It's called Mushin. Google it.
Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#12It's called Mushin. Google it.
While I agree about mushin, its always better to provide your reasoning rather than telling someone to "Google it".
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#13When I was taking driver's ed as a teenager the instructor showed us a video that illustrated a driver's gaze from the first person as they drove using a small circle. The difference between a skilled, competent driver and a student was that the competent driver only fixated on things that were likely to matter. So mostly their gaze was on the vehicle in front of them, followed by any place that could hold moving objects and pedestrians, then briefly signage. In contrast, novice drivers' gaze was all over the road, the signage, pedestrians moving parallel to the road--in short they had no mental filter for their attention.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#14When 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.
Disclaimer - I wrote the article I'm genuinely interested in your point here, but doesn't the research on quiet eye training actually support this causal link? Lots of the studies showed that feedback on the athlete's eye movements does improve their accuracy, better than control interventions that did not explicitly teach the quiet eye.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#15I've been practicing martial art for just over a decade now, no means world class, but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast", and generally tell students to slow down. We (people) get worked up and excited and anxious the second anything stressful happens. As we get worked up, we get tunnel-vision and things like "wheel spinning" (trying anything without consideration of if it helps) start. With music for example, if you try too hard to go fast for the sake of speed rather than smooth, you start to trip over your notes and it sounds worse than when you played one note at a time.
Mushin (as another poster wrote), mindfulness, breathing techniques - all they focus on is calming ourselves down to that we can make better decisions. If you can remain calm when everything on fire, you can think and react better.
My current research is inspired by athletes and other "physical" skills and how it translates to a knowledge skill like Computer Science. Some of the first steps in a physical skill is the creation of "smooth technique" - not fast, smooth. To get there takes time downing things slowly and methodically until it becomes muscle memory. Does this mean that there is some positive points to just drilling exercises? Obviously, only drilling without understanding is not useful, but I think somewhere along the way western education (or at least higher education) decided to not do as much drilling.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#16I've been practicing martial art for just over a decade now, no means world class, but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast", and generally tell students to slow down. We (people) get worked up and excited and anxious the second anything stressful happens. As we get worked up, we get tunnel-vision and things like "wheel spinning" (trying anything without consideration of if it helps) start. With music…
>> but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast"
Same saying is used frequently in the fire service. We teach cadets things like throwing ladders, we start slow and practice, practice,practice until it's a fluid smooth motion.
Also we teach them how to breathe, right from the go. Proper breathing enhances focus. Then a simple reminder "breathe" and they remember to slow down their mind.
If you want to talk about excitable, look at a rookie firefighter jumping on a fire engine with sirens and lights blazing on the way to a structure fire. We try to get them in a relaxed, focused state as quickly as possible.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#17When 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…
> it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher
Its more a sign of both - the student's willingness to adjust and the teacher's willingness to refine. The reason I say both is that you run into students that have a better chance of picking something up right away (prior experience) and others that do not. The student that does not have that prior experience still needs it in order to be successful. A good instructor knows not to only focus on the people with prior experience and help boost the latter as well.
For example, in martial arts (as I noted elsewhere), you have someone who has prior experience in body coordination, which makes it easier for them to pick up an art (or dance or a sport). A student whose never stepped on to a mat in their life still needs body coordination. While a good instructor should see that and help build that coordination, the student needs to develop motivation and discipline to do these things without the need of someone else. An out of shape student should needs to recognize they need to put in extra work to move up a level - that is something the instructor can only point out.
A great book I use as a backing to my teaching philosophy is Mastery by George Leonard[1]. It categories the different personalities of the student into Dabbler, Obsessive, and Hacker (not in a good way). Dabblers try but quit when things get hard; Obsessives consume everything possible until they start seeing diminished returns; and Hackers just kind of "show up" and steadily maintain/improve. People can be all three for different things but its handling the particular category appropriately that pushes people toward mastery.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfil...
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#18Sorry when I'm going all-out nerd here, but isn't the quiet eye the exact stance on war which is talked about over and over in Stephen King novels? I'm thinking It, the Dark Tower series, the Talisman (plus sequel), all basically revolve around the theme of the warrior getting more of that introverted kind of alertness - as opposed to getting more fucked up by the confrontations brought upon them - on every step into the madness that their task turns out to be.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#19I 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…
You are missing at least one point of the article --- that specifically training the "quiet eye" actually improves performance.
Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’
#20This article reminded me of a great book I've read several times that deals with sports performance: The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey.
Great read, I reread it frequently. Even if you aren't applying it to tennis it's incredible useful information to be aware of.