Listening Impact

There was an excellent article on January 14, 2012 in Science News titled “Brainy ballplayers: Elite Athletes get their heads in the game” by Nick Bascom. The article explains the vital role brainpower has in the prowess of super athletes (and the rest of us too).

The article not only does an excellent job of citing the latest research on the relationship of the brain to athletic performance, it also explains some of the terms neuroscientists and other specialists are using these days. Here are definitions of some of those terms to upgrade our shared knowledge:

Overall brain activation: neural regions that are engaged. The more expert we are the lower the overall brain activation we display. In other words, we don’t use what we don’t need to do a task with focused attention.

Brain Mapping: set of neuroscience techniques that spatially represent the activity of the brain to show what the brain is doing whether we are consciously or unconsciously engaged.

Motor centers: Areas of the brain that direct movement (superior parietal and premotor). These areas are heightened for professional athletes while amateurs show dispersed activity, especially in the regions that control emotions (basal ganglia and limbic system). It’s why high-performing people tune out everything but what they are doing at the moment.

Optimal solution: Experts don’t pay too much conscious attention to what they’re doing; rather they rely upon their expert brain that knows what to do. In the article he sites Yogi Berra’s famous line, “I can’t think and hit the ball at the same time.” So much for the multitaskers among us.

Automaticity: To access complex actions automatically requires a huge amount of training and practice to develop nerve connections. The author says attributes we’re born with play a big role in how close to perfection we can come, regardless of the amount of practice.

Noise: Sensory static that “prevents the muscles from hearing the message the brain is sending.”

Mirror-neurons: a system for matching what you do with what you see others doing.

Anticipation: the ability to predict a movement. We decide if we should expend energy on a certain response by reading what another person is doing. I think of people listening, and sometimes people shut down because they aren’t interested enough to follow along. The ability to anticipate well means one can sort out relevant versus irrelevant clues. That can be expedient or troublesome.

Forward models: the ability to pre-plan. Previous experiences allow the brain to go into calculation mode to predict how to respond.

Priors: the accumulated knowledge the person has seen before.  The expert’s predictive machine is constantly being updated. That’s why many CEO’s will say they trust their gut to make a decision when actually it’s their forward model and priors telling them what they know and what the likelihood of success will be.

Prefrontal cortex: part of the brain often called The Director. It’s job is to control information and sometimes it puts us into over-analysis, which paralyzes and clouds judgment. We overthink when we should just be listening, not judging, composing, or thinking.

The article ends with a quote from a song by En Vogue, “Free your mind, and the rest will follow.”  Of course, there’s also this one, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”