TRAINING THE BRAIN

Sports mastery is a lot more than physical capability; it shapes the brain, too

- Emily Cooke

To triumph over competition, athletes must be the fastest, strongest and the nimblest contenders. Recordbreakers must push even further, surpassing the limits of human capability.

But besides their physical prowess, athletes harness a unique set of mental skills that allows them to succeed in their respective disciplines. Numerous studies have shown that athletes' brains differ from nonathletes' brains.

Visual cue processing

The ability to quickly soak up visual information and make decisions accordingly is a crucial skill for athletes, especially those who play team sports. A 2013 study in the journal Scientific Reports revealed that professional ice hockey, soccer and rugby players are better visual learners than people with lowerlevel abilities in the same sports.

The pros were compared with 'elite amateurs'— in this case, US college athletes and players from a European Olympic sport-training centre. They were also compared with non-athlete university students. Compared with both groups, professional athletes performed better, and improved faster, on a task that tested their ability to focus on and track objects moving across a screen. In other words, their brains are more skilled at processing “dynamic visual scenes”, or the world moving around them, the study authors found. The elite amateurs were also better at this than the non-athletes.

This knowledge could be used to enhance an athlete's training and determine the best time for them to return to their sport following an injury, said Jocelyn Faubert, author of the 2013 Scientific Reports study and a professor at the University of Montreal School of Optometry. For example, assessing how efficiently an athlete can process visual information and not make judgment errors could prevent them from coming back too early and putting themselves in danger, he said.

Muscle memory