Better Bowling Through Neuroscience?

In a recent post, I speculated on what makes Walter Ray Williams such a successful bowler. I suggested that exceptional ability to command his body to execute good strike and spare shots under pressure was an overriding factor. But what enables him to do this?

I found this interesting London Times Online article about research that neuroscientists are doing regarding athletic performance, and the gist of it is that sophisticated brain scan and brainwave measurement studies reveal that the more skilled an athlete is, the less of his brain he or she is likely to use, and that there is an ideal range of brainwave frequencies for different sports and for different activities within each sport.

In other words, the expert hockey players and golfers mentioned in a couple of studies exhibited significantly less activity in parts of their brains, such as the limbic area that regulates emotions, that aren't vital to performing well at those sports than did novices whose brains lit up in many areas. This suggests,that experts are able to stay focused on the task at hand a lot better than novices who try to compensate for their lack of experience and "muscle memory" by overthinking about what they need to do and are also unable to shut out irrelevant thoughts and distracting anxieties about their performance.

Also, some studies seem to show that practitioners of some sports, such as golf and target shooting, perform better when their brainwave activity is in the slower 12-15 cycles per second range, whereas practitioners of other sports, such as football and rugby, perform best when their brainwaves are in the faster 15-25 cycles or brainwaves per second range.

One could speculate that a Walter Ray Williams is better than most at using his brain efficiently and keeping his brainwaves in the optimal frequency range during competition. And while it remains to be seen HOW he is able to do this better than most, although it seems reasonable to assume that genetics probably has a lot to do with it as this Psychology Today article suggests that it does with those who win "American Idol" contests, it also seems possible that as neuroscientists learn more about the correlation between brain activity and athletic performance, it may be possible to use biofeedback and other brain-based approaches to improve performance in various sports including bowling.

For instance, bowlers, who, I'm guessing, might perform best when their brainwaves are in the 12-15 cps range, might be hooked up to biofeedback devices that tell them when their brainwaves fall within this range. They could either learn to correlate how they feel with the device telling them they're in the optimal range and then make themselves feel this same way in competition without using the device, or, perhaps, the day will come when they'll be allowed to wear a portable biofeedback device during competition.

I'm not sure this would be a good thing, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it and much more sophisticated brain training technologies for bowling and other sports come into play.