The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius

by Zach Schonbrun

Ericsson even admits that most of us remain at a hobbyist level of performance because we would rather settle at a level of skill we find replicable and enjoyable than continue to pursue further self-improvement.

“If you have two athletes with the same level of practice and skill, on the day that one is more motivated, he will shift his speed-accuracy tradeoff more than the other one,” Krakauer told me. It is a short-term modulator on the long-term practice effect. Players can practice all they want, but in some brief, ideal circumstances, motivation can give an extra boost. A negative modulator, such as nervousness, can have the same effect in reverse. “When you talk about having a natural ability,” Krakauer said, “it may not just be a natural ability in the skill. It may be an ability to do better with your modulators.” To modify the modulators, so as not to be too confident or too nervous, you might need to practice. It’s reinforcing something different from a physical drill, but it might benefit your performance nonetheless.

There are also sensory nerve axons, he said, called “C-tactile fibers” or “caress sensors,” that are actually designed to carry information about interpersonal touch. There is such a thing as “optimal” speed for a caress: too slow and it might feel like a bug crawling along the skin; too fast and it doesn’t carry the appropriate amorousness. “We now know,” Linden said, “that if you stick an electrode in the arm and record electrical activity from one of those C-tactile nerve cells going from the skin to the brain, the highest firing rates happen at precisely the touch velocity that ‘feels’ best to us.”

The reason, Wolpert believes, is so we are more attuned to external events. This can mistakenly lead to erroneous estimations. Wolpert and others discovered this when they asked people to hold out their index finger in front of a force transducer, which applied a small push. When the participants were then told to apply the same amount of force to a second transducer, they consistently pushed back harder and harder, in what could be described as an escalating “tit-for-tat” exchange. Self-generated force is perceived to be as much as half as strong as when it gets generated externally. It explains how shoving matches tend to spiral quickly out of control. Your sensation of being pushed is not even close to being aligned with your judgment for how hard you should push back.

In the late 1970s, an Italian neurologist, Edoardo Bisiach, observed a group of Milanese patients, all with injuries to their right parietal lobe. When he asked them to imagine they were standing

in the middle of the Piazza del Duomo, facing the world-famous cathedral, he found that they could all clearly remember the buildings on the right of the square but not the left. When he asked them to switch perspectives, imagining themselves looking out from the duomo toward the square, they could accurately identify the buildings they had previously forgotten, while blanking on those they had just recalled.