4 ms·

Expert athletes are able to offload much of the mental processing of their game to the subconscious. We all do this to some degree (most of us aren't solving d

Expert athletes are able to offload much of the mental processing of their game to the subconscious. We all do this to some degree (most of us aren't solving differential equations in real time to catch a ball), but great athletes are able to do this for many more sport specific tasks than casual players. Here's a mindblowing video of Ronaldo making a goal in complete darkness after only seeing the first few milliseconds of the ball path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03LHpeWnpA&t=330s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03LHpeWnpA&t=330s

mettamage 5y ago
Definitely a good example of Kahneman
iamben 5y ago
That's a wonderful video. What a talent. Reminded me of a product I read about a while ago - https://www.bernell.com/product/STROBE/Vision_Therapy_BestSellers https://www.bernell.com/product/STROBE/Vision_Therapy_BestSe... - the glasses flicker between clear and not so you learn to interpret the motion of the ball rather than relying on vision alone. Very cool!
Spooky23 5y ago
The line between experts and non-experts is how they manage. I’m a little league coach, currently with 9-10 year olds. Once the kids get comfortable with basic mechanics, the real challenge of the game is not thinking about mechanics, while thinking about the tactical picture. It’s difficult - in our case right now, working with a talented pitcher who starts to panic and throws wild when she gets rattled in the game (by a walk, hit, etc). The joyous part as a coach is that with repetition and support, the kids figure it out! That cycle continues.
- clusterhacks 5y ago
  I loved coaching baseball for that age group. For our local rec league levels that is the first entry to kid-pitch. It was really off-putting how outcome focused some of our other coaches were. I am a player development nerd (Driveline youth certified now - highly recommended - and love their philosophy shaped to rec players) and hated playing teams with coaches that tried to manipulate our player draft process to vacuum up all the better athletes. Those were the teams that would max out their two pitchers' pitch counts every game and cycle all the non-starters on their team through right field. I moved onto softball coaching at our local middle school and enjoy player development and coaching at that level too. We lost this year to pandemic closures but I am looking forward to going full-on gamified tech next year (Blast sensors, pocket radar, lots of quick fun drills to keep things moving).
- Cyril_HN 5y ago
  I think a lot of amateur pool players will feel that. They get into a rhythm and start potting everything. Then they either beak the rhythm, get a difficult shot, or notice their success, over think it all and mess up the mechanics. This analogy doesn't go particular far, but it works to explain the difference between conscious and subconscious mechanical focus.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    Inner game mastery seems like staying focused on not thinking about the mechanical aspects... "in the zone." Like, do you even know your ATM PIN? Could you think of it consciously without pressing in the air? How about your computer password? Has it become "muscle-memory," learned subconsciously as motions while semantic symbols are discarded?
bps4484 5y ago
I have a theory that how good someone is at something (soccer, the piano, programming) is directly tied to what they can put into their subconscious brain. The more that you can do subconsciously the better you are. I realized this after thinking about skills like dribbling in basketball where first you get plain dribbling into your subconscious, then more complex dribbling, then entire moves. Athletes always talk about when “the game started slowing down” and I always wondered if this was pushing a lot of faculties into their subconscious so they could operate at that speed.
elgenie 5y ago
A reasonable and forum-appropriate analogy might be touch-typing. In the nanosecond at which the lights go out, Ronaldo's brain has finished (the equivalent of) considering the concept of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and engaged the autopilot for reifying that into keystrokes while at the same point the amateur soccer player is still doing (the equivalent of) a hunt-and-peck for the "T" key.
justicezyx 5y ago
Wow very nice video. I have been drinking too much ML koolade and gradually disenchanted about human capabilities. This is an example that human capabilities are still something one don't need to feel inferior to machine. I.e., I think the current ML tech can predict trajectory equally well. But there is nothing super human.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  See Moravec's paradox. We can easily build a human-performance image classifiers, but don't have robots that can hear humans at football. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
abcanthur 5y ago
I've always wanted to see an experiment to see if free kicks (or teed golf shots, or a teed football) performance went down if the athlete was not allowed to set or tee the ball themselves. Soccer players will always give the ball a gentle toss onto the ground and watch it settle; do world class athletes "see" the millimeter differences in the ball position and subconsciously take into account before striking??
iseanstevens 5y ago
cool, thanks for video :)

mettamage 5y ago

Definitely a good example of Kahneman

iamben 5y ago

That's a wonderful video. What a talent. Reminded me of a product I read about a while ago - https://www.bernell.com/product/STROBE/Vision_Therapy_BestSellers https://www.bernell.com/product/STROBE/Vision_Therapy_BestSe... - the glasses flicker between clear and not so you learn to interpret the motion of the ball rather than relying on vision alone. Very cool!

Spooky23 5y ago

The line between experts and non-experts is how they manage. I’m a little league coach, currently with 9-10 year olds. Once the kids get comfortable with basic mechanics, the real challenge of the game is not thinking about mechanics, while thinking about the tactical picture. It’s difficult - in our case right now, working with a talented pitcher who starts to panic and throws wild when she gets rattled in the game (by a walk, hit, etc). The joyous part as a coach is that with repetition and support, the kids figure it out! That cycle continues.

clusterhacks 5y ago
I loved coaching baseball for that age group. For our local rec league levels that is the first entry to kid-pitch. It was really off-putting how outcome focused some of our other coaches were. I am a player development nerd (Driveline youth certified now - highly recommended - and love their philosophy shaped to rec players) and hated playing teams with coaches that tried to manipulate our player draft process to vacuum up all the better athletes. Those were the teams that would max out their two pitchers' pitch counts every game and cycle all the non-starters on their team through right field. I moved onto softball coaching at our local middle school and enjoy player development and coaching at that level too. We lost this year to pandemic closures but I am looking forward to going full-on gamified tech next year (Blast sensors, pocket radar, lots of quick fun drills to keep things moving).
Cyril_HN 5y ago
I think a lot of amateur pool players will feel that. They get into a rhythm and start potting everything. Then they either beak the rhythm, get a difficult shot, or notice their success, over think it all and mess up the mechanics. This analogy doesn't go particular far, but it works to explain the difference between conscious and subconscious mechanical focus.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Inner game mastery seems like staying focused on not thinking about the mechanical aspects... "in the zone." Like, do you even know your ATM PIN? Could you think of it consciously without pressing in the air? How about your computer password? Has it become "muscle-memory," learned subconsciously as motions while semantic symbols are discarded?

bps4484 5y ago

I have a theory that how good someone is at something (soccer, the piano, programming) is directly tied to what they can put into their subconscious brain. The more that you can do subconsciously the better you are. I realized this after thinking about skills like dribbling in basketball where first you get plain dribbling into your subconscious, then more complex dribbling, then entire moves. Athletes always talk about when “the game started slowing down” and I always wondered if this was pushing a lot of faculties into their subconscious so they could operate at that speed.

elgenie 5y ago

A reasonable and forum-appropriate analogy might be touch-typing. In the nanosecond at which the lights go out, Ronaldo's brain has finished (the equivalent of) considering the concept of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and engaged the autopilot for reifying that into keystrokes while at the same point the amateur soccer player is still doing (the equivalent of) a hunt-and-peck for the "T" key.

justicezyx 5y ago

Wow very nice video. I have been drinking too much ML koolade and gradually disenchanted about human capabilities. This is an example that human capabilities are still something one don't need to feel inferior to machine. I.e., I think the current ML tech can predict trajectory equally well. But there is nothing super human.

teruakohatu 5y ago
See Moravec's paradox. We can easily build a human-performance image classifiers, but don't have robots that can hear humans at football. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

abcanthur 5y ago

I've always wanted to see an experiment to see if free kicks (or teed golf shots, or a teed football) performance went down if the athlete was not allowed to set or tee the ball themselves. Soccer players will always give the ball a gentle toss onto the ground and watch it settle; do world class athletes "see" the millimeter differences in the ball position and subconsciously take into account before striking??

iseanstevens 5y ago

cool, thanks for video :)