Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
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Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#2This site has been designed primarily for researchers and their students carrying out quiet eye (QE) studies in sport, medicine, law enforcement, the military and other areas where a high degree of expertise is required. The content is free and may be used for educational and research purposes.
> http://www.quieteyesolutions.com/
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#3I didn't find this a convincing read. There may be good research about quiet eye, I don't know personally, but how is it a revelation to say athletes and experts focus very intently on one spot with their vision? This seems to border on truism to me, why would a professional athlete need to look all around to judge different parameters? Someone like Serena Williams has served the ball millions of times, is she truly going to gain more information by looking all around? Whereas, for a novice, it would be useful to look at the service box, then back at the ball, then at your feet to ensure your stance is good, then to your grip. So, is this expert effect simply a product of muscle memory and intense focus?
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#4When you look at training and coaching as being instead of correcting or perfecting skills and their signifiers, but as "how you learn to learn," in that domain, a quiet eye is not an objective, but rather an effect of building skills on top of a set of underlying attitudes.
Goodhart's Law has been quoted a lot here recently, (re: measure becoming target and ceasing to be good measure), but it applies here.
The more useful question is, "of what is a quiet eye the effect?"
At an elite competition level, the physical differences (and scores) between athletes are so minor that success is more an effect of psychological habits than the relative difference in diet and training regimens.
Watching very top athletes, they are usually calm and deliberate, which is the effect of being in a zone where they are not intellectualizing or reacting to events, but are instead, in a state I call accept-respond. There is a huge aspect of ego suppression they can cultivate, where the y aren't distracted by hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and in particular, expectations and anticipations for how the immediate situation plays out, which delays their ability to shorten their accept-respond loop.
The very existence of an "if this then that," thought in their mind is performance inhibiting, because even that "if," statement needs to be negated before they can respond. Bringing conditionals to the game only works when the game plays out according to that conditional at the right time. At a learning level, you can learn those conditionals as tactics, but you need to practice them to where there is no conscious selection and evaluation of them when you are performing.
IMHO, a quiet eye is the effect of how you related to your trainer/coach/parent/teacher, and it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#5This feels like the start of scientific insight into what is described in the classic Zen in the Art of Archery. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen-Herrigel/dp/037...
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#6I didn't find this a convincing read. There may be good research about quiet eye, I don't know personally, but how is it a revelation to say athletes and experts focus very intently on one spot with their vision? This seems to border on truism to me, why would a professional athlete need to look all around to judge different parameters? Someone like Serena Williams has served the ball millions of times, is she truly…
The article (and anyone who focuses on "quiet eye") is placing emphasis on one of many triggers to flow state. Hyper visual focus is no different than the focused breathing of vipassana "mindfulness" mediation, or the pre-action routines that are standard in sports psychology.
If LeBron has a mental, pre-freethrow routine of focusing his vision on the tip of the hoop, bounces the ball twice, spins it, and then shoots, he's triggering his mind to focus on the precise moment and allowing his subconscious to take over.
There are a number of great books on this subject, but my favorites are How Champions Think, by Bob Rotella, and The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#7I didn't find this a convincing read. There may be good research about quiet eye, I don't know personally, but how is it a revelation to say athletes and experts focus very intently on one spot with their vision? This seems to border on truism to me, why would a professional athlete need to look all around to judge different parameters? Someone like Serena Williams has served the ball millions of times, is she truly…
I rarely think about these things from neuroscience perspectives anymore, but I'd imagine simply tuning into one's environment using conceptual representations like words and data can remove oneself from a state of flow, when what matters most is muscle memory, reflexes, strength - all physical stuff. Overloading the mind with information the body must calculate through the mind, that sounds to me like it would be sending an interrupt signal to a system that's already functioning correctly (or at peak performance, what have you)
The visual field is the most simplified representation of data one needs when the body is doing the rest of the work. You can't think your way into running faster, you can convince yourself that's what the mind is doing for something like, extreme distances, training (maintaining motivation to improve performance), but the goal at the end is training the literal muscle to respond efficiently, and training the mind to react to the environment precisely according to the set of rules laid out by the game.
Reasoning about it beyond the literal reality of the game, and the literal ability of the body, once both of those spaces have been trained to peak performance is inefficient, so I would imagine it would be easy to discard all of the thinking that got you to that point. It's like it transforms into a feeling of comfort and confidence instead, because I would assume you would become accustomed to all of that stuff working as expected, your own performance would become predictable and unwavering.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#8When you look at training and coaching as being instead of correcting or perfecting skills and their signifiers, but as "how you learn to learn," in that domain, a quiet eye is not an objective, but rather an effect of building skills on top of a set of underlying attitudes. Goodhart's Law has been quoted a lot here recently, (re: measure becoming target and ceasing to be good measure), but it applies here. The more…
Well put. The article makes it sound like training the "quiet eye", i.e. improving eye focus by X percent, will improve elite athlete traits of calmness and zone/flow. When cause/effect operating in the opposite direction is equally (if not more) likely.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#9My own, albeit limited, experience is that quiet eye is flow state.
I think the main problem here is that so many of us pick one field of endeavor in our lives and we don’t spend enough time trying to excel at more than one thing to notice that the feeling of being in the groove and kicking ass are the same across a wide field of experiences and activities.
I even experienced it once in a yoga class. Last day the instructor had us do some restorative excercises. Next think I know, I hit Flow. My first thought was “uh oh, this could be addictive”, but with nothing to do with it, and having only done it once, I never experienced it again. A pity though. Sometimes you have a bug to fix and you just aren’t feeling it that day. Would be nice to have more tools to get into that state.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#10[deleted]