You’re just settling in at your favorite restaurant, Chez Nous. The waiter has taken your order, the usual bœuf en daube, to be washed down with an exquisite ’96 Côtes du Rhône. In anticipation of your meal, you gaze around the restaurant. The milieu is warm and comfortable, the other diners are chatting amiably. The weather is superb for late autumn in New England, but it’s expected to turn colder by the weekend. You review your day—not entirely unsuccessful. You accomplished a great deal, but the leaves still need raking.
By now, however, you’re beginning to feel a bit of disquiet. It surely seems like it’s taking them a long time with the dinner. The service here is usually excellent. After another period of considering your plans for tomorrow, you really do feel uncomfortable. And the people at the next table, who arrived after you, are already on their main course. A decision is made—you stop the waiter and inquire as to the reason for the delay. “Ah, monsieur, quel dommage,” he explains. “I accidentally dropped your order on the floor leaving the kitchen. But, pas de problème, we’re cooking you another!” Totally galled, you storm out of the restaurant, heading for a drive-through burger and fries.
What happened here? According to what is called scalar expectancy theory, as soon as the waiter first took your order, an internal clock, driven by the oscillatory activity of spontaneously firing nerve cells, began ticking in your brain. The ticks were stored up in an accumulator, which provided you with a sense of present or working time, what duration had elapsed since the order headed for the kitchen. Now, waiting for your dinner in this restaurant is an experience you’ve had many times before, and a memory of the previous time durations between ordering and receiving your meal is stored in your central nervous system. You matched up the accumulated working time with the past time durations, became aware of the discrepancy, and made a conscious decision to act based on differences, or the ratio, between the two.
How accurate were you? Repeated in a similar setting, you’d probably be very close. You became aware, upset, and acted, all in an appropriate time scale. But consider how this scenario might have changed if things were different. Suppose instead of dining alone, you were engaged in a scintillating conversation with a fascinating companion? Or, on the other hand, if you were pressed for time to make it to the theatre for an 8:00 curtain? The tempo of your clock, or at least your attention to it, would have been very different.
The previous scenario, which we’ve all experienced in one form or another, reminds us how an acute perception of time governs our daily activities and decisions. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of any action that doesn’t involve some kind of temporal sense.1 We need to perceive our environment in both spatial and temporal realms. How long do you wait for the red light to change before realizing that it’s malfunctioning and driving on through? How do you safely cross a busy street?
In animals, such processes are clearly linked to their survival value. You will no doubt recall from freshman biology class the African mormyrid fish, which creates an electrical field around its body to detect the motion and speed of other fish. This mechanism is effective for tracking and avoidance when it gets really dark down on the ocean floor. Or animals, like the barn owl, which can localize fleeing prey in the black of night by computing the difference in sound coming to one ear from that arriving at the other. (Think about this. Those animals with larger heads—a greater distance between the ears—should be able to discriminate such differences more easily than those with smaller heads.)
For athletes, the usual challenge is to identify a visual duration and match it to a motor activity. The tennis player must identify the course of the falling ball before striking a lob. The center on the basketball team can’t allow himself to spend more than three seconds in the paint (the referee is counting the same duration). The football quarterback must judge the spot he should aim his pass based on (a) the time it will take for the receiver to reach that point and (b) the speed of the ball in the air. There are no watches to help make those decisions. They’re all based on intrinsic timekeeping mechanisms. And, as we’ll discuss, most aren’t even in the realm of cognitive decision making. The astounding feats of sports performance we regularly witness from athletes are products of internal timekeepers that are matched tightly with finely tuned motor actions, well outside their conscious awareness.
This chapter examines some of the theories about how this all happens. It also considers whether time perceptions of athletes differ from those of nonathletes and if these temporomotor links can be improved with training.
In the second movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, there comes a point when a triangle roll is followed by a single crash of the cymbals. This is, in fact, the single note that this instrument performs in the entire symphony. Frank Wilson, in his article “Music and the Neurology of Time,” cites Jens Rossel as describing that “this note becomes the occasion of indescribable anguish to almost every cymbal player responsible for its delivery. It must come at precisely the right instant, or it simply ruins everything. A few minutes before, you always see the fellow begin to turn in his chair, rub his hands, and wipe his palms on his trousers. When he stands up, he plants his feet, just so, like a baseball catcher bracing himself for a fast pitch. The moment comes and the cymbals crash. It’s a matter of just a few milliseconds, but what it represents to the music is either life or death.”2
Every performing musician has been there. In most musical settings, the precise matching of perception, time, and motor execution are critical. And the parallels of musical virtuosity—the remarkable ability to match timekeeping with muscular effort—with athletic performance have not been lost on scientific observers. Itzhak Perl-man, flowing through the intricate passages of a Beethoven violin concerto, can rightly be considered an elite small-muscle athlete. Indeed, concluded the neurologist Frank Wilson, “the well-trained musician is, after all, an individual whose muscular prowess generally surpasses anything encountered on the athletic field.”2 (The virtuoso violinist lacks, of course, an opponent who is attempting with all his effort to inhibit such harmony, a game clock, and 85,000 screaming fans.)
Precise timing of coordinated finger movements in the production of notes is the essence of musical performance. The ability of instrumentalists to accomplish this at extraordinary speed (as in, say, a Paganini violin concerto) is a fundamental skill of accomplished musicians. Efforts of this author to enlighten the eager reader on exact speeds that music can be performed have been met with only partial success. The best I can do is report that on an autumn evening in 2003, an Italian named Carmelo Crucitti set the world’s record for the most rapid playing by a bassoonist when he completed the Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee” in 33.8 seconds. That piece contains 791 notes, so Carmelo’s internal clock, his intrinsic metronome as it were, was firing every 0.045 seconds, or 23 times a second. (One might expect the time would be even shorter if played on a violin or piano.)
Of course, we do not know how many mistakes he made. You might expect that the faster you play, the more errors you would make. But, interestingly, when it comes to timing accuracy, the same may hold true if you play slower. Talented pianists who play scales at different tempos have been found to be most accurate when they were playing 7 or 8 notes per second (intervals of 0.07 second). Diminished accuracy is observed at both faster and slower speeds. It has been pointed out that this particular frequency coincides with the preferred (and upper limit of) rate of alternations of flexion and extension across a single joint when performing an automatic movement (such as signing your name). The idea that these two observations might be physiologically related is an intriguing one.
Although Wilson noted that “even superficial reflection about this process impels one to the conclusion that the brain mechanisms involved must be of very high order and among the most complex found in biological systems,”2 our understanding of the neurophysiological basis for musical skill remains vague. It has generally been assumed that these artists rely on an intrinsic clock that serves as an internal metronome, conducting coordinated muscle contractions. And, recognizing previous neurophysiological research, the basal ganglia and cerebellum are the parts of the brain that have been considered as key to the temporomotor coordination that underlies musical performance skills. Clearly, too, such mechanisms must be on automatic, since the milliseconds that separate closely spaced notes don’t allow enough time for cognitive reflection.
Can you be born with the capacity to perform finely tuned sequences of notes necessary for musical performance? The question hasn’t been truly resolved. Evidence indicates that the neuromuscular systems of those who have achieved musical success operate differently than yours and mine. To no one’s surprise, skillful pianists are seen to possess motor and perceptual timing in laboratory testing that is superior to nonpianists. Musicians are also more accurate than nonmusicians in estimating time. But, then again, these talented people put in a lot more hours of practice than you or I do.
We’ll return later to musicians as models of perceptuomotor timekeeping when we discuss the training of such abilities. You can guess that parallels between the acquisition of musical skill and catching ground balls at second base might be both expected and instructive.
It should be emphasized here that perfection of sensorimotor timing in the production of music is not really the artist’s goal. If it were, we could simply have all music produced by a computer. In fact, musical performance is based on nuances of a piece that provide variation not only in the tempo but also in the shaping of notes, dynamics, intonation, and a host of factors that make each musician’s performance unique. These are the differences that separate one musician or symphony orchestra from another, and the reason that we can listen to performances of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony over a lifetime without losing a sense of its freshness, beauty, and power.
Athletes, of course, need to do more than simply estimate time intervals. Their task is to couple visual information with their perception of time, an accomplishment that is, in fact, often the very essence of athletic competition. Indeed, for a great many sports, it’s the ability of players to track an object visually (ball, puck, shuttlecock), and then employ a timing device that enables them to initiate a motor act of particular direction, force, or duration at just the right moment.
Consider the player spiking the ball in volleyball, the wide receiver leaping over the defender in the end zone to catch a game-winning pass, the Liverpool goalkeeper diving for a save. Indeed, athletic success—being number one (not to mention the multimillion dollar contract)—goes to those who can best enact this scenario. In the end, it all basically just boils down to a neurophysiological battle.
What makes these responses even more amazing, of course, is that for the most part, they all occur beneath the level of conscious effort. They happen much too quickly for us to mull over how we might act, but, more importantly, they challenge the limits of time required for electrical activity in the neurons and muscular contractile apparatus that makes such feats possible. Let’s look at a few examples.
Hitting a pitched baseball has been regarded by some as the single most difficult challenge in all sports.3 Consider this: The pitcher toes the rubber, winds up, and delivers a 70 to 100 mph fastball toward home plate, 60 feet away. There stands the batter, wielding a slab of lumber whose optimal point of contact with the ball is about 3 inches long. At the speed of the pitch, the time from the release of the ball to the hoped-for point of contact with the bat is about 450 milliseconds. During this time—a little less than half a second—the batter must do the following:
• Visually identify and track the oncoming ball
• Decide whether or not to swing
• Recognize the type of pitch (slider, fastball, knuckle ball)
• Time the coincidence of a complex motor act (swinging the bat) with the arrival of the ball across the plate
It takes 160 milliseconds from when the swing of the bat is initiated to when it meets the ball crossing the plate. Given a visuomotor reaction time (from seeing the ball to moving his muscles) of 200 milliseconds, the batter’s decisions about swinging would be expected to occur 90 milliseconds after the pitcher delivers the ball. That’s when the ball has traveled about 15 feet, one-quarter of its trip to the plate.
After the ball is released from the pitcher’s hand, its trajectory in the sight line of the batter directly to center field changes little from 0 degrees until late in its pathway (that is, at the start, the ball is pretty much coming straight at the batter). The angle then rapidly reaches 90 degrees as the ball passes over the plate. As it does so, the angular velocity of the ball in the batter’s sight is extraordinary—up to 500 degrees per second, which is much faster than the human eye can follow it (about 70 degrees per second).
Can baseball batters keep their eye on the ball? Or, more to the point, can they follow the ball with their eyes to the point of its contact with the bat? Robert Watts and Terry Bahill set out to find out. In the laboratory, they rigged batters with devices that measured eye movements as they swung at a simulated pitch (a white plastic ball threaded on a fishing line and propelled by a pulley). They had a number of interesting findings. First, a professional player was able to visually track the ball at an angular velocity in his vision up to 130 degrees per second. As noted previously, that’s a lot faster than has been described in nonathletes. It would seem, at least based on this one subject, that the professional ball player has rather an astounding ability to visually track a pitched baseball as it nears the plate. That athlete could follow the ball to within 5.5 feet of home plate, but not after.
The authors then asked the question, how slow would the ball have to go so that the batter could actually keep his eye on it until contact with the bat? Keep in mind that it’s not really a matter so much of the speed of the ball, but rather of its velocity when crossing the batter’s field of vision. It’s easy to visually track the ball during the first portions of the pitch, when the angular velocity in the batter’s vision is very small—it’s coming right at him. But the speed of the ball is actually greater at the beginning than when it crosses the plate. At that point, the angular velocity becomes too high for the batter to visually track the ball. That’s why it can’t be seen after it reaches about 6 feet in front of the plate.
Anyway, these investigators ran a computer simulation to try to address their question. Can a ball be pitched slowly enough so that a batter could watch it all the way to the plate? The computer’s answer was never. They found that the slowest a pitch can be delivered and still reach the plate is 21 mph (34 kmph). Even at this lugubrious pace, the angular velocity as the ball crossed the plate would exceed human capacity for tracking.
Having said all this, one strategy would enable a batter to watch the ball closer to its contact with the bat. Watts and Bahill saw this in one of their subjects. Batters can visually track the pitched ball during the first portions of its flight, then jump their vision ahead (that’s called a saccade) and then let the ball catch up to the focal point. Commented the authors, “If you want to see the ball hit the bat, you can make your anticipatory saccade early in the trajectory. This means you have to take your eye off the ball at precisely the time when you want to see the ball best. Using an anticipatory saccade to put your eye ahead of the ball may be an oft-trained strategy, but it is probably not the best strategy for hitting the ball.”3
In fact, they wondered, why would a batter want to see the ball contact the bat? If you think about it, this wouldn’t seem to be of much value. It would be too late at that point to change the direction of the swing of the bat. Given the required reaction time, that decision must come sooner, in anticipating or predicting the ball’s path before it arrives.
Their final conclusion: “It has often been said that athletes are dumb. Our studies have shown the contrary. They are not paid a million dollars for their six-month job because of their bodies; it’s because of their brains. The players that are paid the most have the best brains: They can predict the flight of the pitch better than other mere mortals can.”3
Of course, too, the coincidence of swinging of the bat and the arrival of the ball must be exquisitely timed. As Adair noted, “if he swings as much as 1/100 of a second early, the ball will go down the left field line. If he is 1/100 of a second late, the ball will go foul into the stands down the right field line.”3
But wait, there’s more. Due to gravity, the ball falls in its trajectory toward the batter, which is magnified since the pitcher’s mound is 10 inches higher than home plate. As the batter awaits the arrival of the pitch, the ball can descend as much as 3 meters. And, of course, the path of the ball, particularly late in the pitch, is open to all sorts of vagaries at the dictates of the wily pitcher. A knuckle ball wobbles in flight and can change direction more than once. A curve ball can move from a straight flight by as much as 0.4 meters. The slider curves away near the end of the pitch.
“The complexity of hitting,” noted Stephen Kindel in an article in Forbes magazine, “is why baseball, of all sports, rewards relative failure so well. An NFL quarterback who hits his receiver less than 50% of the time or an NBA center who sinks fewer than half his baskets would soon be training as a stockbroker or selling beer. But baseball rewards .300 hitters—failure rates of 70%—with enormous contracts.”3
All of the events that go into hitting a pitched baseball occur at a subconscious level. There’s just not enough time to add an extra neural loop to the cerebral cortex, to think. But that’s not to say that batters don’t use cognitive processes to enhance their batting average. Ted Williams, arguably the best ever at this challenge, was a firm believer that proper thinking is 50% of effective hitting. He said, “You learn what you might expect in certain situations. Pitchers pick on your weaknesses, or what they fooled you with last time. But did I guess? Boy, I guess I did!”4 (And good guessing it was, too. Good enough for a .344 lifetime batting average, three years at .400 or better).
There is both anecdotal and experimental evidence, in fact, that a batter’s expectations, even before the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, is important for batting success. This could be, as Ted Williams emphasized, knowledge of a pitcher’s tendencies, the pitch count, and past experience. Too, expert batters often appear to use particular visual clues, such as the release point during the pitcher’s arm motion (compared to nonexperts, who fix on the pitcher’s head and face).
Now, I’ve never tried to hit a major-league fastball, but I did once attempt to return Andy Roddick’s serve in the quarterfinals of the French Open. (Okay, so this was actually in a recent dream after an overindulgence at a friend’s wedding.) Anyway, apparently to no one’s amazement, I was leading 4-2 in the second set and was up 15-40 when Andy surprised me by firing one of his 138 mph (222 kmph) serves up the T. Since a distance of around 80 feet (24 m) separated the point where he struck the ball from the spot where I was cowering behind the baseline, I had fewer than 400 milliseconds to respond. Given the visuomotor reaction times previously noted, I had to recognize where the ball was going, track its flight, start to move my legs into position, and decide where and when to initiate my stroke, all pretty much just as the ball was leaving my opponent’s racket (figure 5.1). One difference was for the better—I didn’t have to swing at the ball. I simply had to block it back. And one for the worse—the ball was going to bounce (who knows where?). Knowing Andy, it was going to depart from its flight path after I’d lost sight of it, probably kicking up high and away. Fortunately, this is where I woke up.
The batter in a cricket match faces time dilemmas similar to that of the returner of a tennis serve—tracking down and timing a swing at a rapidly approaching projectile that suddenly strikes earth and diverts at an unpredictable angle.5 At Oxford University, Peter McLeod and Simon Jenkins analyzed the neuromuscular responses to striking a cricket ball and concluded, in fact, that the game might be—despite direct evidence to the contrary—totally impossible. In this sport, the batsman awaits a ball bowled at speeds up to 40 meters per second (m/s), or about 95 mph (150 kmph). The ball typically strikes the ground within 5 feet (1.5 m) of the batsman, slows to a speed of 25 to 30 meters per second, then bounces at a variable angle. Some quick arithmetic indicates that the batsman should not have sufficient time after the bounce for a normal reaction (200 milliseconds) that would allow him to accurately swing the bat. Yet skilled cricket players somehow accomplish this. In fact, they do this by timing the arrival of the ball within 3 milliseconds.
Ditto. Except at point-blank range.
Obviously, trained athletes are much more capable of performing these perceptuomotor timing tasks than average mortals are. How do they do it? Are their nervous systems and motor functions more finely tuned? Or do they take advantage of indirect cues that permit them to better anticipate the course of oncoming balls and pucks? The mystery remains incompletely solved, but it would seem that both answers are probably correct.
Although coaches and fans think of players as having a great arm or lightning-fast breakaway speed, researchers have more accurately considered athletes as experts at visuotemporal processing. In examining just what separates athletes’ timing abilities from those of nonathletes, a number of factors have been considered, including the following:
• Reaction time. The duration required to detect a sensory stimulus and respond by initiating a motor act is a measure of the fundamental electrical properties within the nervous system. Obviously, for athletes, shorter is better. A fast reaction time gives a baseball batter more time to decide if, where, and when to swing the bat. He could then make his choice later in the ball’s flight toward home plate when it was easier to tell just where the ball was headed.
• Coincidental timing. This is the ability to match a motor action with the arrival of an object. The third baseman must time his leap for a line drive at just the right instant when the ball arrives. To accomplish this, he must have some means of estimating the velocity of the ball.
• Anticipation. The ability to predict the location and flight of a pitched ball is very helpful. For instance, athletes may sense where the ball is going even as it is being thrown or hit.
It could be that the electrical properties and conduction velocities of athletes’ neurons are more enhanced than those of nonathletes. Traditionally, average reaction time in the laboratory setting (such as pushing a button in response to a flash of light) for human beings is about 200 milliseconds. Some investigators have suggested that it might be shorter. For instance, when D. Lee and coworkers had subjects jump up to hit balls that were falling from different heights, their reaction times varied between 55 and 130 milliseconds. A number of other studies have suggested that reaction to visual information can also be substantially shorter than 200 milliseconds. What’s interesting, though, is that investigators have generally failed to find that such basic reaction times are any different in athletes than in untrained subjects. Moreover, these simple reactions times do not seem to improve with practice or sport training.6
At the same time, it might be suspected that athletes have superior reaction times in tasks that are specific to their sport. This idea has been supported by studies indicating that trained athletes in certain sports can more quickly respond when choosing between reactions to a stimulus. Termed a go-no-go reaction time, this is what baseball batters use when deciding whether or not to swing at a pitch. For those who are anatomically inclined, brain imaging studies have demonstrated that such decisions are made in the anterior cingulate cortex, with inhibitory control (discerning that the pitch is going to be in the dirt, for example) focused in the dorsolateral and ventral lateral prefrontal sites.
In one report, baseball players of varying levels of skill and experience and nonathletes were tested on their speed in deciding whether or not to press a key, depending on a color display that appeared on a computer screen. The choice reaction time was 16% shorter for the baseball players than for the nonathletes. Among the players, a negative relationship was observed between skill level and go-no-go time.
This study also showed that two years of baseball practice shortened choice reaction time. In addition, no difference was observed in go-no-go time between first-year baseball players and nonathletes. From these observations, the following suggestions were made:
• As opposed to simple reaction times, choice reactions are trainable.
• The shorter reaction times of trained athletes are not innate.
Similar findings about length of choice reaction times have been confirmed using similar testing procedures with fencers and basketball players. However, some have criticized the use of choice reaction times measured by this color-computer approach for identifying sport skill, given its generic nature.
The ability to match the arrival of an object (say, a pitched ball) with a motor act (swinging at the ball) relies on an accurate means of estimating the object’s incoming velocity. In most sports, as previously noted, the incoming object has very little angular velocity in the athlete’s field of vision until just before it arrives (when that velocity suddenly becomes very fast). So, rate of image movement in the retina of the eye would not seem to be helpful in estimating velocity.
Instead, estimating the speed of the incoming object to permit coincidental timing is probably achieved by figuring out relative changes in the size of the object as it nears. That is, as the pitched ball approaches the batter, it gets larger in his field of vision. And the faster it comes, the more rapidly it expands. Let’s raise the scientific sophistication of this discussion a bit by noting that the velocity (V) of the oncoming ball can be calculated as follows:
V = (D2/s)(dθ/dt)
In this equation, D is distance, s is the radius of the ball, and dθ/dt is the angular rate of expansion of the retinal image of the sphere. D. Regan reminds us that the astronomer Fred Hoyle used this idea in his 1957 science fiction novel The Black Cloud, calculating the time that a dark cloud outside the solar system would strike Earth according to this equation:
T = θ/(dθ/dt)
Here, T is the time until collision and θ is the angle of the object (size) to the observer’s retina. (Regan pointed out, though, that such changes could equally likely reflect a growing cloud that was not moving at all.) So, baseball batters and hockey goalies probably estimate arrival times in the same manner with visual cues. However, binocular information (comparing the relative velocities in the two retinas) may be important when the ball or puck gets very close.7
Calculation of ball velocity based on changes in retinal image size is particularly advantageous in situations requiring a very quick response, since the estimate of speed can be achieved directly from these retinal changes. That is, we don’t need to feed this information through the brain’s memory database in order to react.
It should come as no surprise that studies indicate that athletes are more skilled at coincidental timing (figuring out just when to swing the bat as the ball arrives over home plate) than nonathletes are. And skill in baseball hitting and catching has been shown to be directly related to the length of time that a ball in flight can be visually followed, as well as smoothness of eye pursuit movements. Skilled batters are better able to predict where and when the ball will cross the plate than we are. That would seem rather obvious.
In real life, I would never be able to block back one of Andy Roddick’s booming serves, but a good number of highly ranked professional players can repeatedly do so. What is not expected, however, is that research studies do not demonstrate particularly large differences in temporomotor coordination abilities between skilled players and nontrained subjects. For instance, in one report about the ability to time the response of swinging a tennis racket with an oncoming light (at a speed of 5 m/s), the accuracy of highly skilled players was only about 15% greater than of that of players with less experience.
A number of studies have been performed to determine just how accurately athletes in different sports can time their motor activity (that is, the variability on multiple attempts).5 As indicated in the sidebar on this page, these range from 2 to 15 milliseconds, depending on the skill of the athlete and speed of the approaching object. Peter McLeod and his coworkers examined timing accuracy in nonathletic subjects who tried to swing a bat horizontally at a ball dropped down a vertical chute. They found that in 90% of trials, subjects could swing within 10 milliseconds of the approaching ball. They could react within 5 milliseconds in 50% of the trials. McLeod concluded that this information seems rather counterintuitive. Tests of neither coincidental timing nor reaction time appear to be major predictors of sport skill. (One might wonder, however, why the dramatically greater speed of approaching objects in the sport setting has not gained more attention in such comparisons.)
Back-leg glance in cricket: + 2 milliseconds
Forehand in table tennis: + 8 milliseconds
Ski jumping (upward thrust at lip of jump): + 10 milliseconds
Catching a ball (closing fingers after ball hits the hand at velocity of 10 m/s): + 15 milliseconds
Response of untrained adults (see preceding text): + 10 milliseconds
Attempt by 9-month-old infants to intercept objects arriving at various speeds: + 50 milliseconds
From various sources.
So, are there other ways by which we can explain the obviously superior skill of athletes in perceptuomotor timing, which, as the following section shows, improves with training? Most likely, the ability to anticipate where and when the ball will arrive, even before or just as the tennis player serves the ball, plays a major role.
A number of investigations in sports, such as baseball, golf, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, and table tennis, have indicated that skilled athletes can better use past experience and visual cues to predict the direction and speed of the ball’s flight. For example, it has been reported that expert tennis players were far more proficient at predicting the path of serves by analyzing the server’s body position. Skilled players seem to focus more on the area around the server’s arm and racket, tracking the ball as it is being tossed, while novices have a variety of visual scanning techniques. As noted previously in this chapter, better baseball players fix their vision on the pitcher’s release point to predict direction of the ball. Certainly, factors such as knowledge of an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, the strike count, signals from the coach, and previous patterns of a particular pitcher’s delivery would add to predictive ability. As Bruce Abernethy has concluded, “Given the time constraints, especially at the very top level of competition, superior pattern recognition may be an essential precursor to superior anticipation, and in turn, to the ability of expert [tennis] players to give the impression of ‘having all the time in the world’ to make their return stroke.”8
As we muse over this information, we may have the sense that, considering what neuroscientists tell us about the human limits of perceptual timing skills, the incredible timing abilities of athletes seem almost implausible. Take, for instance, our model of a professional batter attempting to hit a pitched baseball. Considering the tight time constraints during the ball’s flight, decision making on the part of the batter would seem limited to the earlier portion—certainly less than the first third—of its trajectory. From what we know about the changes in acceleration and direction of a pitched baseball late in its flight, the batter’s tasks of matching the bat’s swing with the arrival of the ball and then directing the ball to a vacant sport in the field (which actually occurs around 25% of times at bat) seems beyond belief.
Patricia DeLucia and Edward Cochran, in fact, showed that batters can obtain visual information throughout each portion of the pitched ball’s trajectory. They found that blocking the batter’s view of any portion of the ball’s path caused a reduction in batting accuracy. However, the loss in accuracy was very limited—not more than 20%. And screening the first third of the flight path did not cause a greater decline in batting performance than blocking the middle or the last third.
This information would seem to go against what we know about the limits of visual tracking in humans. It is also contrary to what Adair concluded in the fascinating book The Physics of Baseball: “If it weren’t psychologically upsetting, the batter could just as well close his eyes after the ball is halfway to the plate, or if it were a night game, management could turn out the lights—the hitter would hit the ball just as well.”3 There has to be some wizardry in these athletic skills that goes beyond an understanding of nerve cell function and organization. (In this category of athletic magic, it has been suggested that baseball batters can actually watch the seams of the ball arriving at 100 mph [160 kmph] to make hitting decisions. They’d have to watch pretty closely. A typical fastball spins at a rate of 1,600 revolutions per minute—about 11 rotations—on its way to the plate.)
Getting back to musicians, whether the virtuoso violinist is born or made is open to debate. I’m going to guess that when this is figured out, the answer will be akin to what we currently think about athletes. There are significant genetic influences at two levels: physical capability to perform and the magnitude of the ability to improve with training.
That is, you’ve got to have the right parents and you’ve got to practice. There seems to be no question that repeated musical performance—practice—is effective in improving the neuromuscular timing, the speed, and the aesthetic abilities we call musical skills. To get to Carnegie Hall, you do need to practice, practice, practice. And it’s not just your mother saying this. It’s been reported that violinists who were considered to be excellent performers by age 21 have spent twice as much time in their lives practicing as the average player has (10,000 hours versus 5,000 hours).9 (But, cries the skeptic, which way does the arrow of causality go here? Couldn’t one argue that it might be just as likely that the highly talented violinist, being more motivated and feeling a greater need, would spend more time in the practice room?) Many have concluded that the amount of time devoted to concentrated practice is the single most effective means of acquiring musical expertise. (On the other hand, Mom, one must appreciate genetic limits. I could practice 8 hours daily for years and never be an Andrés Segovia.)
The basic idea, of course, is that in being repeated over and over, the finely timed patterns of muscular expression that go into music performance get grooved, or programmed, into the nervous system. That concept has pedagogical implications. For example, piano teachers tell their students to begin a new piece by playing it very slowly—not just because it is easier that way, but also because it prevents errors and engrains the correct notes.
For athletes, the story seems to be the same. There is no question from our common observations that athletes get better with training, that point guards get faster and shoot more accurately and that soccer goalies block more shots as they pass through high school, college, and into the professional ranks. In sports where it counts, all the skills of visuomotor timing enumerated in this chapter (except simple reaction time) also improve with training. (It is important to note, though, that such gains are typically highly task specific. That is, a baseball batter gets better at hitting a pitched ball, but his ability to time a jump for a rebound on the basketball court will remain limited.) The basis for improvement in these sports, then, is largely that of enhancing neuromuscular coordination and timing abilities. It follows, then, that one way to improve such perceptuomotor function—and thereby improve performance—is to simply play and practice a lot.
Considering the critical importance of visuomotor timing in many sports, it has been proposed that specific perceptual training might be useful for athletes. The jury still seems to be out on whether these programs actually work, but many scholars are skeptical. For instance, Abernethy commented that “approaches that might be expected to be of limited value would include generalized training programs (in which the intent is to improve generic visual skills through the use of repetitive training on non-task-specific stimuli), visual search pattern matching, and approaches based on the conscious processing of perceptual information. Generalized visual training programs have been popularized by sports optometrists, but systematic evidence indicating their effectiveness in actually improving sports performance is scarce.”8 That is to say, even in those studies in which perceptual training has been found to improve particular reaction or decision times, there is no indication that such responses can actually be translated into enhanced sport performance in the field. So, whether athletic teams should employ neurophysiologists along with the usual cadre of nutritionists, trainers, and sport psychologists remains to be seen.
How much do we control our own destiny? Do we truly have free will to choose and alter the events of our lives? Or are we simply players in an unwinding film that is already recorded? You might think it odd that weighty issues that have troubled philosophers for centuries should be raised in this discussion. But bear with me.
The previous sections show that athletic events of extremely short duration—hitting Andy Roddick’s first serve—must necessarily occur at an automatic, subconscious level. In contrast, cognitive, conscious decisions can be made for those occurring at least over several seconds. Consider the punt returner who is trying to decide whether to call for a fair catch or not. The punt is high in the air. He judges the time it will take it to descend to earth, recognizes the speed (and combined weight) of the offense’s punt coverage team converging on him, dimly knows which yard line he is standing on, and assesses the effectiveness of the wall of blockers on the right side of the field. He actually has time to think about all this and come to a reasonable decision. Or does he?
In a famous set of experiments in the 1980s, Benjamin Libet and his research team raised the surprising (and I dare say, disturbing) idea that actions we normally consider to be set into motion by our own conscious decision making might possibly be already made for us by our subconscious brains. They found that subjects decided to perform a voluntary, spontaneous task (flexing the wrist) 150 to 200 milliseconds before the act. That conscious decision was made, however, 350 to 400 milliseconds after the appearance of electrical potentials on an electroencephalogram that signaled preparation for the action. Thus, “it seems possible that the brain’s [unconscious] activities that initiate a willed act begin well before the conscious will to act has been adequately developed.”10
So, does this mean that we are not really in control of our actions, that they instead are devised by unconscious forces? For many, that would be a disturbing thought. On this point, though, one aspect of these studies seemed to hold out help for believers in free will. In the 100 to 200 milliseconds before the act was performed, there was sufficient time for the conscious self to change, or veto, the act. So, maybe we’re in charge after all.
We see this quandary of self-determinism versus the actions of the subconscious brain in other aspects of time perception in athletes. Chapter 1 outlines a similar metaphysical muddle in discussing pacing strategies for long-distance runners. As has been traditionally supposed, does the runner select, from the start, the proper pace that will deliver him to the finish line of a 10K race just before marked fatigue ensues? Does self-determinism rule? (Descartes taught this, albeit admittedly in a different context.)
Or are we just being presumptuous? Does, instead, a central governor in the brain figure this out, keeping the pace safe (avoiding coronary insufficiency, muscle tetany, hyperthermia) through feelings of fatigue, all at an unconscious level? This is the viewpoint of Tim Noakes and his colleagues in South Africa.
I suppose the only presumptuous beings here would be those who claim to know the answers. The issue is intriguing, fundamental, and not easily amenable to experimental study. One cannot help imagining the creation of entire university departments, international congresses, and journals devoted to a new field of existential philosophy of athletic competition.
“There’s time distortion when you are in the alpha state—like a hypnotic state. I had no idea that six and half hours had passed.” Six and a half hours. Jean Hepner and Vicki Nelson had just set the world’s record for the longest continuous professional tennis match. (This was 1984, predating John Isner and Nicolas Mahut in their epic 11-hour battle on the grass at Wimbledon in 2010). And it only went two sets.
The other record set that September day was even more remarkable. For 29 minutes, the two (ranked 172 and 93 in the world, respectively) battled it out for a single point. The 643-point rally ended when Nelson came to net and drove home an overhead smash of Hepner’s lob. “Just thinking about it, my stomach is starting to hurt,” Hepner later told NewYork Times reporter Dave Seminara. In his article, titled “The Day They Belabored the Point,”he relates that Nelson, who eventually won the match, 6-4, 7-6 (11), collapsed with leg cramps, for which she was awarded a time-violation warning by the still-conscious chair umpire.
So, how do you hit straight 322 shots without an error? Said Hepner, “I was just really concentrating.”
We’ve all heard stories from survivors of serious automobile accidents and similar crisis situations who describe that in the midst of the event, everything just seemed to slow down. The approaching car, the impact, the automobile rolling over all appeared to float in time. “It was just like it was all happening in slow motion.” (One might suppose, in fact, that such a suspension of time is necessary if a person’s entire life is going to flash in front of his eyes. And, as one of my children once graciously remarked, in my case, that would be a lot of reels.) There is a certain consistency in the nature of these accounts, as Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti found when they collected descriptions of 61 such events. This is, in the end, “a disputed phenomenon for which there is, nevertheless, a wealth of anecdotal evidence.”11
It’s said that athletes can experience similar extensions of time in the midst of intensive competition. Baseball hitters have described a blazing fastball as almost standing still in front them just before contact with the bat. At the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Apolo Ohno explained that in the final lap of a short track skating race, “everything slows down…. everything gets quiet.” Michael Jordan reportedly stated that as he dribbled by converging opponents, all the action became very slow and deliberate. (From my luxury box, however, any suspension of the time clock was not at all evident.) In his classic book The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey describes the ball as appearing larger and moving slower when one focuses to return a shot. It is just to this illusion of marked slow motion, this suspension of time, that Jimmy Connors is said to have attributed much of his championship success on the court. In the movies, too, we witness filmmakers using this technique to heighten the dramatic effect of sport action (Hoosiers, for example).
Oliver Sacks considered this capability of athletes to slow down time at critical points of competition to be an effect of years of training: “Their neural representation becomes so ingrained in the nervous system as to be almost second nature, no longer in need of conscious effort or decision. One level of brain activity may be working automatically, while another, the conscious level, is fashioning a perception of time, a perception that is elastic and can be compressed or expanded.”11 Others have seen slowing of time in athletic activity as an outcome of intense concentration. Thus, it should be available even to recreational athletes with the right mind-set.
Since these experiences are subjective, it is difficult not only to document such moments of retardation of time but also to study and understand them. Given the frequency with which such time-slowing events have been reported to occur, though, it is reasonable to conclude that they have truth on some level, that they represent some real psychological phenomenon. It would be, too, a reaction to stress that provides value—time to act and avoid accidents, to save people in danger, and, for the athlete, to perform in difficult competitive situations.
In his book The Labyrinth of Time, Michael Lockwood points out that another dimension to such reports exists. In addition to the slowing of time, there is a sensation of being “capable of reacting with remarkable alacrity and effectiveness—such as they would normally expect of themselves only if events really were unfolding at the obligingly modest rate that the illusion projects.” Such shifts in time perception, he contends, are triggered by events in which “normal powers are in danger of falling short of what circumstance demands of us.”11
Assuming that moving the athlete’s time projector in slow motion is (a) a real phenomenon and is (b) beneficial to sports performance, is it possible to turn it on? As previously noted, Gallwey (and others) have felt that focus and concentration are crucial to altering time perception for improving sports performance. He was talking about tennis and the need to free yourself from thinking too much, from trying too hard, from letting your instinctive abilities play the game. Consciousness is always getting in the way. Concentration in a calm mind is the key. He offered a concrete way of accomplishing this: Focus on the seams of the tennis ball as it crosses over the net toward you. The outcome is that “sometimes the ball even begins to appear bigger or to be moving slower” by the time it reaches you. (I’ve tried this, and it might work, but my 3.5 rating hasn’t budged.) These are “natural results of the concentration of one’s conscious energy.”11 From this, some have suggested that meditation and other relaxation practices might aid in altering time perception. (So, this chapter encompasses both existential philosophy and the world of Zen.)11
1. The following is an excellent source of ideas about how our brains perceive time: Gibbon, J., and C. Malapani. 2001. “Neural basis of timing and time perception.” In Encyclopedia of cognitive science, ed. I. Nadal. Oxford: Oxford Press.
2. Wilson, F.R. 1991. “Music and the neurology of time” Music Education Journal 77: 26-30. _______.1988. “Brain mechanisms in highly skilled movements.” In The biology of music making, ed. F.L. Roehmann and F.R. Wilson, 77-93. St. Louis: MMB Music.
3. Read more about the complexity of hitting a pitched baseball in the following sources: Adair, R.K. 2002. The physics of baseball. 3rd ed. New York: Harper Collins. DeLucia, P.R., and E.L. Cochran. 1985. “Perceptual information for batting can be extracted throughout a ball’s trajectory.” Perceptual Motor Skills 61: 143-150. Kindel, S. 1983. “The hardest single act in all of sports.” Forbes 132: 180-186. Watts, R.G., and A.T. Bahill. 2000. Keep your eye on the ball. Curveballs, knuckleballs, and fallacies of baseball. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.
4. Ted Williams was a perfectionist, and he spent a good deal of time studying and thinking about the pitchers he faced. He also wiped off his bats with alcohol every night to get rid of any resin deposit. He claimed that condensation and dust can add to their weight, and he often took his bats down to the post office and had them weighed. (It was said he could tell the difference himself of a half ounce.) He had 20/10 vision but denied the claim that he could read labels on revolving phonograph records. You can read more about Ted Williams and his batting strategies in his book: Williams, T., and J. Underwood. 1970. The science of hitting. New York: Simon and Schuster.
5. Cricket is just as difficult: McLeod, P., and S. Jenkins. 1991. “Timing accuracy and decision time in high-speed ball games.” International Journal of Sport Psychology 22: 279-285.
6. References for studies of athletes’ reaction times: Kida, N.S., S. Oda, and M. Matsumura. 2005. “Intensive baseball practice improves the go-no-go reaction time but not the simple reaction time.” Cognitive Brain Research 22: 257-264. Lee D.N., D.S. Young, P.E. Reddich, S. Lough, and M.H.T. Clayton. 1983. “Visual timing in hitting an accelerating ball.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 35A: 333-346.
7. If you’re thirsting for some hard science and math in regard to tracking oncoming balls, try this article: Regan, D. 1997. “Visual factors in hitting and catching.” Journal of Sports Science 15: 533-558.
8. Abnernathy, B. 1996. “Training the visual-perceptual skills of athletes. Insights from the study of motor expertise.” American Journal of Sports Medicine 24: S89-S92.
9. Reference that practice makes perfect: Ericsson, K.A., R.T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Roma. 1993. “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.” Psychological Review 100: 363-406.
10. These ideas can be found in the following book: Libet, B. 2004. Mind time. The temporal factor in consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
11. For additional perspectives on the feeling of time slowing, see the following sources: Gallwey, W.T. 1974. The inner game of tennis. New York: Random House. Lockwood, M. 2005. The labyrinth of time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noyes, R., and R. Kletti. 1977. “Depersonalization in response to life-threatening danger.” Comparative Psychology 18: 375-384. Sacks, O. 2004. “Speed.” The New Yorker, August 23, 60-69.
1. In many sports (baseball, tennis, hockey, and cricket), the timing of finely tuned perceptuomotor skills taxes the limits of human neurological function.
2. Through training in these sports, athletes translate enhancement of perceptual skills into improved performance.
3. Whether training programs focused on improving basic perceptual skills are useful in enhancing sports performance remains uncertain.
4. Rapid visuomotor timing decisions by athletes are performed automatically, bypassing brain centers of cognitive awareness and decision making. The possibility has been raised that in events of longer duration, supposedly purposeful decisions in sport are actually expressions of predetermined, subconscious strategies that are based on previous playing experience stored in the mind.
