It’s 1920 and New York is passionate about a baseball player. Not the sharpest or most disciplined of athletes, we regularly see him in the evenings drinking beers, which the roundness of his stomach betrays. However, George Ruth hit fifty-four home runs on the season alone, more than any other team. But if his level cannot be explained by his physical abilities, what are the factors at play? Scientists from Columbia University then discovered the pot-aux-roses: the one we nicknamed the “Bambino” did much better than the average on all psychological tests.
George Ruth performs better than the average person on tests of attention, memory and cognitive tasks. It will take nearly a century for science to establish whether such abilities are common to all athletes or whether they are the genius of Ruth. Alberto Filgueiras, a psychology researcher, and his colleagues at the University of Central Queensland (Australia), published a meta-analysis in 2018 which proves that athletes mobilize brain areas involved in concentration, memory and motor control when they make in-game decisions.
Results supported four years later by a study led by Nicole Logan, from Northeastern University (United States), which compared the data of 5,339 participants, including 2,267 athletes. The results are convincing: professional athletes show higher scores than ordinary people when it comes to tests of concentration and decision-making. And the pros are also better at this level than the amateurs. This is shown by a major study by the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) published in 2012, as well as another carried out by Alberto Filgueiras in 2023.
The emergence of cognitive neuroscience has allowed scientists to visualize the neural networks that athletes activate to imagine game situations and, once on the field, make decisions in the heat of the moment. We now know that attention, memory and creativity play a key role in their profession – and mark their superiority over other humans.
Training makes the difference
Take a football player facing a lock-down defense. Several passing options are available to him on the left and right. He nevertheless opts for a little effective dribble before hitting and scoring. In a fraction of a second, he had to make a decision based on the information at his disposal. His imagination calculated the best trajectory for each dribble or each pass, then the most suitable decision based on the positions of each teammate and opponent.
It was there that he saw a space he could move into alone. Scan the terrain, push away any distraction, retain all the information by imagining each alternative, imagine the same sequence from several points of view… This whole process requires a high level of attention, memory and creativity. These three skills have their technical name: respectively inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility. They are the three main executive functions that the brain uses to carry out tasks as complex as a sport can induce.
Of course, this is not a simplistic hierarchy between individuals. It is through daily professional training, in addition to certain slight biological dispositions, that the brain of an athlete reaches a level higher than normal in these three functions. If the scientific literature has already established that athletes perform better than average in cognitive flexibility and inhibition, it however lacks a little perspective on working memory.
Sport, by its nature, pushes athletes to be creative and to constantly find better solutions to outperform an opponent. The digestion of information, in addition to pressure management, represents yet another new strength for athletes where ordinary people tend to be overwhelmed by a flow of information that is a little out of the ordinary. This advantage can translate into better decision-making on and off the field. Even if we will always have the impression, from our sofa, that the players of our favorite team are only making mistakes.
