out that Federer and Nadal, but not the others, also turned their heads and eyes to focus on the point of contact between racket and ball. It’s the same in baseball. Ted Williams is sadly beyond the reach of modern sports science, but pictures of him and other top hitters show them watching the ball right onto the bat.
What’s surprising about these findings is that watching the ball as it makes impact can’t possibly make any difference to the execution of the shot. Even if the brain is taking short-cuts, reacting to visual clues before they contribute to any focused awareness, there’s just no time. Remember that it takes Usain Bolt 140-plus milliseconds just to push off his blocks in response to a loud bang. Any visual information gathered from the last few feet of the ball’s flight will arrive far too late to help the shot.
It seems that the elite athletes benefit from watching the point of contact, not because it gives them any extra information, but because it makes them keep their head still. Hitting is essentially a matter of balance and timing, and it doesn’t help if your head is waggling around.
When Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play their shots, they continue to fix their gaze on the point of contact for some while even after the ball has been dispatched. These geniuses have the ability to get themselves into the perfect position to hit their shot, and they make absolutely sure they don’t lose it too soon.
Keeping your head still is the key to success in many sports. Golf is the antithesis of a fast-reaction game, but while we are on the topic I can’t resist repeating this advice from the golf writer Peter Dobereiner:
“Golf instruction books can be immensely valuable to the novice. What you do is balance it on top of your head and then swing the club as hard as you can. Once you have mastered the art of taking a full vicious swing without dislodging the book, you can play golf.”
Of course, saccading eyes and head positions are no part of what the athletes think about when they execute their shots. These physical techniques all operate below the level of consciousness. It could scarcely be otherwise. There’s just no time to think about what you’re doing when you hit a ball within 400 milliseconds.
A recent study by the Australian sports psychologist David Mann provides further confirmation for the unconscious nature of fast sporting skills. It is well known that the human visual brain analyses information via two distinct pathways—a fast dorsal (or “where”) stream, which is largely unconscious and guides immediate physical movements like reaching and grasping, and a slower ventral (or “what”) stream, which allows us to consciously recognize objects and classify them.
Given the timing involved, fast-reaction sporting skills must come under the control of the unconscious dorsal stream. Rafa Nadal’s first imperative is to ascertain where the ball is going and intercept it with his racket, not to classify it consciously. But this leads to a surprising prediction. Since the fast dorsal stream has only limited visual acuity, bad eyesight shouldn’t make much difference to hitting a fast-approaching ball.
Mann decided to test this prediction for cricket. He used contact lenses to reduce the visual acuity of expert batsmen from 20/20 vision to 20/60, 20/120, and 20/180. (20/20 is normal. 20/180 means that things 20 feet away look as blurred to you as they do to most people at 180 feet.)
Mann discovered that for bowling of up to 70 miles per hour batting was hampered only by the highest degree of 20/180 blurring. That’s legal blindness. Anything short of that left batting performance unimpaired.
Even for bowling of up to 80 miles per hour—a respectable pace even at international level—the 20/60 lenses did nothing to affect performance. Most countries won’t give you a driving license if you have 20/60 vision. But it seems that this is no handicap if you want to hit fast-medium bowlers.
The significance of good vision for fast-reaction sports performance is not well understood. As a group, major league baseball players have unusually good eyesight: surveys suggest that contemporary players average as high as 20/12. This might seem inconsistent with Mann’s findings that blurry vision does not affect batting performance. But it is not to be taken for granted that the reason elite baseballers have unusually sharp eyesight is that this helps them to hit major league pitchers.
One possibility is that their visual acuity—seeing things in sharp focus—is not itself a cause of strong batting performance, but is correlated with other things that are. The 20/12 vision of the baseball players does mean that on average they have exceptional optical mechanisms. But these might matter in other ways than bringing balls into sharp focus—for instance, by ensuring that their dorsal “where” visual streams work faster.
Another possibility is that selection for sharp focus happened much earlier, when the athletes initially learned to play baseball. When kids first start hitting, they begin by swinging very deliberately at slow practice balls that they are consciously keeping in sight. Those with sharp eyesight would inevitably have developed much faster that their more optically limited peers.
I favour a yet further hypothesis. I suspect that sharp eyesight is important because it helps you to anticipate what pitch is coming. Anticipation is a crucial factor across a large number of sports. The very best players are often said to “have a lot of time”.
Roger Federer is balanced and ready, pretty much whatever shot is hit at him. The most elegant cricket batsman—David Gower, Brian Lara, Mark Waugh—never seem to be hurried as they play their shots. I haven’t watched much ice hockey, but I do remember once seeing Wayne Gretzky play. It was easy to pick out The Great One, even among the padding and helmets. He was the one playing in slow motion.
You might think that these gifted athletes are distinguished by their exceptional reactions, that their eye-limb coordination is superior to the average. But that isn’t how it works. In simple reaction tests—pressing a button as soon as a bell rings, for example—elite athletes typically score little better than the average person. What marks them out from the crowd isn’t that they move faster once their opponents have launched the ball, but rather that they know well beforehand where the ball is going to go.
Where the top athletes really stand out is in tests that check their reactions before they see the trajectory of the ball. In a typical such test, the athletes will wear special glasses that can be occluded by a switch operated by the experimenter. They watch opponents readying themselves to deliver the ball, but their vision is blocked at the moment the ball is projected. For example, a tennis player might observe an opponent preparing to serve, but the glasses will be occluded as the server’s racket hits the ball.
Elite athletes far outscore lesser performers on these tests—they have a pretty good idea where the ball is going before it starts on its path. Research shows a consistent pattern across tennis, squash, soccer, baseball, and cricket. The best players anticipate the ball’s trajectory from the posture and other bodily features of their opponents.
Perhaps this is where very good eyesight makes a difference. Some of the visual information used by the athletes is fairly coarse-grained, concerning chest position, flexing of legs, and so on. But they also use finer detail, especially in baseball and cricket, about the way the ball is gripped and the angle of their opponent’s wrist. Getting these details right at a distance of sixty feet calls for sharp eyes.
The role of anticipation in elite sport was highlighted a few years ago when the USA Olympics softball star Jennie Finch had a chance to pitch at some major league batters in a 2004 celebrity softball game. You’d think that her stuff would have been easy for them. Her pitches came at up to 70 miles per hour from 43 feet away, which gives about the normal 400 milliseconds until arrival, but in addition a softball is about a full third bigger than a baseball in diameter. Even so, the major league stars couldn’t lay a bat on her. Albert Pujols and Mike Piazza whiffed repeatedly at her underarm pitches.
Their trouble was that they couldn’t read her in the same way as normal baseball pitchers. Pujols and Piazza had spent years facing every species of big league hurler, and knew how to glean all kinds of information from the way they set themselves to throw the ball. But this didn’t help them with Finch.
They had no stored knowledge about the variations in her action, and so performed no better than softball novices. Finch’s normal female opponents did much better, because they know how to read the clues implicit in her whirling underarm deliveries. But the big-time major leaguers had no idea what to look for.
As before, reading your opponents’ intentions from bodily postures and hand angles is an entirely unconscious skill. Until the sports scientists came along, nobody had any idea that this was how it worked, least of all the athletes themselves. This provides yet further confirmation that hitting balls in fast-reaction sports operates below the level of conscious awareness. The athletes start moving prior to the ball’s release, their eyes jag around, they swing before the ball is in focus, it all happens in the blink of an eye.
Let us return to the Yoga theory of athletic performance. At first pass, the reflex speeds involved in fast-reaction sports might seem to support the Yoga theory that athletes will do best to empty their minds completely and let their unconscious reactions take over. If their shot selection operates below the level of consciousness, how can it help for them to think about what they are doing? Won’t this simply interfere with the smooth operation of their automatic routines?
Not at all. The Yoga theory is still ignoring a crucial mental dimension of performance, even in the context of fast-reaction sports. Sure, there are plenty of sports where there’s no time to think about what to do in the heat of the action. But even then the athletes must keep their plan firmly in mind. If they don’t, they will end up doing the wrong thing.
Take an example from baseball. Suppose you are the third baseman, with a single runner on third, and the ball comes at you. What is your play? Well, it depends on how many outs there are. If there are two outs, you must immediately throw hard to first to make sure you get the batter out. But if there is none or one outs, you must first pause momentarily and hold the runner on third, to stop him making a dash for home, before you throw to first.
These are fast, trained reactions. Once you’ve fielded the ball, there’s no time to think about what to do, you just do it. Still, you need to know how many outs there are in order to respond correctly. It is no good emptying your mind and letting your physical environment tell you what to do. The physical setup on the field can be exactly the same whether there are one or two outs. To react correctly, you must hold the score in mind, and respond accordingly. After all, it is not uncommon, even at the highest levels, for a fielder to start daydreaming, or become agitated, or otherwise lose concentration, and make the wrong play as a result of forgetting the score.
It is pretty clear, once you think about it, that even the fastest sporting reactions are often controlled by the conscious mind. Baseball batting provides another obvious illustration. Any half-way competent batter will set himself to swing more readily on some counts than others.
Maybe Yogi Berra really couldn’t do this—he is widely regarded as the most eager bad ball hitter in baseball history—but I rather doubt it. Even he must have known that it’s not a good idea to swing at a bad pitch on a 3-0 count with the bases loaded and one run to win in the last innings.
It’s the same in tennis. You might decide that your opponent’s backhand is weak and resolve to play on it whenever possible. On another occasion you might opt to concentrate on slicing to your opponent’s forehand. While you are in the middle of a rally, you will be on auto-pilot, responding directly to the ball’s trajectory. But how you respond will depend on your earlier tactical resolutions.
Batsmen in cricket need to suit their mode of batting to the circumstances, batting defensively or attackingly as the situation of the game demands. Sometimes they will cut out particular shots, avoiding the hook or leaving wide balls outside off stump, or alternatively look to play specific attacking shots against specific bowlers.
In the end, nobody can seriously doubt that conscious decisions often make a difference to how athletes respond to fast-approaching balls. Even so, there remains something very puzzling here. How can conscious decisions make a difference to fast automatic reactions?
Note that we are not talking about dumb premeditation. Good batters or tennis players don’t generally commit themselves to some particular response before they’ve seen what’s coming at them. Their shot selection still depends on the ball’s delivery and approaching trajectory. But on different occasions they will consciously adopt different strategies, so that a ball that previously produced one response will now call forth a different one.
It seems almost paradoxical. We’re talking about eye-blink-fast unconscious reactions, mediated by neural channels that must necessarily bypass anything like conscious decision-making. Yet which shot is prompted in that flash of time is also somehow influenced by the athlete’s earlier conscious thinking.
To resolve this conundrum, we need to go back to the distinction between skills and their components. To repeat, skills are things you know how to do without thinking about how you do them. Their components are the constituent movements that compose those skills.
In the last chapter I stressed how athletes need to hold in mind which skills they are aiming to perform. But they mustn’t let themselves think about the components of those skills, lest they reduce themselves to the level of a learner.
What the focus on fast-reaction sports has now highlighted is that athletic skills are often complex, involving a range of different responses to different possible stimuli. Sports performers don’t just learn isolated skills like how to hit a forehand slice, or fade the golf ball, or throw a slider. They also acquire complex capacities like how to field at third base when there is one out, or how to play to the backhand when they get the opportunity, or how to bat defensively at cricket.
Philosophers call such complex skills “multi-track dispositions”. Tennis players who have set themselves to play to the backhand won’t hit it there every time. Their shot will still depend on how the ball comes at them, the position of their opponent, and so on. Their consciously chosen strategy will involve a profile of different responses, each appropriate to a different situation on the court. But it will differ in its profile from a “slice to the forehand” strategy, or a “chip and charge” strategy. The ball will be returned to the backhand more than on these other strategies, even though not every time.
Many sporting skills have a similar structure. Third basemen know how to field when there is one out. This won’t commit them to any particular play, prior to seeing how the ball is coming at them, but their reactions will be different from when there are two out. Cricket batsmen who are playing defensively react differently from when they are attacking, but they will still tailor their shots to the bowler’s delivery.
These complex skills are acquired in practice. The athletes train themselves, over many hours on the practice ground, to react automatically to oncoming balls in the requisite ways. It’s a bit like installing different computer programs. Once each program has been installed, all you need to do is open it, and it will run automatically.
That’s how conscious decisions make a difference to the fast reactions of athletes. It’s not that the athletes consciously decide what to do once they see how the ball is coming at them. There’s no time for that, indeed no time to see the ball properly.
Rather the conscious decision is made beforehand. It is a decision about which complex skill to deploy, about which program to open. It activates one set of automatic neural reflexes rather than another. You turn on the “one batter out” instead of the “two batters out” program, and then you leave it to your automatic neural reflexes to do the right thing.