Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’ | Hacker News Reader

Why athletes need a ‘quiet eye’

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174 pointsclouddrover70 comments

When I was taking driver's ed as a teenager the instructor showed us a video that illustrated a driver's gaze from the first person as they drove using a small circle. The difference between a skilled, competent driver and a student was that the competent driver only fixated on things that were likely to matter. So mostly their gaze was on the vehicle in front of them, followed by any place that could hold moving objects and pedestrians, then briefly signage. In contrast, novice drivers' gaze was all over the road, the signage, pedestrians moving parallel to the road--in short they had no mental filter for their attention.

Intriguing. A friend of mine just learnt how to drive very recently. He told me he was able to pick up driving much faster than an average person as he was able to apply the skill he developed in many years of playing Counter-Strike Global Offensive in driving: Instead of looking everywhere he would focus his attention on things that likely to matter and react to it like he was playing the first person shooter game. He once managed to reach top 1000 in the country for the game and he took roughly half the number of lessons an average person here needed to get his license. But I wonder how many of what he believed are true. Have there been any studies done on things like this?

Correlation doesn't imply causation, of course.

He may have picked up driving quickly not because of Counter Strike, but for the same reason he was capable of becoming a skilled Counter Strike player- some genetic or psychological advantage that is independent of anything else. He may just be better than the rest of us at filtering and focusing!

In contrast, I played a bit of counter strike in high school but I never got even remotely good at it. I just didn't have any knack for it. And while I am now a fairly skilled driver (no accidents in 16 years on the road!) I suspect those early years it was a matter of very good luck that I didn't get myself killed behind the wheel.

Will have to source it but there is a video game where you can play to win a chance to be a race car driver. One of the guys won the contest and then won the actual race with a real car. The skills apparently do translate [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2014/apr/07...

Note that GT Academy winners get extensive race driver training as part of their prize. I agree that the skills translate (somewhat), but people should be aware that he (the guy in the article) didn't go from playing Gran Turismo directly to racing an actual car and even then it took a while before he started to be competitive.

One study found that surgeons who regularly play video games are better at laparoscopic surgery.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17309970

Experience teaches you the noise to ignore. Same thing applies to all sorts of disciplines, even debugging or fixing a code.

An experienced dev can look at a large code base and spot a bug or just from the structure of the code tell if it's "badly written" code.

An experienced sysops can look at large streams of system log files and tell you what's wrong with the system because they can ignore the noise. Someone else might be fixated on the high cpu load when the issue is a bad device.

Experience is knowing what qualifies as noise, and when.

Just because a system is running doesn't mean it's running well. Just because code is orderly in appearance doesn't mean it's effective at performing the desired task.

Perfection is the enemy of good.

Sometimes a shambling mess of spaghetti is that way because of a lot of underlying and tangentially-related issues with the operating environment. Code can be perfect looking yet fail because developer expectation of the compiler/toolchain and the underlying OS don't actually function as documented. Of course this can also lead to things being brittle when the underlying issues change. Experience is knowing when those issues are involved.

I had something like the opposite issue. I've got my permit and not a license yet. Often when I drive, I feel I'm not paying much attention. I'm almost spacing out. I felt a bit guilty about it. I was leaning toward undiagnosed ADD/ADHD being a factor, but by your logic it sounds a bit like I've adopted the mindset of a more seasoned driver right out of the gate. I have driven small vehicles like ATVs off-road, so actually maneuvering isn't a major challenge, but just the environment of urban roads feels very different. Having to care about rules and such adds a lot of mess to the experience of driving.

This is a pretty universal thing in complex tasks. As you get used to things and your brain translates them into familiar patterns, they take less effort to anticipate (or produce,) so you can string lots of them together without being overwhelmed. Like when you see a piece of piano music that seems to be completely black from so many notes. Or when you watch olympic diving and wonder how a person is going to go from doing a perfectly still handstand 10m up, to launching into multiple flips and then somehow be calm enough by the bottom to think about not splashing at the end.

So you learn to recognize the set of signage you're expecting in a given pattern, and you recognize where the likely spots are for surprises, or you remember to watch for heads in the cars along the side so you know if someone's about to open a door.

Was that real eye tracking or a fake for pedagogical purpose?

It's the same with everything. After a while, in college, one learns what the important things to pay attention to are in class, and what aren't. It makes one a much more efficient learner.

Motorcycle classes with the Maryland MVA focus on SIPDE.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sipde

Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide, and Execute

Don't know if that correlates with 'quiet eye' but it does put emphasis on the eye being engaged in a specific activity (the scanning). Looking for what's out there, with the intention of knowing about it, versus just randomly looking around. Or worse blankly staring without focus.

I agree. I have long thought that a large part of learning to drive is learning where to look and when.

Funnily enough, attention is one of the things that help deep neural networks learn.

I think I watched that same video. I actually took it to heart and that's been the basis for where my eyes go ever since I've been driving.

Fascinating comment. Makes me want to read random eye tracking studies.

My driving instructor (in the car) is really against this. He talked about becoming fixated on the car in front of you and then lots can go wrong.

Mostly on car in front is not exclusively on car in front.

The car in front of you is by far the greatest risk to your safety that you can control. the car in back is a large risk but you have minimal control.

Your eyes should be scanning at all times. Those 'experienced' drivers have literal blind spots and are likely to enter a mental state akin to a sleep state.

So what you’re saying is, learn from those most likely to get into car accidents, rather than the least likely?

https://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/...

What an absurd strawman.

Your advice is for an experienced driver who wants to become even better. The original commenter's scenario talked about novice vs. experienced. If you just tell a novice driver to scan everywhere, it's not actionable advice. Since, as was pointed out, they have not built a good filter yet. They'll end up being stressed out looking all over the place, when the simpler advice that driver's ed gives like "check these 3 places every 30 seconds", while far from perfect, will get them looking around a little bit and training that filter without becoming overwhelmed.

> The original commenter's scenario talked about novice vs. experienced.

It talked about novice vs. "skilled, competent" drivers, which suggests the latter meeting some threshold beyond just experience. (Making their behavior even more likely to be a demonstration of skill and safe technique.)

Nope, my advice is for all drivers, as is taught to motorcyclists. Checking three places every thirty seconds is appalling advice.

Sadly, sites like this are full of ignorant, unskilled, overconfident motorists who don't like correct advice.

That’s not really what allows people to drive safely. Without filters youd treat stationary objects with the same deference as moving ones.

Well it works for Tesla's autopilot right? /s

I never said you should drive without mental filters, I said that your eyes should be scanning at all times. Lots of strawmen today.

A book on safe driving I read said in normal driving your eyes should mainly be on the car ahead, and every 5 or 10 seconds glance at your mirrors to see what else is going on and also do a broader scan. And of course in different circumstances like turning, you should look around much more.

That's what properly aligned mirrors and looking over your shoulder are for..? Any sleep state you could be referring to is caused by (a) exhaustion or (b) being unaware of being a bad driver.

When you look at training and coaching as being instead of correcting or perfecting skills and their signifiers, but as "how you learn to learn," in that domain, a quiet eye is not an objective, but rather an effect of building skills on top of a set of underlying attitudes.

Goodhart's Law has been quoted a lot here recently, (re: measure becoming target and ceasing to be good measure), but it applies here.

The more useful question is, "of what is a quiet eye the effect?"

At an elite competition level, the physical differences (and scores) between athletes are so minor that success is more an effect of psychological habits than the relative difference in diet and training regimens.

Watching very top athletes, they are usually calm and deliberate, which is the effect of being in a zone where they are not intellectualizing or reacting to events, but are instead, in a state I call accept-respond. There is a huge aspect of ego suppression they can cultivate, where the y aren't distracted by hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and in particular, expectations and anticipations for how the immediate situation plays out, which delays their ability to shorten their accept-respond loop.

The very existence of an "if this then that," thought in their mind is performance inhibiting, because even that "if," statement needs to be negated before they can respond. Bringing conditionals to the game only works when the game plays out according to that conditional at the right time. At a learning level, you can learn those conditionals as tactics, but you need to practice them to where there is no conscious selection and evaluation of them when you are performing.

IMHO, a quiet eye is the effect of how you related to your trainer/coach/parent/teacher, and it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher.

There's a video where an experienced pianist's eyes were tracked and compared to a less experienced player's. The experienced person had much less eye movement and displayed what might also be called a quiet eye. Both players were already familiar with the piano piece, so there's a difference here when compared to sports where there is an element of randomness (ex. tennis - is the serve going to go left right?).

I'd be interested to see if there's a difference between the "ultimate" quiet eye in procedural tasks (piano, free throw) vs tasks that have randomness (returning a serve, saving a goal).

Perhaps one difference is in the accept-respond loop you mentioned, with the procedural tasks being able to be reduced far greater than the random tasks. Say if a random task was reduced too far, you might get something like goalkeepers jumping in the wrong direction.

Piano video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVvY8KfXXgE

Thanks for the link.

> it's not incumbent on the student or athlete to develop it, it is the sign of a good teacher

Its more a sign of both - the student's willingness to adjust and the teacher's willingness to refine. The reason I say both is that you run into students that have a better chance of picking something up right away (prior experience) and others that do not. The student that does not have that prior experience still needs it in order to be successful. A good instructor knows not to only focus on the people with prior experience and help boost the latter as well.

For example, in martial arts (as I noted elsewhere), you have someone who has prior experience in body coordination, which makes it easier for them to pick up an art (or dance or a sport). A student whose never stepped on to a mat in their life still needs body coordination. While a good instructor should see that and help build that coordination, the student needs to develop motivation and discipline to do these things without the need of someone else. An out of shape student should needs to recognize they need to put in extra work to move up a level - that is something the instructor can only point out.

A great book I use as a backing to my teaching philosophy is Mastery by George Leonard[1]. It categories the different personalities of the student into Dabbler, Obsessive, and Hacker (not in a good way). Dabblers try but quit when things get hard; Obsessives consume everything possible until they start seeing diminished returns; and Hackers just kind of "show up" and steadily maintain/improve. People can be all three for different things but its handling the particular category appropriately that pushes people toward mastery.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfil...

Excellent, will check that book out. Something I've noticed in my own life is practicing mastery in one area creates learnings and attitudes that aid in mastery in another area. The actual skills are not there, but the ability to navigate the learning terrain is. Many facts I thought about myself (eg. I'm unathletic) were simply assumptions I made somewhere early on in my life, perhaps because I lacked prior experience that my peers had. Which makes me think, is talent simply unconscious prior experience?

Unless we want to go into an all night drinking philosophical discussion - I'd say its a combination of nature and nurture (though how "unconscious" is nature would be the drinking topic). There's a great article the argues that practice isn't enough [1]. It will be incredibly difficult for me to become a professional basketball player, even with practice. I'm too old, bad knees, and 5'9" (again, Mugsy Bugs was 5'3"... possible but difficult nonetheless).

[1] Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...

I think as we become more experienced in something, we draw from that to make metaphors to another domain (no paper link, but I'm sure there a psych one out there I've yet to read). My current research is inspired by my years in martial arts. I draw analogies from it because I see the parallels to CS - poor retention rates, difficult subject matter, etc.

A long time ago I determined I was not a genius, rock star, pro athlete, whatever person. I'm just a guy that works really hard to be better than myself.

Well put. The article makes it sound like training the "quiet eye", i.e. improving eye focus by X percent, will improve elite athlete traits of calmness and zone/flow. When cause/effect operating in the opposite direction is equally (if not more) likely.

Disclaimer - I wrote the article I'm genuinely interested in your point here, but doesn't the research on quiet eye training actually support this causal link? Lots of the studies showed that feedback on the athlete's eye movements does improve their accuracy, better than control interventions that did not explicitly teach the quiet eye.

As an aside, do you know of any research where eye movement is not possible? I'm thinking of sparring in grappling, where you can't see parts of your opponent's body because you literally can't move your head that way.

> The very existence of an "if this then that," thought in their mind is performance inhibiting, because even that "if," statement needs to be negated before they can respond.

i guess humans also suffer from branching stalls.

This site has been designed primarily for researchers and their students carrying out quiet eye (QE) studies in sport, medicine, law enforcement, the military and other areas where a high degree of expertise is required. The content is free and may be used for educational and research purposes. > http://www.quieteyesolutions.com/

I've been practicing martial art for just over a decade now, no means world class, but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast", and generally tell students to slow down. We (people) get worked up and excited and anxious the second anything stressful happens. As we get worked up, we get tunnel-vision and things like "wheel spinning" (trying anything without consideration of if it helps) start. With music for example, if you try too hard to go fast for the sake of speed rather than smooth, you start to trip over your notes and it sounds worse than when you played one note at a time.

Mushin (as another poster wrote), mindfulness, breathing techniques - all they focus on is calming ourselves down to that we can make better decisions. If you can remain calm when everything on fire, you can think and react better.

My current research is inspired by athletes and other "physical" skills and how it translates to a knowledge skill like Computer Science. Some of the first steps in a physical skill is the creation of "smooth technique" - not fast, smooth. To get there takes time downing things slowly and methodically until it becomes muscle memory. Does this mean that there is some positive points to just drilling exercises? Obviously, only drilling without understanding is not useful, but I think somewhere along the way western education (or at least higher education) decided to not do as much drilling.

Your post reminds me of a quip from A NASCAR champion driver who said "the way to fast lap times is to 'go slowly ... in a hurry.'"

Love that!

What martial art ?

Aikido and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

>> but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast"

Same saying is used frequently in the fire service. We teach cadets things like throwing ladders, we start slow and practice, practice,practice until it's a fluid smooth motion.

Also we teach them how to breathe, right from the go. Proper breathing enhances focus. Then a simple reminder "breathe" and they remember to slow down their mind.

If you want to talk about excitable, look at a rookie firefighter jumping on a fire engine with sirens and lights blazing on the way to a structure fire. We try to get them in a relaxed, focused state as quickly as possible.

I didn't find this a convincing read. There may be good research about quiet eye, I don't know personally, but how is it a revelation to say athletes and experts focus very intently on one spot with their vision? This seems to border on truism to me, why would a professional athlete need to look all around to judge different parameters? Someone like Serena Williams has served the ball millions of times, is she truly going to gain more information by looking all around? Whereas, for a novice, it would be useful to look at the service box, then back at the ball, then at your feet to ensure your stance is good, then to your grip. So, is this expert effect simply a product of muscle memory and intense focus?

You are missing at least one point of the article --- that specifically training the "quiet eye" actually improves performance.

I rarely think about these things from neuroscience perspectives anymore, but I'd imagine simply tuning into one's environment using conceptual representations like words and data can remove oneself from a state of flow, when what matters most is muscle memory, reflexes, strength - all physical stuff. Overloading the mind with information the body must calculate through the mind, that sounds to me like it would be sending an interrupt signal to a system that's already functioning correctly (or at peak performance, what have you)

The visual field is the most simplified representation of data one needs when the body is doing the rest of the work. You can't think your way into running faster, you can convince yourself that's what the mind is doing for something like, extreme distances, training (maintaining motivation to improve performance), but the goal at the end is training the literal muscle to respond efficiently, and training the mind to react to the environment precisely according to the set of rules laid out by the game.

Reasoning about it beyond the literal reality of the game, and the literal ability of the body, once both of those spaces have been trained to peak performance is inefficient, so I would imagine it would be easy to discard all of the thinking that got you to that point. It's like it transforms into a feeling of comfort and confidence instead, because I would assume you would become accustomed to all of that stuff working as expected, your own performance would become predictable and unwavering.

The article (and anyone who focuses on "quiet eye") is placing emphasis on one of many triggers to flow state. Hyper visual focus is no different than the focused breathing of vipassana "mindfulness" mediation, or the pre-action routines that are standard in sports psychology.

If LeBron has a mental, pre-freethrow routine of focusing his vision on the tip of the hoop, bounces the ball twice, spins it, and then shoots, he's triggering his mind to focus on the precise moment and allowing his subconscious to take over.

There are a number of great books on this subject, but my favorites are How Champions Think, by Bob Rotella, and The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford.

This reminds me of story from Indian epic Mahabarata where Arjuna sees nothing but the parrot's eye when aiming to hit the parrot . http://hindumythologyforgennext.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-eye...

I've experienced this phenomenon. While competing at powerlifting, my field of vision shrunk to just the platform I was on. I couldn't hear the crowd or my family cheering. It was an incredible, transcendent experience that I would liken to an out-of-body experience.

I credit the experience to the immense amount of visualization I went through in the two months leading up to competition. Every night I would visualize the entire day of the meet, every little detail of the whole process.

I also spent a lot of time reading Zen and the Art of Archery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417410, and absolutely used those techniques. The whole motion should be effortless and spontaneous, "like a dewdrop slipping off a leaf."

I like that the researcher had a couple personal experiences with the proverbial "hot hand", as it made her convinced it was a real phenomenon and to look at it more closely. Anyone who's had it happen to them remember the moment whistfully, even decades later: You just can't seem to miss, your hand-eye coordination is perfect, and for a short time you are performing at levels way beyond normal. Then it goes away and you think, "If only!".

No idea whether "quiet eye" is the right answer or flow-state or just plain old luck, but I love her motivation.

This feels like the start of scientific insight into what is described in the classic Zen in the Art of Archery. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen-Herrigel/dp/037...

My own, albeit limited, experience is that quiet eye is flow state.

I think the main problem here is that so many of us pick one field of endeavor in our lives and we don’t spend enough time trying to excel at more than one thing to notice that the feeling of being in the groove and kicking ass are the same across a wide field of experiences and activities.

I even experienced it once in a yoga class. Last day the instructor had us do some restorative excercises. Next think I know, I hit Flow. My first thought was “uh oh, this could be addictive”, but with nothing to do with it, and having only done it once, I never experienced it again. A pity though. Sometimes you have a bug to fix and you just aren’t feeling it that day. Would be nice to have more tools to get into that state.

"Would be nice to have more tools to get into that state."

I'm with you on this sentiment. But I feel like the point of a lot of meditative and yogic practice is to give us those tools. At the very least, that practice has made me feel that the process is learn-able and repeat-able.

I also agree that one issue is our narrow fields of endeavor. I play perform music, ride mountain bike trails, write, program... all of these will allow me to get into a flow state in one way or another. These flow states are all similar, but require different triggers and processes.

What's been helpful to me is recognizing that ritual and paying close attention to how / what I am thinking while I prepare and practice these things all have similar modes.

In the last 6 months I've started doing a lot more yoga, and the ritualistic nature of the practice has made that mental process a lot easier to observe. So now I try and develop patterns in my practices: specific singing exercises, a specific piano warmup, always having the same process for kitting out and checking out the bike before a ride, trying to keep a similar schedule and order for my workday, etc.

As to your comment about addiction, I've been doing a daily bit of kudalini yoga for the last couple of months and although I am not sure of the mechanism it evokes a psychedelic response in me (low-intensity visual hallucinations). Putting aside the short-lived nature of that response, so far it's reminded me of the patterns of addiction around those kinds of drugs: a) unless you do something really too much, these aren't bad results, and b) when there are bad results it's very easy to just say "clearly the aliens telling me to stop are right, and I don't need to keep doing these kinds of things to my brain" and move on to different mental exercises ;) . It's not like the times in my life when I was drinking heavily out of a sense that it was a "good idea" (tm), when in fact I was really being disfunctional.

Sorry when I'm going all-out nerd here, but isn't the quiet eye the exact stance on war which is talked about over and over in Stephen King novels? I'm thinking It, the Dark Tower series, the Talisman (plus sequel), all basically revolve around the theme of the warrior getting more of that introverted kind of alertness - as opposed to getting more fucked up by the confrontations brought upon them - on every step into the madness that their task turns out to be.

> It may even lead to the mysterious ‘flow state’.

Sounds more like what is being described is flow...they're just looking at the way it presents in the eye

I remember reading that your subconscious is often more accurate than your conscious part of the mind (it was one of the books from Ramachandran or Oliver Sacks), so this makes some sense to me. Guess it's important to deliberately "let it loose" to delegate some of your control to your subconscious.

This article reminded me of a great book I've read several times that deals with sports performance: The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey.

Great read, I reread it frequently. Even if you aren't applying it to tennis it's incredible useful information to be aware of.

Anyone has thoughts on 'quiet eye' and programming in general. What is the focus scope ?

When you are getting grilled by the support team, a VP and your boss about a fire on production yet one can maintain a crystal clear focus - even writing solid tests before deploying the hot fix.

Some people perform better under pressure, but for someone else it might be the opposite. The trick is to identify what makes you go into the zone. Then trigger it with some imagination, or actually putting yourself in that kind of situation.

You could also do online training if anyone is interested: http://eyegym.com/

this seems of a piece with open focus techniques.

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Focus-Brain-Harnessing-Power-Att...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OsotDvMJmk

Watch any professional skateboard video and you'll see plenty examples of this

What are actions one can take to train this?

I'm not an expert, but I do competitive shotgun shooting -- one thing that I find is essential is to... not blink, and have your eyes open.

Sounds funny, but it's part of my 'routine' as I wait for the clay disk to appear; after all the stance bits etc etc, when I'm ready, I'm making sure to open my eyes wide, defocus on where I expect the clay to 'appear' and then, call "pull".

Then stuff happens that I'm not entirely aware off for the next 1/2s -- well, until afterward. As soon as I 'see' a shadow of a clay everything happens and I'm a bit of a 'passenger' until the shot is away. You see the clay in slow motion as you mount the gun from your low holding position, while rotating, and when it's on your shoulder as you rotate you do adjustments 'just so' and shoot.

And it works a LOT better if you let the autopilot do it, if you try to 'measure' stuff, you'll miss, guaranteed.

Worst case is when the sun is in the way and you have to 'squint' and the really worst case is when the clay goes from shadow to sunlight (or the other way around) as you know your retina is going to be laggy.

It's called Mushin. Google it.

While I agree about mushin, its always better to provide your reasoning rather than telling someone to "Google it".

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