I Don't Bank Shots In Unless I'm Going Up For A Layup And I Don't Pump Fake Because I Can Usually Out Jump Defenders Or Get My Shot Off Quickly Enough To Avoid Having To Pump Fake!
9'10 Basket. I Was Dunking With 2 Hands Cleanly On Legitimate 12 Foot Baskets In 12th Grade. Anyway, This Was From Last Night (12/09/14) And Was Taken By Anthony https://eccwarriors.com/sports/mbkb/2019-20/bios/godinez_anthony_py11. I Didn't Play To My Full Capability Last Night Because I Was Playing Against INFERIOR Guards And, Hence, Played Down To Their Level (Wasn't Motivated While Playing Against Them Like I Am When I Play Against SUPERIOR Players) And Because My Consciousness (Social Anxiety) Started To Kick In Preventing ME From Playing Instinctively And Unconsciously (I'm Going To Excerpt A Passage From INCOGNITO To Make you Understand This Last Point About Unconsciousness). So After One Of My Poor Performances, While I Was Still Angry And My Adrenaline Was High, I Decide To Take Out My Frustration By Dunking. Hence You See The Rare Dunk Above (Rare In The Sense That I Don't Perform Them As Frequently As I Once Did).
ANYWAY, I DON'T KNOW IF I'VE TOLD YOU GUYS THIS, BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE? I HATE WHEN I SHOW UP TO A GYM AND THE COMPETITION IS WEAK AND THEN I START PLAYING WITHOUT REALLY WARMING UP. THIS HAPPENED YESTERDAY AND A SUBURBAN BLACK GUARD WHO I'D NEVER SEEN BEFORE BUT WHO I COULD TELL WAS AN OREO BASED ON THE WAY HE PLAYED AND HOW HE SPOKE (HE WAS MOST LIKELY THERE TO ATTRACT THE ATTENTION OF THE WHITE GIRL) GOT THE WRONG IDEA ABOUT ME. HE WAS INITIALLY ON MY TEAM AND IN THAT FIRST GAME I CAME OUT SLUGGISH, SLOW, AND COULDN'T HIT A SHOT (I'M TYPICALLY LIKE THIS BECAUSE OF MY PHYSIOLOGY AND ESPECIALLY IF I'M NOT PLAYING AGAINST HIGH LEVEL COMPETITION), WHICH PROBABLY LED HIM TO THINK THAT I WAS AN AVERAGE PLAYER. SO, IN THE FOLLOWING GAME I GOT PICKED UP BY ANOTHER TEAM AND WAS MATCHED UP AGAINST THE OREO AND KNOW WHAT THE OREO HAD THE AUDACITY TO THINK AND DO? THE OREO HAD THE AUDACITY TO THINK THAT HE COULD GUARD ME THEN HE HAD THE AUDACITY TO THINK THAT HE COULD SCORE ON ME (WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT OREO THINKING?). GUESS WHAT THOUGH, GUYS? HE DID SCORE ON ME A COUPLE OF TIMES (BUT I WAS PLAYING TOKEN D ON HIM). BUT THIS JUST GOES TO SHOW HOW BIG OF A ROLE YOUR MIND PLAYS IN SPORTS. IF AN INFERIOR PLAYER GAINS CONFIDENCE HE'LL BEGIN THINKING THAT HE CAN OUT-PLAY GUYS THAT ARE FAR SUPERIOR TO HE AND THIS DELUSIONAL, OVER-CONFIDENCE WILL PERSIST (CARRY OVER TO OTHER GAMES) UNLESS YOU SUPRESS IT. THIS IS WHY YOU HAVE TO SMASH THE CONFIDENCE OF GUYS THAT YOU'RE PLAYING AGAINST EARLY IN A GAME (YOU NEVER WANT THEM TO START THINKING THAT THEY CAN PLAY WITH YOU OR THAT THEY'RE ON YOUR LEVEL BECAUSE ONCE THEY START THINKING THAT THEY'LL START PLAYING LIKE THAT AND THAT'S THE LAST THING YOU WANT).
Bruce Abernethy was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s and an avid cricket player when he began to expand on Janet Starke's occlusion methods. Abernethy started out using Super 8mm film to capture video of cricket bowlers. He would show batters the video but cut it off before the throw and have them attempt to predict where the ball was headed. Unsurprisingly, expert players were better at predicting the path of the ball than novice players.
In the decades since, Abernethy, now associate dean for research at Queensland, has become exceedingly sophisticated at using occlusion tests to illuminate the basis of perceptual expertise in sports. Abernethy has moved his studies from the video screen to the field and the court. He has equipped tennis players with goggles that go opaque just as an opponent is about to strike the ball, and he has outfitted cricket batters with contact lenses with varied levels of blurriness.
The theme of Abernethy's findings is that elite athletes need less time and less visual information to know what will happen in the future, and, without knowing it, they zero in on critical visual information, just like expert chess players. Elite athletes chunk information about bodies and player arrangements the way that grandmasters do with rooks and bishops. "We've tested expert batters in cricket where all they see is the ball, the hand and wrist, and down to the elbow, and they still do better than random chance," Abernethy says. "It looks bizarre, but there's significant information between the hand and arm where experts get cues for making judgements."
Top tennis players, Abernethy found, could discern from the miniscule pre-serve shifts of an opponent's torso whether a shot was going to their forehand or backhand, whereas average players had to wait to see the motion of the racket, costing invaluable response time. (In badminton, if Abernethy hides the racket and entire forearm, it transforms elite players back into near novices, an indication that information from the lower arm is critical in that sport.)
Pro boxers have a similar skill. A Muhammad Ali jab took a mere forty milliseconds to arrive at the face of a victim standing a foot and a half away. Without anticipation based on body movements, Ali's opponents would have been beaten down in round one, hit flush by every punch. (Ali's skill at disguising the trajectory of a punch, and thus confounding the opponent's anticipation, often meant they were finished a few rounds later anyway.)
Even skills that appear to be purely instinctive - jumping to rebound a basketball after a missed shot - are grounded in learned perceptual expertise and a database of knowledge on how subtle shifts of a shooter's body will alter the trajectory of the ball. It's a database that can be built only through rigorous practice.
Without that database, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board, or Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch, stripped of the information that allows him to predict the future. Since Pujols had no mental database of Finch's body movements, her pitch tendencies, or even the spin of a softball to predict what might be coming, he was always left reacting at the last moment. And Pujol's simple reaction speed is downright quotidian.
When scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tested him, Pujols, the greatest hitter of an era, was in the sixty-sixth percentile for simple reaction time compared with a random sample of college students.
As an individual practices a skill, whether it be hitting, throwing, or learning to drive a car, the mental processes involved in executing the skill move from the higher conscious areas of the brain in the frontal lobe, back to more primitive areas that control automated processes, or skills that you can execute "without thinking."
In sports, brain automation is hyperspecific to the practiced skill, so specific that brain-imaging studies of athletes who train in a particular task show that activity in the frontal lobe is turned down only when they do that exact task. When runners are put on bicycles or arm bikes (where the pedals are moved with hands instead of feet) their frontal lobe activity increases compared with when they are running, even though cycling or arm cycling wouldn't seem to require much conscious thought. The physical activity that one trains in is very specifically automated in the brain. To return to Abernethty's point, "thinking" about an action is the sign of a novice in sports, or a key to transforming an expert back into an amateur. (University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock has shown that a golfer can overcome pressure-induced choking in putting - paralysis by analysis, she calls it - by singing to himself, and thus preoccupying the higher conscious areas of the brain.)
Chunking and automation travel together on the march toward expertise. It is only by recognizing body cues and patterns with the rapidity of an unconscious process that Albert Pujols can determine whether he should swing at a ball when it has barely left the pitcher's hand. The same goes for quarterback Peyton Manning. He cannot stop in the face of blitzing linebackers and consciously sort through the defensive alignments and patterns he learned in hours and years of practicing and studying game film. He has seconds to scan the field and throw. He is a grandmaster playing speed chess, only with linebackers and safeties in place of knights and pawns... (The Sports Gene)
https://changizi.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/how-wide-receivers-catch-with-their-eyes-closed/
9'10 Basket. I Was Dunking With 2 Hands Cleanly On Legitimate 12 Foot Baskets In 12th Grade. Anyway, This Was From Last Night (12/09/14) And Was Taken By Anthony https://eccwarriors.com/sports/mbkb/2019-20/bios/godinez_anthony_py11. I Didn't Play To My Full Capability Last Night Because I Was Playing Against INFERIOR Guards And, Hence, Played Down To Their Level (Wasn't Motivated While Playing Against Them Like I Am When I Play Against SUPERIOR Players) And Because My Consciousness (Social Anxiety) Started To Kick In Preventing ME From Playing Instinctively And Unconsciously (I'm Going To Excerpt A Passage From INCOGNITO To Make you Understand This Last Point About Unconsciousness). So After One Of My Poor Performances, While I Was Still Angry And My Adrenaline Was High, I Decide To Take Out My Frustration By Dunking. Hence You See The Rare Dunk Above (Rare In The Sense That I Don't Perform Them As Frequently As I Once Did).
ANYWAY, I DON'T KNOW IF I'VE TOLD YOU GUYS THIS, BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE? I HATE WHEN I SHOW UP TO A GYM AND THE COMPETITION IS WEAK AND THEN I START PLAYING WITHOUT REALLY WARMING UP. THIS HAPPENED YESTERDAY AND A SUBURBAN BLACK GUARD WHO I'D NEVER SEEN BEFORE BUT WHO I COULD TELL WAS AN OREO BASED ON THE WAY HE PLAYED AND HOW HE SPOKE (HE WAS MOST LIKELY THERE TO ATTRACT THE ATTENTION OF THE WHITE GIRL) GOT THE WRONG IDEA ABOUT ME. HE WAS INITIALLY ON MY TEAM AND IN THAT FIRST GAME I CAME OUT SLUGGISH, SLOW, AND COULDN'T HIT A SHOT (I'M TYPICALLY LIKE THIS BECAUSE OF MY PHYSIOLOGY AND ESPECIALLY IF I'M NOT PLAYING AGAINST HIGH LEVEL COMPETITION), WHICH PROBABLY LED HIM TO THINK THAT I WAS AN AVERAGE PLAYER. SO, IN THE FOLLOWING GAME I GOT PICKED UP BY ANOTHER TEAM AND WAS MATCHED UP AGAINST THE OREO AND KNOW WHAT THE OREO HAD THE AUDACITY TO THINK AND DO? THE OREO HAD THE AUDACITY TO THINK THAT HE COULD GUARD ME THEN HE HAD THE AUDACITY TO THINK THAT HE COULD SCORE ON ME (WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT OREO THINKING?). GUESS WHAT THOUGH, GUYS? HE DID SCORE ON ME A COUPLE OF TIMES (BUT I WAS PLAYING TOKEN D ON HIM). BUT THIS JUST GOES TO SHOW HOW BIG OF A ROLE YOUR MIND PLAYS IN SPORTS. IF AN INFERIOR PLAYER GAINS CONFIDENCE HE'LL BEGIN THINKING THAT HE CAN OUT-PLAY GUYS THAT ARE FAR SUPERIOR TO HE AND THIS DELUSIONAL, OVER-CONFIDENCE WILL PERSIST (CARRY OVER TO OTHER GAMES) UNLESS YOU SUPRESS IT. THIS IS WHY YOU HAVE TO SMASH THE CONFIDENCE OF GUYS THAT YOU'RE PLAYING AGAINST EARLY IN A GAME (YOU NEVER WANT THEM TO START THINKING THAT THEY CAN PLAY WITH YOU OR THAT THEY'RE ON YOUR LEVEL BECAUSE ONCE THEY START THINKING THAT THEY'LL START PLAYING LIKE THAT AND THAT'S THE LAST THING YOU WANT).
Consciousness takes time, which we don't always have. Our
ancestors were those who were fast in life-threatening and competitive
situations; the slow ones weren't around long enough to reproduce and
didn't become our ancestors. It is easy to show the difference in timing between automatic responses and those where consciousness intervenes.
If I put you in front of a screen and have you push a button when a
light flashes on, after a few trials you will be able to do this in
about 220 milliseconds. If I ask you to slow this down just a tad, say
to 240 or 250 milliseconds, you wouldn't be able to do it. Your speed
would be more than 50 percent slower, it would drop to about 550
milliseconds. Once
you put consciousness in the loop, your conscious self-monitoring of
the speed takes longer, because consciousness workers at a slower base
speed. This is something that you may already be familiar with. Remember
practicing the piano, or any other instrument, and memorizing a piece?
Once you had practiced a piece, your fingers could really fly until you
made a mistake and consciously tried to correct what you did wrong.
Then, you could barely even remember what note was next. You were better
off starting all over and hoping that your fingers would make it past
the rough patch on their own. This is why good teachers warn their
students not to stop when they make a mistake while playing in a
recital, just keep on going, keep that automatic playing automatic. The
same is true in sports. Don't think about that free throw, just plop it
in as you have the hundreds of times in practice! "Choking" happens when
consciousness steps into the play and throws the timing off.
Natural
selection pushes for nonconscious processes. Fast and automatic is the
ticket for success. Conscious processes are expensive: They require not
only a lot of time, but also a lot of memory. Unconscious processes, on
the other hand, are fast and rule-driven. (Who's In Charge?)
Bruce Abernethy was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s and an avid cricket player when he began to expand on Janet Starke's occlusion methods. Abernethy started out using Super 8mm film to capture video of cricket bowlers. He would show batters the video but cut it off before the throw and have them attempt to predict where the ball was headed. Unsurprisingly, expert players were better at predicting the path of the ball than novice players.
In the decades since, Abernethy, now associate dean for research at Queensland, has become exceedingly sophisticated at using occlusion tests to illuminate the basis of perceptual expertise in sports. Abernethy has moved his studies from the video screen to the field and the court. He has equipped tennis players with goggles that go opaque just as an opponent is about to strike the ball, and he has outfitted cricket batters with contact lenses with varied levels of blurriness.
The theme of Abernethy's findings is that elite athletes need less time and less visual information to know what will happen in the future, and, without knowing it, they zero in on critical visual information, just like expert chess players. Elite athletes chunk information about bodies and player arrangements the way that grandmasters do with rooks and bishops. "We've tested expert batters in cricket where all they see is the ball, the hand and wrist, and down to the elbow, and they still do better than random chance," Abernethy says. "It looks bizarre, but there's significant information between the hand and arm where experts get cues for making judgements."
Top tennis players, Abernethy found, could discern from the miniscule pre-serve shifts of an opponent's torso whether a shot was going to their forehand or backhand, whereas average players had to wait to see the motion of the racket, costing invaluable response time. (In badminton, if Abernethy hides the racket and entire forearm, it transforms elite players back into near novices, an indication that information from the lower arm is critical in that sport.)
Pro boxers have a similar skill. A Muhammad Ali jab took a mere forty milliseconds to arrive at the face of a victim standing a foot and a half away. Without anticipation based on body movements, Ali's opponents would have been beaten down in round one, hit flush by every punch. (Ali's skill at disguising the trajectory of a punch, and thus confounding the opponent's anticipation, often meant they were finished a few rounds later anyway.)
Even skills that appear to be purely instinctive - jumping to rebound a basketball after a missed shot - are grounded in learned perceptual expertise and a database of knowledge on how subtle shifts of a shooter's body will alter the trajectory of the ball. It's a database that can be built only through rigorous practice.
Without that database, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board, or Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch, stripped of the information that allows him to predict the future. Since Pujols had no mental database of Finch's body movements, her pitch tendencies, or even the spin of a softball to predict what might be coming, he was always left reacting at the last moment. And Pujol's simple reaction speed is downright quotidian.
When scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tested him, Pujols, the greatest hitter of an era, was in the sixty-sixth percentile for simple reaction time compared with a random sample of college students.
As an individual practices a skill, whether it be hitting, throwing, or learning to drive a car, the mental processes involved in executing the skill move from the higher conscious areas of the brain in the frontal lobe, back to more primitive areas that control automated processes, or skills that you can execute "without thinking."
In sports, brain automation is hyperspecific to the practiced skill, so specific that brain-imaging studies of athletes who train in a particular task show that activity in the frontal lobe is turned down only when they do that exact task. When runners are put on bicycles or arm bikes (where the pedals are moved with hands instead of feet) their frontal lobe activity increases compared with when they are running, even though cycling or arm cycling wouldn't seem to require much conscious thought. The physical activity that one trains in is very specifically automated in the brain. To return to Abernethty's point, "thinking" about an action is the sign of a novice in sports, or a key to transforming an expert back into an amateur. (University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock has shown that a golfer can overcome pressure-induced choking in putting - paralysis by analysis, she calls it - by singing to himself, and thus preoccupying the higher conscious areas of the brain.)
Chunking and automation travel together on the march toward expertise. It is only by recognizing body cues and patterns with the rapidity of an unconscious process that Albert Pujols can determine whether he should swing at a ball when it has barely left the pitcher's hand. The same goes for quarterback Peyton Manning. He cannot stop in the face of blitzing linebackers and consciously sort through the defensive alignments and patterns he learned in hours and years of practicing and studying game film. He has seconds to scan the field and throw. He is a grandmaster playing speed chess, only with linebackers and safeties in place of knights and pawns... (The Sports Gene)
https://changizi.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/how-wide-receivers-catch-with-their-eyes-closed/
https://twitter.com/Harrisonauthor/status/1500893416867065858
