Quiet Eye with DeAndre Jordan

Quiet Eye with DeAndre Jordan

The Los Angeles Clippers's DeAndre Jordan

DAVID KOHN

•  NOV 18, 2015
•  HEALTH

Consider two very different basketball players. The Los Angeles Clippers star DeAndre Jordan, one of the strongest, quickest players in the NBA,  nevertheless made only 39 percent of his free throws last year. Then there’s his teammate, Jamal Crawford—not as fast or as strong as Jordan, but he makes 90 percent of the shots he takes from the foul line, a rate that’s among the best in the league.

What makes one player a stellar shooter, while another has more trouble making a basket? As Jordan demonstrates, it’s not just a question of sheer athleticism. The difference between athletes like him and athletes like Crawford may well come down to a concept known as “quiet eye”: a new way of understanding how people perform precise motor-skill tasks like shooting a basketball, flying a jet, or removing a brain tumor.

Until recently, most researchers viewed these skills in terms of coordination and reflex, believing that those who were better at making a free-throw or suturing a wound simply had had superior physical dexterity. But in the past few years, a small group of neuroscientists have identified a new way of understanding coordination, one that focuses on visual and cognitive skills over physical prowess.

The concept, known as the quiet-eye theory, is deceptively simple: Before you perform an action, you focus your gaze on the salient aspects of your goal—the rim, the catcher’s mitt, the malignant tissue, and so on. In recent years, using eye-tracking technology, researchers have found that locking onto the relevant stimulus during the right time frame—typically the few hundred milliseconds before, during and after the movement—greatly improves your chances of success.

“When your eyes provide the data, your motor system just knows what to do,” says Joan Vickers, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Calgary and one of the originators of the quiet-eye theory. “Your brain is like a GPS system. It detects target, speed, intensity, and distance.”

But quiet eye encompasses more than vision; it’s about attention, too. The gaze is a key factor in the brain’s ability to concentrate on the essential details rather than ancillary noise. In a study published this spring by researchers at the University of Exeter in the U.K., the scientists found a clear link between a person’s ability to store information in short-term memory—a good measure of the ability to focus—and their ability to use the quiet eye approach.

Some evidence indicates that the quiet-eye technique stimulates the dorsal area of the brain, which regulates focused, goal-directed attention. It may also suppress activity the ventral region, which oversees stimulus-driven attention—the kind that keeps track of a scattered, fluid set of variables. There’s probably more to it, though: Mark Wilson, a psychology professor at Exeter who studies quiet eye, points out that training in the technique tends to change a range of physiological measures, including heart rate and patterns of muscle movement.