X-rated Bob wrote
evolucian wrote
it wasn't being catty... gamers have quick reflexes and thinking times... sportsmen too, especially the ones you mentioned.
Actually they often don't have very quick reflexes. There have been some studies. Two racing drivers have attracted considerable interest in recent times - Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna. Neither, when tested, demonstrated particularly fast reflexes.
Senna was tested at the RAF. They have things that they look for in fighter pilots. It's not speed of reflex. It's to do with the speed at which the brain can absorb and start processing information and how much information is needed to trigger the process. Senna was nearly off the scale in their tests. So that means he needs only the merest glimpse of something to start figuring out where it's going and how fast. It's not reliable, but it's still an advantage because, unconciously, he could repeat this process over again, making little adjustments and recalculations all the time.
Schumacher didn't go through that kind of testing (Senna did it voluntarily as part of some academic study), but he has described something similar. He calls it driving with his backside, the way he feels the car reacting all the time, the way that he can sense when it's getting close to it's limits. The car gives a little vibration or starts to move in a certain plain - most of us wouldn't even notice until it was too late, a good racing driver would say "Hmmm... what's that?". Schumacher feels it, realises it what it is and reacts to it.
What you initially described is not the eyes working faster. They can't. It may be something similar to what's being described above. What it is very similar to is what athletes, especially those who play games involving a moving ball, call "being in the zone". Things don't slow down, and your reflexes and eyes don't magically get quicker, but mentally you are so focussed and synchronised with the task that it
feels like things have slowed down or the ball has got bigger, or that's the only way that you can intellectually understand or express it.
I'd think there's another aspect here - or maybe it's the same thing. Guys who play music with a high degree of improvisation. They have to be able to "think on their feet" because in a way they're composing as they go.
I think this sort of situational awareness (for want of a better term) might manifest itself in different ways. And I think when it happens to us we don't actually have good ways of truly understanding what is going on. In fact because it's going on we focus on the task and on doing it well - if we stopped to analyse it we'd lose it. So afterwards we say "the ball get bigger" or something like that (cricketers in good form often talk about how the ball starts to look bigger and thus is easier to hit). Of course the ball didn't get bigger. We're trying to find a later explanation for something that happened in real time when we concentrating very hard on doing something with speed and precision.
