Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#31

Post by altonzheng »

tsumnia wrote: post #17
motohagiography wrote: post #4

When 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 i…

Excellent, will check that book out. Something I've noticed in my own life is practicing mastery in one area creates learnings and attitudes that aid in mastery in another area. The actual skills are not there, but the ability to navigate the learning terrain is. Many facts I thought about myself (eg. I'm unathletic) were simply assumptions I made somewhere early on in my life, perhaps because I lacked prior experience that my peers had. Which makes me think, is talent simply unconscious prior experience?

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#32

Post by upvotinglurker »

habitue wrote: post #25
hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your eyes should be scanning at all times. Those 'experienced' drivers have literal blind spots and are likely to enter a mental state akin to a sleep state.

Your advice is for an experienced driver who wants to become even better. The original commenter's scenario talked about novice vs. experienced. If you just tell a novice driver to scan everywhere, it's not actionable advice. Since, as was pointed out, they have not built a good filter yet. They'll end up being stressed out looking all over the place, when the simpler advice that driver's ed gives like "check these 3…

> The original commenter's scenario talked about novice vs. experienced.

It talked about novice vs. "skilled, competent" drivers, which suggests the latter meeting some threshold beyond just experience. (Making their behavior even more likely to be a demonstration of skill and safe technique.)

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#33

Post by [deleted] »

arkades wrote: post #26
hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your eyes should be scanning at all times. Those 'experienced' drivers have literal blind spots and are likely to enter a mental state akin to a sleep state.

So what you’re saying is, learn from those most likely to get into car accidents, rather than the least likely? https://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/...

[deleted]

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#35

Post by segmondy »

jschwartzi wrote: post #13

When 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 obj…

Experience teaches you the noise to ignore. Same thing applies to all sorts of disciplines, even debugging or fixing a code.

An experienced dev can look at a large code base and spot a bug or just from the structure of the code tell if it's "badly written" code.

An experienced sysops can look at large streams of system log files and tell you what's wrong with the system because they can ignore the noise. Someone else might be fixated on the high cpu load when the issue is a bad device.

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#36

Post by ddorian43 »

tsumnia wrote: post #15

I'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…

What martial art ?

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#37

Post by brightball »

jschwartzi wrote: post #13

When 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 obj…

I think I watched that same video. I actually took it to heart and that's been the basis for where my eyes go ever since I've been driving.

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#38

Post by edh649 »

taurath wrote: post #24
hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your eyes should be scanning at all times. Those 'experienced' drivers have literal blind spots and are likely to enter a mental state akin to a sleep state.

That’s not really what allows people to drive safely. Without filters youd treat stationary objects with the same deference as moving ones.

Well it works for Tesla's autopilot right? /s

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#39

Post by marketgod »

archibaldJ wrote: post #30
jschwartzi wrote: post #13

When 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 obj…

Intriguing. A friend of mine just learnt how to drive very recently. He told me he was able to pick up driving much faster than an average person as he was able to apply the skill he developed in many years of playing Counter-Strike Global Offensive in driving: Instead of looking everywhere he would focus his attention on things that likely to matter and react to it like he was playing the first person shooter game.…

Will have to source it but there is a video game where you can play to win a chance to be a race car driver. One of the guys won the contest and then won the actual race with a real car. The skills apparently do translate [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2014/apr/07...

Re: Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

#40

Post by russellbeattie »

I like that the researcher had a couple personal experiences with the proverbial "hot hand", as it made her convinced it was a real phenomenon and to look at it more closely. Anyone who's had it happen to them remember the moment whistfully, even decades later: You just can't seem to miss, your hand-eye coordination is perfect, and for a short time you are performing at levels way beyond normal. Then it goes away and you think, "If only!".

No idea whether "quiet eye" is the right answer or flow-state or just plain old luck, but I love her motivation.

Post reply on HN