If you’ve ever wondered in amazement how the world’s top sports stars seem to make decisions faster than you can think, wonder no more. They all share a secret, and it’s one that all of us can unlock if we know how.
In sport, physical prowess is obviously extremely important, and in some sports, like athletics, it’s even enough to make you a champion. But when you involve skill, decision-making, and speed of thought, it is not always the fastest, fittest person who triumphs.
The ability to make complex decisions at an almost superhuman speed is what sets the true greats apart from everyone else.
Champions are bred by repetitive decision-making
For a great example of this, we can look at the game of cricket. A fast bowler in the game is generally seen as someone who delivers the ball at over 90 miles (145 km) per hour. When you consider that a cricket pitch is just 20 meters long, this means the batsman has 0.5 seconds to pick up the trajectory of the ball, decide which shot to play, taking into account the placement of 10 players from the opposing team on the field, and then play the ball.
As if this were not insane enough, the great bowlers also get the ball to swing in the air and move off the pitch. The batsman must decide whether to play an attacking or defensive shot or get out of its way completely.
According to a study in Nature Neuroscience, “the batsman must judge the vertical position of the ball to within 3cm (limited by the bat’s width) and its time of arrival to within 3 milliseconds (limited by the time the ball takes to pass the effective percussion zone of the bat).”
According to “Wait”, a book by Frank Partnoy, the top batsman are not simply quicker at making decisions than the rest of us. Whether you are AB de Villiers or a rank amateur playing for your town’s third team, it will take you around 200 milliseconds to react to the ball.
The magic happens in the next 200 milliseconds. This is when they decide on the shot, move into position and start swinging the bat.
And here the margin between the best and the rest is quite small: “A cricket batsman who is just fifty milliseconds slower than an average professional—in other words, someone who is slower by just a fraction of the time it takes to blink—simply has no chance of competing with the pros.”
Quoting Peter McLeod, an Oxford professor, the book goes on: “Their skill, it seems, lies in how they use the information to control motor actions once they have picked it up, not in the more elementary process of picking it up.”
Now comes the interesting part. This decision-making cannot be done consciously because we are not able to make conscious decisions in less than 0.5 seconds. What they are using is intuitive decision-making, honed by years of practice.
Through repetition, they have trained their brains to make decisions at superhuman speeds, based on a pre-ordained set of criteria. The bad news for the rest of us is that intuition, like any other talent, has a strong genetic basis i.e. some people are simply born with stronger intuitive powers.
The good news? You can improve your intuition quite easily.
Develop your abilities
Synctuition will help you develop your intuitive ability. The combination of deep relaxation, meditative states, and Synctuition’s cutting-edge sound technology has been proven to improve the individual’s intuitive processes.
Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t make ridiculous claims of instant gratification, zero input or seemingly magical transformations. We do believe that by using our program, focussing and taking the time to let your innate intuitive power grow, you can become healthier, happier and more successful. You will definitely become a better batsman if you choose to play cricket.
Synctuition uses the latest technology in sound recording to produce specific patterns of sound that stimulate the effortless flow of brainwaves between hemispheres of the brain. It is designed to teach and exercise the brain to get better at this by practice and promotes particular brain waves resulting in a higher level of intuition.
By sitting undisturbed and listening through stereo headphones, the brain can benefit from the regular stimulation, learning how to default to a more intuitive way of thinking with practice.
