Performance psychology has become a critical facet of sports science. But the field of psychology is far-ranging, something that can lead to psuedo- and junk-science. To avoid the psycho junk it helps to be specific about the material of interest and to connect what you’re interested in to what brain researchers are finding out. Let’s take a close look at decision making.
Decision making has a major role in athlete development, talent identification and skill acquisition. And fortunately, brain scientists are getting better at designing experiments into decision making.
Researchers are making progress on what occurs biologically during good and bad decision making.
There’s a recent, quality overview of the scientific underpinnings of good decision making at The Week, pinched from Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree newsletter and blog about applied neuroscience.
Barker explains that having the right information is more important than having a lot of information. Other factors are paying attention to your feelings instead of being an emotionless decision maker, trusting your instincts on subjects you know best and, also, realizing that “good enough” decisions almost always good enough in reality.
Patterns of bad decision making create havoc, sometimes at a scale far greater than the positive effects of good decisions. Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher of NYU has developed a model for what happens in the brain during irrational decision making, described by Emily Singer in her article in The Atlantic
Glimcher’s model is based on the brain’s energy requirements, which are way out of proportion with the energy used by the rest of the body, writes Singer,
The brain is the most metabolically expensive tissue in the body. It consumes 20 percent of our energy despite taking up only 2 to 3 percent of our mass. Because neurons are so energy-hungry, the brain is a battleground where precision and efficiency are opponents. Glimcher argues that the costs of boosting our decision-making precision outweigh the benefits.
The Glimcher argument also makes sense in the context of fatigue’s negative effects on decision making (see this by David DiSalvo on the Psychology Today website).
The energy costs of decision making also highlight the benefit of establishing routines and relying on mental models. Both offer ways to complete tasks (athletic or otherwise) while minimizing cognitive overhead.
In sports where athlete development involves training in decision making, the context and the energy requirements involved in practice are important considerations. For example, it’s one thing to practice decision making at the beginning of a match, and something else entirely to practice decision making at the end of games when fatigue is a bigger factor.
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