Read Online The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: David Epstein
Tags: Non-Fiction
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doesn’t, his mechanics might be outstanding but he reacts so late that he breaks his bat because the ball is in on his hands. It’s not the bat speed, it’s the visual skills. That little bit is the difference between ordinary and extraordinary.”
When Laby and Kirschen studied U.S. Olympians from the 2008 Beijing Games, they found that the softball team had an average visual acuity of 20/11, outstanding depth perception, and better contrast sensitivity than athletes from any other sport. Olympic archers also had exceptional visual acuity—they scored similarly to the Dodgers—but not particularly good depth perception. That makes sense, Laby says, because the target is far away, but it’s also flat. Fencers, who must make rapid use of tiny, close-range variations in distance, scored very well on depth perception. Athletes who track flying objects at a distance—softball players and to a lesser extent soccer and volleyball players—scored well on contrast sensitivity, which is “probably set at a certain ability you’re born with,” Laby says. *
Clearly, visual hardware interacts with the particular sports task at hand. Plus, visual hardware becomes increasingly critical the faster the ball is moving. In a study of catching skill among Belgian college students, some of whom had normal depth perception and others who had weak depth perception, there was little difference in catching ability at low ball speeds. But at high speeds, there was a tremendous difference in catching skill. Depth perception differentiated people only when the ball was whistling.
A clever follow-up study by an international team of scientistsrecruited a group of young women, all with normal visual acuity but some who had poor depth perception and others with good depth perception. Each woman had a catching pretest—in which she had to snag tennis balls shot out of a machine—followed by more than 1,400 practice catches over two weeks, and then a posttest. The women with good depth perception improved rapidly during the training, while the women with poor depth perception didn’t improve at all. Better hardware sped the download of sport-specific software. Conversely, a 2009 Emory medical school study suggested that children with poor depth perception start self-selecting out of Little League baseball and softball by age ten. As Gobet found with chess players, when it comes to intercepting flying objects, some catchers are more readily trainable than others.
While physical hardware alone—like depth perception or visual acuity—is as useless as a laptop with an operating system but no programs, innate traits have value in determining who will have a better computer once the sport-specific software is downloaded. Pro baseball players and Olympic softball players have outstanding vision, and Louis J. Rosenbaum was able to use tests of visual hardware to predict two straight NL Rookies of the Year—though two successes do not constitute a scientific study.
Other tests of hardware might detect the potential for greatness much earlier in life.
•
Psychologist Wolfgang Schneider had no idea in 1978 that he was being handed the study sample of a lifetime when the German Tennis Federation helped him and a University of Heidelberg research team recruit 106 of the most adroit eight-to-twelve-year-old tennis players in Germany.
The federation was fervent in its assistance because its officials were curious to learn whether, even among a sample restricted to kids who were already highly proficient players, the scientists could predictwho might go on to be an elite adult player. Schneider’s sample turned out to be quite possibly the greatest single sample of child athletes ever studied. Of 106 kids, 98 ultimately made it to the professional level, 10 rose to the top 100 players in the world, and a few climbed all the way to the top 10.
Each year for five years, the scientists gauged the children first on tennis-specific skills and then
When Laby and Kirschen studied U.S. Olympians from the 2008 Beijing Games, they found that the softball team had an average visual acuity of 20/11, outstanding depth perception, and better contrast sensitivity than athletes from any other sport. Olympic archers also had exceptional visual acuity—they scored similarly to the Dodgers—but not particularly good depth perception. That makes sense, Laby says, because the target is far away, but it’s also flat. Fencers, who must make rapid use of tiny, close-range variations in distance, scored very well on depth perception. Athletes who track flying objects at a distance—softball players and to a lesser extent soccer and volleyball players—scored well on contrast sensitivity, which is “probably set at a certain ability you’re born with,” Laby says. *
Clearly, visual hardware interacts with the particular sports task at hand. Plus, visual hardware becomes increasingly critical the faster the ball is moving. In a study of catching skill among Belgian college students, some of whom had normal depth perception and others who had weak depth perception, there was little difference in catching ability at low ball speeds. But at high speeds, there was a tremendous difference in catching skill. Depth perception differentiated people only when the ball was whistling.
A clever follow-up study by an international team of scientistsrecruited a group of young women, all with normal visual acuity but some who had poor depth perception and others with good depth perception. Each woman had a catching pretest—in which she had to snag tennis balls shot out of a machine—followed by more than 1,400 practice catches over two weeks, and then a posttest. The women with good depth perception improved rapidly during the training, while the women with poor depth perception didn’t improve at all. Better hardware sped the download of sport-specific software. Conversely, a 2009 Emory medical school study suggested that children with poor depth perception start self-selecting out of Little League baseball and softball by age ten. As Gobet found with chess players, when it comes to intercepting flying objects, some catchers are more readily trainable than others.
While physical hardware alone—like depth perception or visual acuity—is as useless as a laptop with an operating system but no programs, innate traits have value in determining who will have a better computer once the sport-specific software is downloaded. Pro baseball players and Olympic softball players have outstanding vision, and Louis J. Rosenbaum was able to use tests of visual hardware to predict two straight NL Rookies of the Year—though two successes do not constitute a scientific study.
Other tests of hardware might detect the potential for greatness much earlier in life.
•
Psychologist Wolfgang Schneider had no idea in 1978 that he was being handed the study sample of a lifetime when the German Tennis Federation helped him and a University of Heidelberg research team recruit 106 of the most adroit eight-to-twelve-year-old tennis players in Germany.
The federation was fervent in its assistance because its officials were curious to learn whether, even among a sample restricted to kids who were already highly proficient players, the scientists could predictwho might go on to be an elite adult player. Schneider’s sample turned out to be quite possibly the greatest single sample of child athletes ever studied. Of 106 kids, 98 ultimately made it to the professional level, 10 rose to the top 100 players in the world, and a few climbed all the way to the top 10.
Each year for five years, the scientists gauged the children first on tennis-specific skills and then
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