Sports (psychology) goggles?

I read an interesting article today on the topic of perception/confidence for athletes and how it impacts their performance.

The article came from Wired.com

The following is an excerpt from that article:
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Flubbing a field goal kick doesn’t just bruise your ego — new research shows it may actually change how your brain sees the goal posts.

In a study of 23 non-football athletes who each kicked 10 field goals, researchers found that players’ performance directly affected their perception of the size of the goal: After a series of missed kicks, athletes perceived the post to be taller and more narrow than before, while successful kicks made the post appear larger-than-life.

Professional athletes have long claimed that their perception changes when they’re playing well — they start hitting baseballs as large as grapefruits, or aiming at golf holes the size of a bucket — but many scientists have been slow to accept that performance can alter visual perception.

“The reason why this is so radical is that perception has always been conceived as being all about information received by the eye,” said pychology researcher Jessica Witt of Purdue University, who co-authored the paper published last month in Perception. “In my studies we keep all the optical information constant, so the eye is seeing the exact same info — but it looks different depending on performance.”
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It got me to thinkin', and that usually leads to trouble.

The future of sports will no doubt be quite technologically advanced and with that change so to will come advances in sports psychology and methods of preparation and training. From what the Wired.com article described, it is clear that confidence (or sometimes lack thereof) can influence how we perform, especially in high pressure situations. That is certainly not a novel concept but viewing the topic from a cognition and visual perception standpoint does change things. The knowledge of how to control and manipulate this sort of brain functionality can open some massive doors in the field of sports psychology and athletic training.

My crystal ball is flashing visions of a Minority Report style world where holograms of virtual training grounds hover around, spatially encompassing athletes with footage of past and future performances in the hours before a big event.


Even in the shorter term there are means for this to be realistically applied.

Imagine, for example, a field goal kicker who took to the practice field with custom built and designed glasses [there is a great documentary on something similar to this called Cyberman. here is a link]that record every kick you made in practice for the entire week leading up to the game. Now imagine this footage, which is recording from the precise vantage point as that by which he views his entire kicking motion from snap to follow through, can be edited to simulate a real game environment.

If the kicker could go through repeated clips of successful (simulated) kicks before a game his confidence on the field, as per the article's claims, would be at it's peak. In fewer words, it's like pregame preparation/meditation made easy and accurate.

This would be really good for basketball players as well. Imagine Shaq going through a video of himself knocking down 25 straight freethrows!!?!