#23: The Coach Who Will Put You in The
Zone
By GUY
LAWSON
|
Photograph by Tom Schierlitz
|
A sprinter crouches in the
starting blocks, body and mind quiet, thoughts focused: 100 meters of
dash for an Olympic gold medal ahead. Two lanes away, legs twitching,
eyes darting, vagrant notions race through the mind of another
competitor: a sore ankle, potential fame, bad breakfast; relax, says
his inner voice, growing desperate, come on, come on, come on. For an
elite athlete, trying to concentrate in the moment of greatest stress,
finding the focus and groove known as the zone can mean the difference
between first place and fourth, a smiling face on a Wheaties box and
abiding regret.
The United States Olympic Committee headquarters in Colorado
Springs is populated by folks dedicated to finding any and all manner
of perfecting performance. In an aerie set apart from the rest of the
sports sciences department, Tim Conrad and Tom Westenburg, principal
engineers, explained that the greatest challenge of the future is not
so much improving the mechanics of sport as helping athletes
understand and master their minds. Unlike the fit and trim jocks that
abound on campus, both men are slope-shouldered and pasty-faced --
Conrad whippet-thin and talkative, Westenburg with a paunch and a
gentle manner. They have spent nearly a decade daydreaming of ways of
translating the mantra of sport -- higher, faster, stronger -- into
technological breakthroughs. They have used tiny remote sensors to
measure the force applied in vehicular sports like rowing and bobsled;
they have constructed a pulley system able to drag a swimmer faster
than she can swim -- a second or two faster than the world record, for
example -- allowing her to adjust breathing and mechanics to match the
pace and giving her the chance to feel what it takes to win.
These days, however, their thoughts tend toward the interior life
of competitors. There isn't much physical difference between the best
athletes, Conrad said, but there can be a good deal of difference in
their states of mind. Measurement is the key to all advances in sport,
Westenburg said, including measuring the intangibles like thought and
feeling. So the future of athletic progress lies in trying to take the
measure of the mind. The vital question is, Can the zone be
quantified? Can an athlete be taught to get into the zone, and regain
it if he gets distracted?
In a laboratory on the U.S.O.C. campus, Sean McCann, a sports
psychologist, showed me the contraptions used over the years to try to
teach athletes to create a concentrated mind for competition. The
newest system, McCann said, was a device called the Peak Achievement
Trainer (PAT) EEG, designed to trace electrical activity in the brain,
especially the frontal lobes, and provide biofeedback. Asking if I'd
like to try it out, he applied the EEG's sensors with conducting
jelly, one to my forehead, the other two behind my ears, the wires
transmitting signals to a computer screen sitting in front of me.
The screen showed the brain activity of commonplace distraction --
jagged valleys and peaks of synapses firing wildly in all directions.
I tried to relax and then sat perfectly still, and suddenly, for a
moment, there it was: a flat line, the zone, or at least as close as
can yet be approximated. The PAT EEG is an adaptation of a device used
to treat kids with attention deficit disorder, letting them watch, and
learn to control, the fidget and wander of their thoughts. For
Olympians, the hope is that by seeing neural biofeedback in the lab,
they will be able to find methods -- focusing on one point,
visualizing peaceful images -- to achieve a quiet and still mind when
it is most required.
Dan Landers, an exercise-and-sports scientist at Arizona State
University in Tempe, has set out to measure the thought processes
right before performance. He has collected EEG data of athletes in the
moments before a basketball free throw is tossed, an arrow let fly by
an archer, a trigger pulled by a marksman. By analyzing this data, he
has been able to determine the brain state most conducive to
successful athletic achievement, and by training athletes to
manipulate their EEG patterns, he can teach them to improve their
performances.
Nonetheless, it is still primitive stuff, Landers acknowledged; the
PAT and similar devices can measure only overall activity in the
brain; they can't isolate particular areas, and only inferences can be
drawn about the workings of the mind. It is probable that the zone
involves several parts of the brain. The nether regions of the mind --
the basal ganglia, which contain the fight-or-flight instinct; the
cerebellum, with our motor skills programs -- may also be where the
zone resides. In order to measure those deeper parts of the brain,
though, a time-consuming and expensive CAT scan or M.R.I. would be
needed. More important, the CAT scan or M.R.I. requires almost
complete immobility. Even the less sophisticated EEG requires that a
person remain still for at least a few seconds.
The uncharted territory, Conrad and Westenburg explained, lies in
mapping -- and recreating -- a different kind of zone, the zone of an
athlete in motion. The sprinter on the starting block trains for and
tries to summon a zone that ends with the blast of the starter's gun.
From that moment the state of mind of a runner is a blur of action.
Standing in the batter's box awaiting a pitch with steady thoughts, to
use another example, is altogether different from the half-conscious
act of swinging at a fastball. When the body engages in action,
millions of neurons are fired in the brain, and right now we have no
way of differentiating that neuron activity from the neuron activity
of thought. In order to try to capture the zone of a person in motion,
Conrad and Westenburg said, unobtrusive wireless sensors would have to
be devised that could take in the vast brain information of a person
competing in an activity. To get useful biofeedback, computer
technology will have to advance so that a machine will be able to
filter out the "noise" in the brain caused by muscle contraction.
Computers have become so fast and so small so quickly, Conrad said,
there was every reason to believe that such a machine would become a
reality within a decade. Westenburg suggested that digital signal
processing systems, superfast computers used to analyze the infinite
impulses circulating in outer space, might someday be applied to
decoding neural signals.
Until now, reaching and maintaining the zone has been an art --
part zen, part willpower, part mystery. In 10 years, though, Conrad
said we will know whether or not the zone can be quantified and
trained for; whether it is a matter of science, not spirit. One day,
he said, we might all wear headbands attached to Walkman-size devices
that are our own personal zone monitors. Or, it occurred to me, the
next generation of EEG readouts will become another fixture on sports
broadcasts, the wave patterns of the basal ganglia as familiar to TV
viewers as any stats graphic. Landers told me that determining the
workings of the mind could someday lead to drug therapy to improve
performance -- introducing the prospect, in the dawning age of
psychotropic medication, of pills taken not to build muscle mass but
to create the dreamscape of the zone. Inevitably, fear, hope,
fortitude and moments of transcendence will be rendered as data
collected and digested by computers. The final frontier, then, reaches
outward but also inward: athletes crossing the divide between the
physical and metaphysical. Perfect machines.
Copyright 2000 by Guy Lawson, originally appeared in
The New York Times Magazine, reprinted with
the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.
