"High Strung"

(Photo by Harold Edgerton)

by Zoe Pollock

In time for the U.S. Open, Tom Perotta reports in the new Atlantic issue on the professional athlete's psychological choke:

To hit a 120-mph serve, a player must allow the body to do what it has been trained to do. Thinking mid-serve causes "paralysis by analysis," an attack on performance by the prefrontal cortex, which, in an attempt to control closely synchronized neural activities and muscle twitches, instead sabotages them. "We all know how to...