{"id":12498,"date":"2024-08-27T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=12498"},"modified":"2024-08-15T10:26:28","modified_gmt":"2024-08-15T10:26:28","slug":"elite-athletes-are-generally-smarter-than-us-cognitive-sciences-can-explain-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/elite-athletes-are-generally-smarter-than-us-cognitive-sciences-can-explain-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Elite athletes are generally smarter than us \u2013 cognitive sciences can explain why"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n\n Alberto Filgueiras<\/a>, CQUniversity Australia<\/a><\/em><\/span>\n\n

The year was 1920. It was George \u201cBabe\u201d Ruth\u2019s first season playing for the New York Yankees. <\/p>\n\n

During that season, he scored an amazing 54 home runs. He alone scored more home runs than any team.<\/p>\n\n

However, \u201cThe Bambino,\u201d as he was nicknamed, was far from an example of athletic prowess. He was chubby, did not like to practice and was constantly seen at parties drinking and gambling. <\/p>\n\n

So, how could he achieve such greatness on the baseball field?<\/p>\n\n

To answer this question, a prominent sportswriter from the New York Times, Hugh Fullerton, knocked on the door of the Columbia University psychology lab where two graduate researchers, Albert Johanson and Joseph Holmes, were prompted to answer. <\/p>\n\n

Fullerton\u2019s enquiry was simple: if Ruth\u2019s achievements could not be explained by physical abilities, then what other factors might be involved?<\/p>\n\n

It was no surprise when the researchers discovered Ruth scored higher than the average population in every psychological test he did.<\/p>\n\n

Ruth\u2019s testing results formed the basis of an article by Fullerton in Popular Science Monthly titled: \u201cWhy Babe Ruth is greatest home-run hitter<\/a>\u201d. <\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

These findings changed the popular perspective on sport performance, suggesting physical attributes weren\u2019t the only reason athletes were able to excel \u2013 mental skills were finally on centre stage.<\/p>\n\n

The evolution of sport psychology<\/h2>\n\n

Ruth outperformed normal people in attention, memory and cognitive tasks. <\/p>\n\n

It took almost a century for sport scientists to find out whether those high-level skills were a common trait for elite athletes or if Ruth was just a genius.<\/p>\n\n

In an exploratory meta-analysis published in 2018<\/a>, focusing on athletes only, my colleagues and I found athletes recruited brain areas involved with attention, memory and motor control when making sport-related decisions. <\/p>\n\n

Then, in 2022, a review by Nicole Logan and colleagues<\/a> from Northeastern University in the United States gathered 41 studies comparing professional athletes and normal controls (people like us). <\/p>\n\n

Data from 5,339 participants (including 2267 athletes) was meta-analysed. The results showed significantly higher scores in attention and decision-making among professional athletes compared to normal people. <\/p>\n\n

So athletes generally outperform us in cognitive tasks \u2013 but why?<\/p>\n\n

It was the emergence of cognitive neuroscience that allowed scientists to map neural networks involved in sport imagery (such as athletes\u2019 abilities to reproduce sport-related situations in their minds) and athletes\u2019 decision-making regarding in-game situations. <\/p>\n\n

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