Batting 106: How To Build A Routine Friday, Apr 18 2008 

Uncategorized lukebarnes 7:55 pm

This is the last post in my series Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology.

We saw in my previous post that a major problem for batsmen is internal distractibility – at the critical moment, when the ball is released, unwanted thoughts drift into your head, reducing your reaction time and diverting your attention. We also saw the solution, as Griffiths puts it:

“if you are going to be distracted, the distraction may as we be something which is deliberate and under your control.”

Thus, we develop a routine: a standard set of things to do and things to say to yourself before every ball. It doesn’t have to fill in all the time between one ball and the next – there is time for your thoughts to wander and relax. But there is a specific time where you say “this is the moment when I start to get ready for the next ball”. From that moment, every movement and every thought should be planned, controlled and rehearsed.

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Batting 105: Don’t Think About It Sunday, Apr 13 2008 

Science and Sport lukebarnes 3:34 pm

My last post outlined the four attentional styles: broad external, narrow external, broad internal, narrow internal. I also stressed that each of us has a preferred style, which we will revert to when we have a choice or when under pressure.

Let me make a prediction – your preferred style is internal, either narrow or broad. How do I know this? Because you’re reading a “science-themed blog”! You obviously enjoy thinking about things, and spend idle moments wrapped up in your own thoughts rather than looking around you for entertainment. I certainly do.

(I must give a warning before I move on: Griffiths repeatedly stresses that there is no “one-size-fits-all” mental strategy in sports. I am largely applying the techniques of Griffiths’ book to myself, as an internal attender. Don’t assume that everyone needs to do what I do.)

Let me begin with a surprising statement: in many sporting contexts, conscious thought inhibits performance. Griffiths calls it paralysis by analysis, saying:

“… analysing during the execution of a stroke or while you are bowling a ball is highly detrimental to performance … The well-meaning supporter who yells out ‘think about it’ every time someone in the team makes any sort of error should be given a ticket to the races whenever an important game is on!”

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Batting 104: A Concentration Model Friday, Apr 4 2008 

Science and Sport lukebarnes 7:36 pm

We learned in my last post that the batsman’s task is to concentrate on watching the ball right out of the bowler’s fingers, to pick up the length as soon as possible in order to make the forward vs. backward decision. But how do you direct and control your concentration?

Recall our definition of concentration: “What you attend to.” I’ll begin by presenting the concentration model found in Griffiths. We can categorise a person’s attention at any particular time in the following broad types:

  • Internal vs. External – is your conscious mind busy with recalling, creating and/or processing thoughts (internal) or with the information entering though the 5 senses (external)? [the direction of your attention]
  • Broad vs. Narrow: How many things are you focussing on at the moment? [the width of your attention]

Thus, we have four types of concentration:

  • Broad External: e.g. driving a car.
  • Narrow External: A surgeon performing heart surgery.
  • Broad Internal: Planning a party.
  • Narrow Internal: Doing a maths exam.

The important thing about these styles is that individually they are not right or wrong. They are simply appropriate or inappropriate in any given situation.

Everyone has his or her own natural style. At a football match, narrow attenders will often only watch the ball, while broad attenders will take in the whole scene. Each will see things that the other misses. Importantly, while we are each capable of each style, under intense pressure, we will tend to revert to our preferred style.

Returning to batting, we can isolate the required style of concentration quite easily: narrow external. You need to divert all your brain’s resources to your eyes, focusing to the exclusion of all else on the ball as it emerges from the bowler’s fingers.

We can also identify the mental challenges of batting and maintaining concentration. They are directly related to the wrong attentional styles at the moment of the ball’s release:

1.) The problem of external distractions. These will place the batsman in a broad external attention style at the wrong time. The batsman’s attention is divided between the ball and, say, someone walking behind the bowler. Or the batsman’s is focused around the ball, rather than directly on it. Either way, the batsman fails to gather all the information available about the ball’s flight, and misjudgement is more likely.

2.) The problem of internal distractions, drawing the batsman into his own thoughts at the wrong moment.

I will be looking at internal distractions in more detail in my next post. I will finish this post with a few thoughts on external distractions.

Griffiths notes that, just before the ball is released, the batsman should use a broad external attention style to watch the bowler’s body for clues as to what he is about to bowl. As an example, Griffiths tells of a wicketkeeper who could predict when a leg-spin bowler would spin the ball a certain way (the wrong-un) by the way he raised his left knee just before delivery. Thus, the skill is to flick quickly from broad external to narrow external at the point of delivery. The technique I outline in the next post will tell you how.

Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology
Other posts in this series:

 

Batting 103: Swing More Than The Bat Saturday, Mar 29 2008 

Science and Sport lukebarnes 7:00 pm

The question that naturally arises from my last post, Batting 102, is: why all this focus on where the ball will land? To answer that, we turn to the mechanics of batting.

There is more to hitting a cricket ball than simply swinging the bat with your arms. Your body’s largest muscles are in your legs and torso, so hitting a cricket ball involves your whole body. The same applies in tennis – when an elite tennis player hits a forehand, 50% of the force comes from his leg muscles. In golf, it’s what David Leadbetter (coach of Nick Faldo) calls the “athletic swing” – the power comes from an active, rotating body, not just the biceps.

In cricket, the transfer of the batsman’s weight is essential to every cricket shot, either onto the front foot to send full-pitched balls back in the direction they came from, or onto the back foot to allow a free rotation of the body for horizontal bat shots.

For every ball that a batsman faces, he must make this crucial decision: forwards or backwards. You will often hear commentators noting that a batsman’s downfall was brought about by “being caught on the crease” i.e. moving neither forward nor back. And the decision is based solely on the length of the ball i.e. how far down the pitch it bounces. Weight transfer is also the movement that takes the most time to execute. Hence, it should be the batsman’s priority. We have answered the question posed at the start: the batsman’s first task is to predict where the ball will land in order to accurately inform the forwards vs. backwards decision.

Every youngster who takes up cricket is given this advice: “watch the ball right onto the bat”. It’s not that the advice is wrong – it just has the wrong emphasis. It is the first stages of the balls flight that contain the most important information for the batsman. The final 0.2 seconds are irrelevant. The important thing is to watch the ball right out of the bowler’s fingers. This is the point where the “quiet eye” should be focussed.

This isn’t a particularly revolutionary conclusion, as the following quotes demonstrate:

Justin Langer:

“The most important thing about batting is to see the ball released from the bowler’s hand … pick up the ball as early as possible, then you can work out the length of the ball.”

Bob Simpson (former Australian coach, on working with Steve Waugh in the early 1990’s):

“When Steve started watching the ball out of the bowler’s hand, he suddenly had an extra metre to pick up the line and length of the ball, giving him extra time to get himself in the right position to play the appropriate stroke. “

What is the relevance of all this to sports psychology? A key mental ability in cricket is the ability to concentrate, especially in high-pressure situations and over long periods of time. But what exactly is concentration? Sports psychologists define concentration simply as “what you attend to.” As Griffiths notes, “it is not a question of whether you are concentrating or not … The question becomes ‘What are you concentrating on?’”

We can isolate what a batsman should be concentrating on, the task he should be attending to. The batsman’s task is to watch the ball right out of the bowler’s fingers, to pick up the length as soon as possible in order to make a decisive forward vs. backward movement.

But as Griffiths notes, “most people who tell you to concentrate cannot tell you how to concentrate.” How do you direct and control your concentration? We’ll start to answer this question in my next post.

Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology
Other posts in this series:

 

Batting 102: Visual Speedometer Thursday, Mar 20 2008 

Science and Sport lukebarnes 4:00 pm

We saw in my last post, Batting 101, that for the first stages of a cricket ball’s flight toward the batsman, the batsman isn’t following the ball with his eyes. He is keeping his eyes still, allowing the ball to cross his field of vision, before flicking them quickly to the point on the pitch where he thinks the ball will bounce.

Why is this? The answer is related to how batsmen judge the speed of the ball. In baseball, where the ball is coming (almost) directly at the batter, batsmen use two factors to judge the ball’s speed: the ball appears bigger (known as image expansion) and the batter’s eyes see different things (binocular disparity) as the ball gets closer. The rate of change of these effects is related to the ball’s velocity.

But in cricket, the ball is not coming directly at the eye – it bounces. Land and McLeod conclude that image expansion and binocular disparity would be insufficient to allow the accuracy with which elite batsmen judge the balls flight. The evidence in support of this conclusion is that batsmen do not track the ball for most of the pre-bounce period.

Instead, batsmen rely on the change in the angular position of the ball – the angular velocity. To measure this most accurately, batsmen keep their eyes still, so that the brain doesn’t have to “factor out” the movement of the eye. An image of the ball in the centre of the batsman’s field of view is not needed. Once they can estimate the speed, and in particular the downward velocity of the ball, they can estimate where it will bounce.

This visual strategy is what Dr. Joan Vickers from the University of Calgary calls “the quiet eye”: a period of time when the eye is stable on a critical object or location prior to the body performing the movement. Elite volleyball players, for example, wait almost 0.4 seconds after the ball is served before taking their first step, while less skilled players have no quiet eye at all: they begin moving even before the ball was served, making it difficult to maintain gaze on the ball. In cricket, the gaze is fixed on the point where the bowler will release the ball. Here’s a short video on the quiet eye from Scientific American.

It is only after the bounce (or late in the trajectory if the ball bounces close to the batsman) that image expansion and binocular disparity become useful information for the batsman. Their use is primarily to gauge the amount of bounce – this is related to the hardness of the pitch (the coefficient of restitution, or “bounce coefficient”), which the batsman learns through experience, not an intuitive calculation.

How does this visual strategy relate to the mechanics of hitting the ball? Stay tuned for my next post!

Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology
Other posts in this series:

 

Batting 101: Don’t Watch The Ball Friday, Mar 14 2008 

Science and Sport lukebarnes 9:02 pm

This is the first post in a series titled “Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology”. I refer the reader to the outstanding book “Modern Psychology for Cricket and Other Australian Sports” by Robert Griffiths (1999). In this area, I am known as an “instant expert” – I read one book and I think I’m a genius. I will try to do justice to Griffiths’ book.

I need to discuss the mechanics of batting before I can look at psychology. In particular, we’ll look at how batsmen watch the ball.

In recent years, scientists have studied how elite cricketers judge the flight of a cricket ball. In particular, in 2000 Mike Land and Peter McLeod, from the University of Sussex and Oxford respectively, presented a detailed study of batsmen’s eye movements when facing very fast bowling. Their conclusions are quite surprising:

“… [batsmen] monitor the moment when the ball is released, make a predictive saccade [a fast movement of the eye] to the place where they expect it to hit the ground, wait for it to bounce, and then follow the trajectory for a period of 100-200 ms after the bounce.”

Let’s break down the stages. Land and McLeod found that, for the first 0.14 seconds of the balls trajectory, elite batsmen do not follow the ball with their eyes. (We’re talking about a fast bowler here – the total time from bowler’s hand to bat is about 0.6 seconds). The eyes are stationary, fixed on the point of release, and the ball moves down through the field of vision.

The next step is called a saccade – the eyes move very rapidly to the point on the pitch where the batsman thinks the ball will bounce. There they wait until the ball arrives.

After the ball bounces, the batsman tracks the ball for the next 0.1-0.2 seconds, but not necessarily all the way onto the bat. The reason for this is quite simple: Land and McLeod note that it takes an elite batsman 0.2 seconds to adjust his shot on the basis of new information. Thus, the information gained by watching the ball in the last 0.2 seconds of its flight is useless – there isn’t enough time to incorporate that information into the trajectory of the bat. Against a fast bowler (total flight time of 0.6 seconds), this is a third of the total flight time.

Mark Waugh makes it look so easy

But how should a batsman use this information? What lessons can we take from this discovery? This will be the topic of my next post.

Introduction to Batting in Cricket: Mechanics, Visual Strategy and Psychology
Other posts in this series:

 

Rush Hour Sunday, Jan 6 2008 

Mathematics Berian 6:51 pm

During the recent holiday period, I was introduced to a puzzle game called ‘Rush Hour’. It’s very simple: a 6-by-6 grid is populated along rows and columns with cars and trucks; the player must manoeuvre a car to the exit by sliding the other vehicles out of the way, moving everything only either forward or backward. The reader should attempt a few configurations from this online implementation by Fred Vonk (hat-tip to a nonetheless thin-on-content Wikipedia article) before reading further.

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Vitriol Against “Virtual Science” Sunday, Dec 23 2007 

Science and the Public brendonbrewer 4:01 am

This opinion piece appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/virtual-science-is-no-substitute-for-the-realthing/2007/12/21/1198175338154.html

 It argues against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the grounds that a lot of what we say we know about climate change is based on theoretical modelling.

I submitted this letter to the editor, which may or may not appear:

I read Michael Duffy’s article “However virtuous, virtual science is no substitute for the real thing” (Herald, December 22) with dismay. Rather than advocating “real science” (which he leaves undefined) he seems to have done nothing more than reveal his own ignorance about how science works.

The whole point of mathematical modelling is to calculate the predictions of a model. If you don’t know what the predictions of a model are, there is no way to test it against reality. And if you blindly make observations with no models in mind, the observations are pointless because they do not tell you anything.

It’s true there are models that make incorrect predictions. Great! That increases our state of knowledge. But if Michael Duffy is sitting on some compelling evidence that the IPCC’s conclusions regarding global warming are wrong, perhaps he should submit them to a real scientific journal, rather than trying to manipulate the opinions of the uninformed through misleading articles in newspapers.

 

The Early Bird Writes The Words Friday, Dec 21 2007 

Brain and Creativity and Neurology and Science lukebarnes 7:50 pm

A few quotes to get you thinking …

Pat Pattison: Professor of Poetry and Lyric writing at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, author of “Writing Better Lyrics”:

The time to start [songwriting] is the first thing in the morning, even before coffee. Sit down and give it a full ten minutes – but no more.

Barry Green, in his book “The Inner Game Of Music”:

My fourteen-year-old cousin Dana … tells me that she plays piano best when she has just rolled out of bed in the morning or is exhausted at the end of the day … It seemed amazing to both of us that Dana was able to perform much better when she was barely awake … Other musicians, young and old, have told me that they perform best when they are relaxed, slightly ill [or] tired.

Songwriter Mike Read, in “The Secrets of Songwriting” by Susan Tucker; asked “Is there a certain time of the day you like to write?”:

… I have this little ritual. I love that smell of the first cup of coffee. I love the early morning … I love getting up early, at six o’clock.

It seems that we are most creative in the morning, when we haven’t woken up properly. Is there any scientific evidence to back up this anecdotal evidence?

On December 2, 2007, New Scientist ran an article titled “The Other You”. The article mentions the work of Colin Martindale of the University of Maine in Orono, which is now three decades old. He used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor the brain activity of a creative mind.

He found that there were two distinct stages of brain activity. During the initial “inspiration” stage, the brain is remarkably quiet. Brain activity is dominated by indicated by alpha waves, indicating a very low cortical arousal. The second stage is called the “elaboration” stage, and is characterised by more activity, especially in the cortex. It is probably associated with the conscious analysis of ideas. People with the greatest difference in brain activity between these two stages were the most creative.

The point of interest to us is that brain activity during the inspiration stage is very similar to brain activity during dream sleep and relaxation. Jordan Peterson, of the University of Toronto, Canada, believes that creativity involves the overflow of subconscious information into consciousness. Thus, to tap the rich mental resources of the subconscious, it is best to catch your conscious mind while it is still half asleep.

 

A Lesson in Neurology from Jimi Hendrix Friday, Nov 30 2007 

Brain and Neurology lukebarnes 8:12 am

In music, there is a chord known as the “Jimi Hendrix chord”. For those who know about these things, it’s a dominant 7 #9 chord – e.g. C7#9 contains the notes C E G Bb D#. The dissonance between the E and the D# (the major and minor third in C respectively) creates the gritty, edgy, crunchy rock sound that Hendrix uses in Foxy Lady and Purple Haze.

There is a story, possibly an urban legend, that Purple Haze is so named because the Jimi Hendrix chord in its introduction made Hendrix see a purple haze. Other theories invoke copious amounts of LSD and marijuana, but it is the triggering of a purple haze that I want to focus on.

This phenomenon, of one sensory experience involuntarily triggering a second, usually unrelated sensory experience, is known as synesthesia. It is a neurological condition, and appears in a variety of forms. For example, some synesthetes (as they are called) associate letters and numbers with colours – for example, a black 5 written on a page is seen to be green; a 2 seen to be red.

At first glance, the condition doesn’t seem very interesting. Most people would connect the word ‘sunset’ with an orange-red colour for the following reason:

  • First, the word “sunset” connects with the concept of a sunset.
  • Next, the concept of a sunset connects with a mental picture of a sunset.
  • Finally, the mental picture of the sunset fills the mind with an orange-red glow.

The mind does all this in an instant, so that the word “sunset” and the colour “orange-red” link seamlessly.

We might postulate that synesthesia involves the same sort of connections, albeit a bit less obvious. For example, the number 2 could trigger a childhood memory of a refrigerator magnet ‘2’ that happened to be red. As time goes by, the connection between the number 2 and the colour red remains even when the fridge magnet is forgotten.

But synesthesia is more than simply association – the number 2 doesn’t just remind them of the colour red. When synesthetes see a black 2, they will tell you that it “really is red”. But is there any way to test how real this mental response is?

In 2001, Ramachandran and Hubbard performed the following ingenious experiment. (See the Wikipedia article on synesthesia for more details.) They presented synesthetes and non-synesthetes with displays composed of a number of 5s, with some 2s embedded among the 5s. These 2s could make up one of four shapes; square, diamond, rectangle or triangle – see the diagram below:

An example of a test used to demonstrate the reality of synesthetic experiences (from Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001).

An example of a test used to demonstrate the reality of synesthetic experiences (from Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001).

Subjects were asked to identify the hidden shape. If recognising the number triggered a concept that triggered a colour, then the colours wouldn’t appear until after the number was recognised. Thus, if synesthesia is just a subjective, mental connection, then it won’t help a synesthete to find the hidden 2’s.

The results were astounding. Non-synesthetes took about 20 seconds to find the shape; synesthetes took about a second.

How do you explain that? Seeing something that isn’t there is one thing, but having it improve your ability to discern shapes is something else. Its like having an imaginary friend who actually helps with the laundry. (This is why synesthesia isn’t usually classified as a neurological condition, because it is often advantageous to the “sufferer”.) Most explanations involve rejecting the linear processing of sense data we invoked previously. Some researchers have suggested that increased cross-talk between different regions of the brain that are specialized for different functions could explain it.

What if you could train your mind to use synesthesia? What if a piano student who struggles to read music could be taught to see each note on the page as a different colour? Could children be taught to see harmful objects as red and harmless ones as blue? What if you saw interesting blog posts as red, and boring ones as blue?

 

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