DEVELOPING OUR BODY AND BRAIN

Playing sports changes your brain. The minds of elite athletes can achieve feats of anticipation and coordination that others would find impossible. The athletic brain has been trained through hours and hours of practice and years of exercise and activity.

The qualities that set a successful sportsperson apart from the rest of us are found not just in the muscles and the lungs but also between the ears.

That is because sportspeople need to make complicated decisions in a flash.

In recent years neuroscientists have begun to record some fascinating differences between average brains and the brains of great sportspeople. By understanding what goes on in a player’s heads, researchers hope to understand more about the workings of all brains - those of sports legends and couch potatoes alike.

To discover how brains make quick decisions neuroscientists found that several regions of the brain collaborate to make the computations needed for detailed motor actions.

The brain begins by setting a goal and calculates the best course of action to reach it. As the brain starts issuing commands, it also begins to make predictions about what sort of sensations should come back from the body if it achieves the goal.

If those predictions do not match the actual sensations, the brain then revises its plan to reduce error. The brain does not merely issue rigid commands; it also continually updates its solution to the problem of how to move the body.

To understand how athletes arrive at better solutions, other neuroscientists have run experiments in which athletes and non-athletes perform the same task. Their findings suggest that an athlete’s brain is like a race car idling in neutral, ready to spring into action.

The brains of sportspeople are also usually quieter, which means they devote less brain activity to these motor tasks than non-athletes do. The probable reason for this is that the brains of athletes are more efficient, so they produce the desired result with the help of fewer neurons. This means that the more efficient a brain is, the better job it does in playing sports.

As soon as someone starts to practice a new sport, his or her brain begins to change, and the changes continue to change for months, neuroscientists scientists found.