NRSC 4132 Blog

As children, many of us had the elaborate dream of becoming professional athletes. We saw their glorified images painted on buildings and billboards, constantly highlighted on TV, and passionately reviewed on the front of each week's newspaper. The professional athlete was - and still is - a symbol of unprecedented talent, glory, and fame, the highest of all achievements.

Unfortunately, that dream goes unrealized for the vast majority. As the New York Times reports, the chances of becoming a professional athlete is 24,550 to 1, "so you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning, marrying a millionaire, or writing a New York Times bestseller."

But what makes becoming a professional athlete so difficult? Recent scientific research has unraveled part of the problem, reporting that the average athlete spends approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate and focused practice. To put this into perspective, imagine spending 2 hours every day practicing; at this rate, it would take 14 years of non-stop practice to reach the level of a professional.

While this task seems near impossible for the majority of us, a nascent field of neurological research is emerging that may hold the key. With the advent of novel technologies such as fMRI (first discovered in the 1990's) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS, FDA approved in 2008), neuroscientists have been able to examine the neural circuitry of professional athlete's to understand what sets them apart on the cellular and molecular scales.

Of particular interest is a paper (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n9/abs/nn.2182.html) published in Nature Neuroscience by Salvadore Aglioti et. al, which examined the dynamics of action anticipation in elite basketball players. Specifically, elite athletes, elite coaches (who hadn't played the sport in several years), and novices (with marginal knowledge of the sport) were presented with videos of basketball players shooting free-throws at time frames varying in duration from 426 - 1,623 milliseconds, and asked to predict whether the shot was good or off target.

As expected, the elite basketball players exhibited the greatest accuracy for the full-length videos. Elite coaches performed comparably, though at a slightly lower accuracy, while novices performed poorly. But interestingly, only the elite basketball players were able to accurately predict free-throw fate for video timeframes before the ball had left the player's hand. This suggests that elite basketball players were able to recognize body kinematics (hand positioning, body posture, etc.) to anticipate the effect prior to ball release.

Previous neuroimaging studies conducted on dancers have identified heighted neural activity in the premotor and parietal cortices during performance of a dance routine. Similarly, tasks involving linking visual familiarity with motor control (such as viewing videos of dancers and identifying when they would make mistakes) resulted in activation of these areas.

Given this precedent, Salvadore Aglioti et. al conducted TMS on the corticospinal system , the principal motor system that innervates the aforementioned areas of the brain. It was discovered that maximal excitability in elite athletes occurred at the 781 ms clip, just before the ball left the player's hand, while it occurred much later for both elite coaches and novices. This suggests that elite athletes posses "extremely fine-grained perceptual operations, like early catching of erroneous or ineffective body configurations". Moreover, only elite athletes demonstrated corticospinal excitability during prediction of missed shots, while the other two groups demonstrated excitability only when predicting made shots.

This results show that elite players are finely tuned to anticipate motor-control errors. While coaches are apt at identifying good shots and correct form, elite players are further versed in anticipating wrong moves by their opponents. Mechanistically, it is proposed that this ability arises from the extensive practice that elite athletes undergo, which strengthens visual-motor synapses in the corticospinal system. As these synapses are strengthened, it takes less of a motor or visual cue to activate neurons implicated in the elite athlete's action anticipation.

If neuroscientists continue to investigate the synapses implicated in elite athletic performance, it may be possible one day to administer agonists that activate untapped reserves of athletic ability. But how ethical is "gene doping"; will it be viewed positively for its potential to elevate the quality of sports, or will it be viewed as a cheap way to avoid 10,000 hours of practice? Only time will tell.