The Science Behind Peak Performance

Todays discussion on peak performance is a continuation of a previous post titled Finding Peak Performance in The Sea of Life. First we’re going to talk about the work of Dr. Debbie Crews of Arizona State University on the importance of a balanced brain. Then we’re going to look briefly at the characteristics of hypnotic susceptibility. Let’s start with Dr. Crews’ research.

Dr. Crews’ Research

Dr. Crews’ research centers on how a balanced brain leads to a better golf game. In one of her projects, Dr. Crews has golfers hit putts on an adjustable putting green. Every few  putts, the green twists, changing the undulations and contours. This means the golfer must reread the green and adjust for distance and direction. It’s the kind thing that’s fun until you have someone looking over your shoulder with every putt.

Measuring Brain Waves

Not only does Dr. Crews watch and rank each putt, she’s also measuring brain waves. She can see things going on in the golfer’s brain, like the left brain firing when the golfer thinks about changing the distance. Then comes the cool part.

Balancing the Brain

Next, she has the golfer stand on a balance board for about ten minutes. Imagine a slab of wood sitting atop a can of beans. Obviously, she feels that physical balance is important. Does physical balance affect mental balance?  You bet and the results are going to blow you away.

Study by Roland A. Carlstedt, Ph.D.

Before we get to the results of Dr. Crew’s study, I want to bring up the work of Roland A. Carlstedt, Ph.D. who is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Director of Integrative Psychological Services of New York City.  He wrote a study titled The Theory of Critical Moments: A Mind-Body Model of Sport Performance and Mastery of Pressure Situations that is truly rigorous and insightful.

Critical Moments Study

Dr. Carlstedt studied critical moments during athletic events as he needed a way to organize data on peak performance. He studied about 600 student athletes in Division I, II and III and looked closely at those critical moments when the contest was on the line. The key moments he studied included:

• A pressure packed free throw shot at a basket ball game
• The intense focus of hitting a baseball during a baseball game
• The skill and concentration to hit a soccer ball squarely on goal during a match

There were others, but you get the point.

Three Key Psychological Factors

Besides these key moments, Dr. Carlstedt also rated the student athletes using three important psychological factors. Basically, he correlated the mental abilities of each student athlete against their success in competition; Talk about a great way to assess the mental aptitude of a group. The three key characteristics are:

• Hypnotic Susceptibility- The ability to be hypnotized. Carlstedt  links hypnotizability with the ability to easily find “The Zone”  and excel in athletic completion with very little effort. Remember the movie “The Natural”?  Paul Newmans character would fall into this category.  Ironically, low hypnotizable athletes can also excel, but for a different reason.  
• Repressive Coping- The ability to stay positive (despite a negative situation) by bringing up positive memories. Basically, Dr. Carlstedt is saying that a positive person moves on  and performs in the moment and doesn’t looking back.
• Neuroticism - The tendency of a person to experience long lasting negative emotions. The negative person, no matter how skilled athletically, will be dragged down by negative events during the game or contest and struggle to recover emotionally.

Hypnotic Susceptibility

I have a point I want to make today, so let’s take a brief look at hypnotic susceptibility. To take the “black magic” out of the study, let me give you little bit of background. To assess hypnotic susceptibility, Carlstedt applied a test (or questionnaire). I did some research into this as I was a bit skeptical. It turns out that there’s a fair amount of research that validates the use of tests as a measure of hypnotic susceptibility. As you probably guessed, the test rated some athletes highly hypnotizable and some low hypnotizable. Most athletes were in the middle.

Athletes who are highly hypnotizable have powerful imaginations and easily apply vivid imagery in their thinking. The key is that during a game, they are able to process the information more automatically. Think of Wayne Gretzky. They say Gretzky had incredible anticipation and always knew where to be on the ice. In basketball, the same was said about Magic Johnson’s ability to see the court.

These are the athletes who enter “the zone” and understand the game because of their ability to process the images they are seeing and react - They get it. Their minds are highly agile. It turns out that people who are highly hypnotizable are physically different.  See ( Horton, Crawford, Harrington,  Downs, 2004) Their corpus callosum (the part of the brain that controls all the activity between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere) is larger.

Being larger, it is more conductive and allows the left and right brain to communicate more efficiently. If an athlete’s left brain needs information from the right brain, he can easily access it. Their minds are not weighted too heavily either way. Their brains are naturally open and in balance. What about yours?

Getting Back To Dr. Crews

When the putting green twists, the golfer must make a judgment. He must use the left side of his brain to take in the information and assemble it. He must also use the right side of his brain to interpret these results and apply the right about amount of force and direction. It’s a unilateral process.

When Dr. Crews put golfers on the balanced board to balance their mind, guess what happened? Their game improved dramatically. In fact, there is a video narrated by Alan Alda that will take you through it. You can see Alda go from hitting 2-3 putts out of ten up to 8 or 9 putts out of 10.

A Balanced Brain is Key

Does it make sense to have a balance board at your cubicle at work? Perhaps. What about during a meeting, on the golf course, making a presentation or taking a test?
What can you do to increase your ability to think evenly and uniformly with both sides of your brain? 

Using Focus Stones could be your answer. We’re preparing to launch Focus Stones in the next few months. If you would like to be part of our Priority Notification list, register here and we will let you know.

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