PILLAR II:   BRAIN SKILLS

Brain skills are one of the four pillars that make up an athlete's so-called set of "intangible" skills.

The brain is the control center of the entire body.  Physically, the difference between the top echelon of athletes in a particular sport and the middle of the pack is marginal. Mentally, the gap can be enormous.  Why?  The answer is quite simply, a better-trained brain.

Mind speed.  You see it in many sports; athletes that seem to defy nature with uncanny anticipation, split-second moves or perfectly-executed blind passes while under severe pressure from opponents.

What makes such great plays possible is speed. It's not the kind of speed we normally see and think of, but rather mind speed, information-processing speed, mental quickness, and brain clarity that allows the body to move without any conscious thought.

Athletes who try to think and analyze will be stopped in their tracks. The eyes must be trained to load the brain with visual cues and information. And the brain must recognize, process and react without thought.

What really sets the special athletes apart is their ability to act and react at a fraction of a second faster than their opponents.

The table below summarizes the brain skills which are most important for athletic performance and which can be improved with purposeful exercises and a cognitive training program.

Trainable Brain Skills	Description
PERIPHERAL AWARENESS	Peripheral awareness is the ability of an athlete to perceive what's going on around her without turning her head. Athletes with a better developed peripheral awareness are able to pick up more information and visual cues from the periphery, which enable them to react in ways that would not even occur to others.
VISUAL MEMORY	Visual memory is the ability to encode, retrieve and recognize sport-specific information from long-term memory structures. The ability to store information that has been seen briefly and then recognize or recall it later can be very helpful in blurring the line between thought and action. Expert athletes use their knowledge of situational probabilities to anticipate future events. They have a better than average idea of what is likely to happen given a particular set of circumstances.
VISUALIZATION	Visualization is getting yourself into a deeply-relaxed state and then using your mind to create positive images of something you want to occur. Visualization techniques develop the subconscious mind. As mind speed is measured in milliseconds and occurs without conscious thought, visualization techniques are a powerful tool for training mental quickness.
REACTION SPEED	Reaction speed refers to how quickly an athlete's brain processes the information it receives from the eyes and transmits that information to the body for the correct movement. Research studies indicate that the difference in abilities of skilled and unskilled athletes to react to visual information does not depend on the speed of the visual system. Rather, it lies in the organization of the motor system that uses the output of the visual system. In other words, brain processing speed.