The Chimp Paradox

I’ve talked a lot about the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain, but there’s another part known as the limbic system. I tend to think of this as an alarm system: all sensory information goes to this part of the brain first and is scanned for potential dangers.

This system was great when our ancestors were living in the jungle and could be eaten by a predator at any moment, but can cause problems in our modern lives. So an opening batsman preparing to face a fast bowler will have made a conscious decision to play cricket that day. The precise movements required to play a shot at the right time to hit the ball successfully depends on the subconscious brain. But as the batsman watches the fast bowler marking their run-up, the limbic system may well be sending out alarm messages, such as “He looks big; the ball’s likely to be coming at me very fast; I didn’t do very well when I played here last time”.

In his book “The Chimp Paradox”, Dr Steve Peters refers to this limbic system as “The Inner Chimp”. As Dr Peters acknowledges, it may not be anatomically or philosophically correct to describe the inner chimp as a separate entity from the “human” brain. But it seems to be an incredibly powerful and useful way of thinking about it. The book also has chapters on achieving success, confidence and happiness, so it really could change your life.

If you find that you have over-reacted to a situation with an emotional response that you later regret, you can blame it on your inner chimp. But it’s like having a pet dog: although you aren’t your dog, you are still responsible for how your dog behaves. So you have to be able to control your inner chimp as you’re responsible for it.

It probably won’t work if you just try and ignore your chimp. You can manage it, however, by setting up default behaviours such as pre-shot rituals in sports such as tennis or golf which enable you to carry out the task before the chimp starts acting up.
 
Recent examples of sportsmen whose chimps seem to be out of control include Andy Murray and Luis Suarez. Of course, since Dr Peters has worked with Suarez, he’s not exactly the best advert when he carries on biting players.

In the end, though, the player has to decide to help himself. Unfortunately, in the case of Suarez, he decided to help himself to a piece of Chiellini’s shoulder.

David Donner

The A - Z of Sports Vision - Occlusion

Andy Murray is generally reckoned to be the best service returner in the world. He achieves this because he is the best at anticipating the opponent’s serve. How does he do that? One of the best ways of finding out is by occluding the vision of experts so that they can only see part of the opponent’s service action. These experiments have shown that experts can predict the direction of a serve before the racket makes contact with the ball. They are able to use cues such as the motion of the arm holding the racket that occur early in the opponent’s service action (Abernethy & Russell, 1987). The next step has been to see if lesser players can be trained to anticipate better by having their vision occluded at crucial points. Farrow & Abernethy (2002) put this to the test with 32 intermediate-level schoolboy tennis players. They were tested before and after training, with a retention test 32 days later. The tests consisted of facing actual tennis serves on a court whilst wearing occlusion goggles that cut off their sight at various points from 900ms before the server’s racket hit the ball, to a time after contact when the ball was approaching the net. They anticipation was judged according to the direction of the first movement they made as they attempted to return the serve (even though they couldn't actually see it at that point). During training, they watched video clips of serves that were occluded at various points. They had to say immediately where they thought the serve was directed. They would then watch it again when there was no occlusion, so they could assess how accurate they had been. One group was given specific information about the anticipatory cues used by experts, such as the location of the ball toss and the racket head angle just before contact (explicit knowledge), whilst a second group was not given this information but had to estimate the speed of each occluded serve (implicit knowledge). A placebo group did not have video training, but watched videos of tennis matches for an equivalent time. There was also a control group that didn't watch any videos. All four groups also had physical tennis training as well during the 4 weeks. The only group that showed a significant improvement in their anticipation was the implicit training group. They showed an improvement when their vision was occluded after the ball had been tossed, but before contact was made. This period has been shown to be crucial for service prediction (Farrow, Abernethy & Jackson, 2005). The placebo and control groups showed no improvement. Although the explicit group had high scores on average, they did not show an improvement in anticipation. This could be because they had too much information, whereas the implicit group concentrated on the racket movement in order to estimate the speed of the serve, and this was also the best indicator of the serve’s direction. Similar improvements from occlusion training have been found for baseball hitters (Fadde, 2006). Other sports will no doubt catch up in time: for example, there is no reason why it shouldn't be used to help goalkeepers trying to save penalties. David Donner