John McEnroe Was Correct!!!

Scientific Evidence that John McEnroe Was Correct ---------

                                    ‘You Can’t Be Serious’

     David Whitney, an associate professor at The Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California-Davis says that due to a phenomena called perceptual mis-location it’s good to challenge a call of ‘out’ in a tennis match because most mistakes by Wimbledon line judges are on balls ruled out that were actually in. The human brain often mis-judges objects moving at high speed so it guesses where they will end up – and it guesses long and wrong.

This comes from the way your brain works -- it simply assumes that things will continue as you last saw them -- unless you gather information to the contrary. Under normal circumstances you don’t study the ground to determine if it is still there as you take each step and so it is with all aspects of your visual field including your golf where gathering information to the contrary is exactly what you should do when you read a putt.

You’ve got to Look to See

Because of changes in slopes, when you read a green, you have to look or point your eyes at every section of your putt or else you brain fills in the part you skipped with a logical extension of what went before. If the putt starts with a left-to-right slope, flattens out, then breaks a little left at the end, you have to look at all three segments – if you skip the flat segment, your visual systems fills it in as a continuation of the left to right break.     

At the University of Rochester, Dana Ballard a Computer Science Professor, is studying the science of visual optics by learning the intricacies of how we perceive visual depth and gather information that is then relayed to the motor cortex for execution. This skill is automatic but understanding how your brain processes the information necessary to track your target can make you a better golfer especially when it comes to putting, pitching and chipping. As Dr. Ballard discovered, the eyes determine the distance and break to the hole by a series of "fixations" where, one at a time, they look at and evaluate portions of the route your ball should take.

 

I've used the golf balls to represent the segments. Information about each segment is stored in "working memory" a very short term brain function that lets you hold the information just long enough for it to be acted on.  If you fail to point your eyes, your brain will not have the information it needs to run its calculations.